Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/250

THE GOLDEN BOWL "So much as marry me in particular?"

Her smile was as for true directness. "I might get what I want for less."

"You think it's so much for you to do?"

"Yes," she presently said, "I think it's a great deal."

Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far—then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn't quite know where they were. There rose for him with this the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, ignore it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. "Of course, yes—that's my disadvantage: I'm not the natural, I'm so far from being the ideal, match to your youth and your beauty. I've the drawback that you've seen me always, and so inevitably, in such another light."

But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft—made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep. "You don't understand me. It's of all that it is for you to do—it's of that I'm thinking."

Oh with this for him the thing was clearer! "Then you needn't think. I know enough what it is for me to do."

But she shook her head again. "I doubt if you know. I doubt if you can."

"And why not, please—when I've had you so 220