Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/252

THE GOLDEN BOWL "Why you've more ways of being kind than any one I ever knew."

"Take it then," he answered, "that I'm simply putting them all together for you." She looked at him, on this, long again—still as if it shouldn't be said she hadn't given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with admiration. "You're very, very honourable."

"It's just what I want to be. I don't see," she added, "why you're not right, I don't see why you're not happy, as you are. I can't not ask myself, I can't not ask you," she went on, "if you're really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oughtn't we," she said, "to think a little of others? Oughtn't I at least in loyalty—at any rate in delicacy—to think of Maggie?" With which, intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained. "She's everything to you—she has always been. Are you so certain that there's room in your life—?"

"For another daughter?—that what you mean?" She hadn't hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.

He hadn't, however, disconcerted her. "For another young woman—very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion," said Charlotte Stant.

"Can't a man be, all his life then," he almost 222