Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/256

THE GOLDEN BOWL "You take me to pleasant places." She turned it over. "You propose to me beautiful things."

"It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You've made Brighton—!"

"Ah!"—she almost tenderly protested. "With what I'm doing now?"

"You're promising me now what I want. Aren't you promising me," he pressed, getting up, "aren't you promising me to abide by what Maggie says?"

Oh she wanted to be sure she was. "Do you mean she'll ask it of me?"

It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but certain? "She'll speak to you. She'll speak to you for me."

This at last then seemed to satisfy her. "Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?"

He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. "Of course I give you time. Especially," he smiled, "as it's time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see I mean how I need you."

"I already see," said Charlotte, "how you've persuaded yourself you do." But she had to repeat it. "That isn't unfortunately all."

"Well then how you'll make Maggie right."

"'Right'?" She echoed it as if the word went far. And "O-oh!" she still critically murmured as they moved together away. 226