Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/266

THE GOLDEN BOWL it be," she asked, "a thing that would occur to him?"

"I really think," Mr. Verver concurred, "that it naturally wouldn't. He doesn't know you're morbid."

She just wondered—but she agreed. "No—he hasn't yet found it out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn't yet; and I'm willing to give him meanwhile the benefit of the doubt." So with this the situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared hadn't she too quickly had one of her restless relapses. "Maggie, however, does know I'm morbid. She hasn't the benefit."

"Well," said Adam Verver a little wearily at last, "I think I feel that you'll hear from her yet." It had even fairly come over him, under recurrent suggestion, that his daughter's omission was surprising. And Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more than three minutes.

"Oh it isn't that I hold that I've a right to it," Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified—and the observation itself gave him a further push.

"Very well—I shall like it myself."

At this then, as if moved by his habit of mostly—and more or less against his own contention—coming round to her, she showed how she could also ever, and not less gently, come halfway. "I speak of it only as the missing grace—the grace that's in everything Maggie does. It isn't my due—"she kept it up"—but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful."

"Then come out to breakfast." Mr. Verver had 236