Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/283

THE PRINCE Verver's immediate response to her friend's enquiry had culminated. She had thus on the spot the sense of having given her plenty to think about, and that moreover of liking to see it even better than she had expected. She had plenty to think about herself, and there was already something in Fanny that made it seem still more.

"You say your husband's ill? He felt too ill to come?"

"No, my dear—I think not. If he had been too ill I wouldn't have left him."

"And yet Maggie was worried?" Mrs. Assingham asked.

"She worries easily, you know. She's afraid of influenza—of which he has had at different times several attacks, though never with the least gravity."

"But you're not afraid of it?"

Charlotte had for a moment a pause; it had continued to come to her that really to have her case "out," as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate difficulties had oftenest referred themselves, would help her on the whole more than hinder; and under that feeling all her opportunity, with nothing kept back, with a thing or two perhaps even thrust forward, seemed temptingly to open. Besides, didn't Fanny at bottom half-expect, absolutely at the bottom half-want, things?—so that she'd be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn't get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have "gone too far" in her 253