Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/286

THE GOLDEN BOWL a question of any one's returning to him in his trouble it would be better you yourself should have gone?"

Well, Charlotte's answer to this enquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the real truth. "If we couldn't be perfectly frank and dear with each other it would be ever so much better, wouldn't it? that we shouldn't talk about anything at all; which however would be dreadful—and we certainly at any rate haven't yet come to it. You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because, don't you see? you can't upset me."

"I'm sure, my dear Charlotte," Fanny Assingham laughed, "I don't want to upset you."

"Indeed, love, you simply couldn't even if you thought it necessary—that's all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I'm, by no merit of my own, just fixed—fixed as fast as a pin stuck up to its head in a cushion. I'm placed—I can't imagine any one more placed. There I am!"

Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. "I dare say—but your statement of your position, however you see it, isn't an answer to my enquiry. I confess it seems to me at the same time," Mrs. Assingham added, "to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being 'frank.' How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay, and if she's willing to 256