Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/288

THE GOLDEN BOWL then with abruptness. "You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such good people."

The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had the next instant caused further to brighten. "Does one ever put into words anything so fatuously rash? It's a thing that must be said, in prudence, for one—by somebody who's so good as to take the responsibility: the more that it gives one always a chance to show one's best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly, you'll never have the distress, or whatever, of hearing me complain."

"Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!"—and the elder woman's spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy.

To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. "With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up—still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him. She missed his company—a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can—a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments—which has all the same everything in its favour," Charlotte hastened to declare—"makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house. To make sure she doesn't fail of it she's always arranging for it—which she didn't have to do while they lived 258