Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/299

THE PRINCE father—this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgement of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.

"Isn't it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?" And the effect for his good friend was still further to be deepened. "I somehow feel half the time as if he were her father-in-law too. It's as if he had saved us both—which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don't you remember"—he kept it up—"how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability for her of some good marriage?" And then as his friend's face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: "Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right—and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn't 269