Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/300

THE GOLDEN BOWL it? Only—what she has got—something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better—once you allow her the way it's to be taken. Of course if you don't allow her that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom—which I judge she'll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The 'boat,' you see"—the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly—"is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you'll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing the same. It isn't even a question, sometimes, of one's getting to the dock—one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion's track—for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination—call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges, off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable—and above all as not endangering life or limb? We shan't drown, we shan't sink—at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too moreover—do her the justice—visibly knows how to swim."

He could easily go on, for she didn't interrupt him; 270