Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/309

THE PRINCE with all our friends—as I see them myself: what I can't do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up—!" But he exhaled it again in smoke.

"My additions don't matter when you've not to pay the bill." With which her meditation again bore her through the air. "The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn't afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was—if I hadn't seen he wasn't—so," said Mrs. Assingham, "could I. So," she declared, "would I. It's perfectly true," she went on—"it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted. And I liked his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn't have faced it. Then—if she hadn't had confidence—we might have talked. But she had it to any amount."

"Did you ask her how much?" Bob Assingham patiently growled.

He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed this time the sharpest spring of response. "Never, never—it wasn't a time to 'ask.' Asking is suggesting—and it wasn't a time to suggest. One had to make up one's mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as—for so proud a creature—almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her 279