Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/310

THE GOLDEN BOWL for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due."

"That is to Mrs. Assingham?"

She said nothing for a little—there were after all alternatives. "Maggie herself of course—astonishing little Maggie."

"Is Maggie then astonishing too?"—and he gloomed out of his window.

His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. "I'm not sure I don't begin to see more in her than—dear little person as I've always thought—I ever supposed there was. I'm not sure that, putting a good many things together, I'm not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary."

"You certainly will if you can," the Colonel resignedly remarked.

Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out. "In fact—I do begin to feel it—Maggie's the great comfort. I'm getting hold of it. It will be she who'll see us through. In fact she'll have to. And she'll be able."

Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband's general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr. Verver. "Oh Lordy, Lordy!"

"If she is, however," Mrs. Assingham continued, "she'll be extraordinary enough—and that's what 280