Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/311

THE PRINCE I'm thinking of. But I'm not indeed so very sure," she added, "of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I mean I'm not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife."

"I shouldn't think you would be, love," the Colonel with some promptness responded. "Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist—!" His cigar in short once more could alone express it.

"Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?"—this memory, for the full view, Fanny found herself also invoking.

It made her companion in truth slightly gape. "An incredible little idealist—Charlotte herself?"

"And she was sincere," his wife simply proceeded—"she was unmistakeably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it."

"And that—I see—happens to be another of the questions you can't ask her. You have to do it all," said Bob Assingham, "as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up—though who's to come down on you if you break them I don't quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses—like forfeits on Christmas Eve?" To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her he further added: "How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?"

"I shall go on," Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, "while there's a scrap as big as your nail. But we're not yet, luckily, reduced only to that." She had another pause, holding the while the thread of 281