Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/315

THE PRINCE Assingham waited—conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn't turn his face, but stared straight before him, and his wife had already gathered from the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire—proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. "Leave it," he at last remarked, "to them."

"'Leave it'—?" She wondered.

"Let them alone. They'll manage."

"They'll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah there then you are!"

"They'll manage in their own way," the Colonel almost cryptically repeated. It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband's indurated conscience, it gave her full in her face the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful, truly then, the evocation. "So cleverly—that's your idea?—that no one will be the wiser? It's your idea that we shall have done all that's required of us if we simply protect them?"

The Colonel, still in his place, declined however to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one's way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, none the less, he had his point to make—for which he took another instant. But he made it for the third time in 285