Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/331

THE PRINCE discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question as yet of their seeing their way together: to which indeed exactly the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. "It's not that you haven't my courage," Charlotte said, "but that you haven't, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all," she added, "that you haven't even my intelligence. However, I shan't be afraid of that till you've given me more proof." And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. "You knew besides, you knew to-day I'd come. And if you knew that you know everything." So she pursued, and if he didn't meanwhile, if he didn't even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal—not exactly blessed by the Pope—suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. "Above all," she said, "there has been the personal romance of it."

"Of tea with me over the fire? Ah so far as that goes I don't think even my intelligence fails me."

"Oh it's further than that goes; and if I've had a better day than you it's perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don't. I don't, I don't," she repeated. 301