Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/335

THE PRINCE the less. It's not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It's so beautiful," she said, "that it's not a question of anything vulgar or horrid." Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was rather remarkably as if he fell in. "I went out—I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important. It has been—it is important. I know as I haven't known before the way they feel. I couldn't in any other way have made so sure of it."

"They feel a confidence," the Prince observed.

He had indeed said it for her. "They feel a confidence." And she proceeded with lucidity to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return—for curiosity and even really a little from anxiety—to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key rarely used: it had always irritated Adam—one of the few things that did—to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home in the small hours after parties. "So I had but to slip in each time with my cab at the door and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went—without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose," she asked, "becomes of one?—not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn't matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maîtresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They 305