Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/372

THE GOLDEN BOWL best not be sincere?—may be but a mask for doubts and fears and for gaining time?"

The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this again could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. "You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel at any rate that I've nothing to do with her doubts and fears or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It's enough for me that she'll always be of necessity much more afraid for herself, really, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren't." And Charlotte's face, with these words—to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them—fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption—so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed the next instant have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakeable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her at the same time to pay her tribute to the good 342