Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/398

THE GOLDEN BOWL "You'd think it still more if you knew. But you don't know—because you don't see. Their situation"—this was what he didn't see—"is too extra ordinary."

"'Too'—?" He was willing to try.

"Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn't see. But just that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously."

He followed at his own pace. "Their situation?"

"The incredible side of it. They make it credible."

"Credible then—you do say—to you?"

She looked at him again for an interval. "They believe in it themselves. They take it for what it is. And that," she said, "saves them."

"But if what it 'is' is just their chance—?"

"It's their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up. It's their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had."

The Colonel showed his effort to recall. "Oh your idea, at different moments, of any one of their ideas!" This dim procession, visibly, mustered before him, and, with the best will in the world, he could but watch its immensity. "Are you speaking now of something to which you can comfortably settle down?"

Again for a little she only glowered at him. "I've come back to my belief, and that I have done so—"

"Well?" he asked as she paused.

"Well, shows I'm right—for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I 'm at home again, and I mean," said Fanny Assingham, "to stay here. They're beautiful," she declared. 368