Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/400

THE GOLDEN BOWL He had a pause. "Do you think Maggie so blind?"

"The question isn't of what I think. The question's of the conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte—who have better opportunities than I for judging."

The Colonel again wondered. "Are you so very sure their opportunities are better?"

"Well," his wife asked, "what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?"

"Ah my dear, you have that opportunity—of their extraordinary situation and relation—as much as they."

"With the difference, darling," she returned with some spirit, "that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat they're in, but I'm not, thank God, in it myself. To-day, however," Mrs. Assingham added, "to-day in Eaton Square I did see."

"Well then what?"

But she mused over it still. "Oh many things. More somehow than ever before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing for them—I mean for the others. It was as if something had happened—I don't know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place—that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes." These eyes indeed of the poor lady's rested on her companion's meanwhile with the lustre not so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired obviously to reassure him, but it apparently 370