Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/402

THE GOLDEN BOWL the time, had lost both fondness and compunction.

"I can imagine the way it works," she said; "it's so easy to understand. Yet I don't want to be wrong," she the next moment broke out—"I don't, I don't want to be wrong!"

"To make a mistake, you mean?"

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. "I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate—in thought—crimes." And she spoke with all intensity. "I'm a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I'd do it again—feel that I'd do things myself."

"Ah my dear!" the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.

"Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you you never have. You've done everything else, but you've never done that. But what I really don't a bit want," she declared, "is to abet them or to protect them."

Her companion turned this over. "What is there to protect them from?—if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing that justly exposes them."

And it in fact half-pulled her up. "Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie may think."

"Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?"

She waited again. "It isn't my 'whole' idea. Nothing's my 'whole' idea—for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so much in the air." 372