Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/405

THE PRINCE "Then it's not sweet of you." She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. "You admit that it is 'rum.'"

And this indeed fixed again for a moment his intention. "Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?"

"Never, that I know of, a word. It isn't the sort of thing she does. And whom has she after all," Mrs. Assingham added, "to complain to?"

"Hasn't she always you?"

"Oh 'me'! Charlotte and I, nowadays—!" She spoke as of a chapter closed. "Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me more and more as extraordinary."

A deeper shade, at the re-echo of the word, had come into the Colonel's face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then, isn't that why one must just resign one's self to wash one's hands of them—to be lost?" Her face however so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for—her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back alertly enough to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. "Hasn't she then, Charlotte, always her husband—?"

"To complain to? She'd rather die."

"Oh!"—and Bob Assingham's face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. "Hasn't she the Prince then?"

"For such matters? Oh he doesn't count." 375