Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/406

THE GOLDEN BOWL "I thought that was just what—as the basis of our agitation—he does do!"

Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. "Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of my agitation is exactly that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!" And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver's superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head—as marked a tribute to that lady's general grace, in all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had ever received.

"Ah only Maggie!" With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.

"No—not only Maggie. A great many people in London—and small wonder!—bore him."

"Maggie only worst then?" But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. "You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte 'if they have arrived.' You think it then possible that they really won't have returned?"

His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from entertaining it. "I think there's nothing they're not now capable of—in their so intense good faith."

"Good faith?"—he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.

"Their false position. It comes to the same thing." 376