Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/411

THE PRINCE "Ah then," the Colonel dutifully declared, "she's indeed a little brick!"

"Oh," his wife returned, "you'll see in one way or another to what tune!" And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation—so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. "She'll see me somehow through!"

"See you—?"

"Yes, me. I'm the worst. For," said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, "I did it all. I recognise that—I accept it. She won't cast it up at me—she won't cast up anything. So I throw myself upon her—she'll bear me up." She spoke almost volubly—she held him with her sudden sharpness. "She'll carry the whole weight of us."

There was still nevertheless wonder in it. "You mean she won't mind? I say, love—!" And he not unkindly stared. "Then where's the difficulty?"

"There isn't any!" Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis.

It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. "Ah you mean there isn't any for us!"

She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern for their own surface at any cost. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was after all what they had most to consider. "Not," she said with dignity, "if we properly keep our heads." She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis. "Do you remember what you 381