Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/412

THE GOLDEN BOWL said to me that night of my first real anxiety after the Foreign Office party?"

"In the carriage—as we came home?" Yes—he could recall it. "Leave them to pull through?"

"Precisely. 'Trust their own wit,' you practically said, 'to save all appearances.' Well, I've trusted it. I have left them to pull through."

He considered. "And your point is that they're not doing so?"

"I've left them," she went on, "but now I see how and where. I've been leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to her."

"To the Princess?"

"And that's what I mean," Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. "That's what happened to me with her to-day," she continued to explain. "It came home to me that that's what I've really been doing."

"Oh I see."

"I needn't torment myself. She has taken them over."

The Colonel declared that he "saw"; yet it was as if, at this, he a little sightlessly stared. "But what then has happened, from one day to the other, to her? What has opened her eyes? "

"They were never really shut. She misses him."

"Then why hasn't she missed him before?"

Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out. "She did—but she wouldn't let herself know it. She had her reason—she wore her blind. Now at last her situation has come to a head. To-day she does know it. 382