Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/413

THE PRINCE And that's illuminating. It has been," Mrs. Assingham wound up, "illuminating to me."

Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. "Poor dear little girl!"

"Ah no—don't pity her!"

This nevertheless pulled him up. "We mayn't even be sorry for her?"

"Not now—or at least not yet. It's too soon—that is if it isn't very much too late. This will depend," Mrs. Assingham went on; "at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before—for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now however she has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—" But again she projected her vision.

"The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she'll like it!"

"The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she'll triumph."

She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. "Ah then we must back her!"

"No—we mustn't touch her. We mayn't touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile," said Mrs. Assingham, "we must bear it as we can. That's where we are—and it serves us right. We're in presence."

And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. "In presence of what?" 383