Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/414

THE GOLDEN BOWL "Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it may come off."

She had paused there before him while he wondered. "You mean she'll get the Prince back?"

She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. "It isn't a question of recovery. It won't be a question of any vulgar struggle. To 'get him back' she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him." With which Fanny shook her head. "What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that all the while she really hasn't had him. Never."

"Ah my dear—!" the poor Colonel panted.

"Never!" his wife inexorably repeated. And she went on without pity. "Do you remember what I said to you long ago—that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?"

The smile with which he met this appeal wasn't, it was to be feared, robust. "What haven't you, love, said in your time?"

"So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I declared, on that occasion, that Maggie was the creature in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed. That therefore," Fanny continued, "is what will now have to happen. Her sense will have to open."

"I see." He nodded. "To the wrong." He nodded again almost cheerfully—as if he had been keeping 384