Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/417

THE PRINCE "'Jolly'—?" She turned upon it again from the foot of the staircase.

"I mean it's rather charming."

"'Charming'—?" It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.

"I mean it's rather beautiful. You just said yourself it would be. Only," he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connexions hitherto dim—"only I don't quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so 'rum,' hasn't also by the same stroke made her notice a little more what has been going on."

"Ah there you are! It's the question that I've all along been asking myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued—she let him have it straight. "And it's the question of an idiot."

"An idiot—?"

"Well, the idiot that I've been in all sorts of ways—so often of late have I asked it. You're excuseable since you ask it but now. The answer I saw to-day has all the while been staring me in the face."

"Then what in the world is it?"

"Why the very intensity of her conscience about him—the very passion of her brave little piety. That's the way it has worked," Mrs. Assingham explained—"and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a way as possible. But it has been working from a 'rum' start. From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off and it then happened by an 387