Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/419

THE PRINCE ; that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They didn't know how to live—and somehow one couldn't, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it. That's what I pay for"—and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. "I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives when not beautifully and a trifle mysteriously flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure just as, for any possible good to the world, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me in the watches of the night that Charlotte was a person who could keep off ravening women—without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something of course that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean—it looks at me," she veritably moaned, "out of your face! But all I can say is that it didn't; the reason largely being—once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn't quite make out either what other woman, or what other kind of woman, one could think of her accepting."

"I see—I see." She had paused, meeting all the 389