Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/420

THE GOLDEN BOWL while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. "One quite understands, my dear."

Yet it only kept her there sombre. "I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again perfectly in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest"—and the grimness of her lucidity suddenly once more possessed her: "you've only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see," she said with an ineffable headshake, "that I don't stand up! I'm down, down, down," she declared; "yet"—she as quickly added—"there's just one little thing that helps to save my life." And she kept him waiting but an instant. "They might easily—they would perhaps even certainly—have done something worse."

He thought. "Worse than that Charlotte—?"

"Ah don't tell me," she cried, "that there could have been nothing worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary."

He was almost simultaneous. "Extraordinary!"

"She observes the forms," said Fanny Assingham.

"With the Prince—?"

"For the Prince. And with the others," she went on. "With Mr. Verver—wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms"—she had to do even them justice—"are two thirds of conduct. Say 390