Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/421

THE PRINCE he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them."

But he jerked back. "Ah my dear, I wouldn't say it for the world!"

"Say," she none the less pursued, "he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for."

"You mean then he doesn't care for Charlotte—?"

This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: "No!"

"Then what on earth are they up to?" Still however she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time to risk soothingly another question. "Are the 'forms' you speak of—that are two thirds of conduct—what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?"

"Yes—absolutely. Their forms."

"'Theirs'—?"

"Maggie's and Mr. Verver's—those they impose on Charlotte and the Prince. Those," she developed, "that so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones."

He considered—but only now at last really to relapse into woe. "Your 'perversity,' my dear, is exactly what I don't understand. The state of things existing hasn't grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now 391