Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/425

THE PRINCE Charlotte to cheer his path—by instalments, as it were—in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however," Mrs. Assingham further explained, "by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you'll easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate even if quite heroic little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting him. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire—this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been—involved in some degree and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold," Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a person can mostly feel but one passion—one tender passion, that is—at a time. Only that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities—as you'll recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout bêtement, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie"—she kept it up—"is in the same situation 395