Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/428

THE GOLDEN BOWL She stared. "But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn't really—or what you may call undividedly—had."

"Any more than Maggie by your theory, eh, has 'really or undividedly,' had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn't had," the Colonel conceded, "to account for the innocence that in her too so leaves us in admiration."

So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. "It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What's definite at all events is that—strange though this be—her effort for her father has up to now sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged—the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding—he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn't worked them out in detail—any more than I had, heaven pity me!—and the queerness has been exactly in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both," she neatly wound up, "help."

"'Both'—?"

"I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte," Fanny declared, "works like a horse."

So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. "And what does the Prince work like?" 398