Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/70

THE GOLDEN BOWL expense of railways and hotels, a reason for her running to and fro."

"On the contrary. But she doesn't like her country."

"Hers, my dear man?—it's little enough 'hers.'" The attribution for the moment amused his hostess. "She has rebounded now—but she has had little enough else to do with it."

"Oh I say hers," the Prince pleasantly explained, "very much as at this time of day I might say mine. I quite feel, I assure you, as if the great place already more or less belonged to me."

"That's your good fortune and your point of view. You own—or you soon practically will own—so much of it. Charlotte owns almost nothing in the world, she tells me, but two colossal trunks—only one of which I've given her leave to introduce into this house. She'll depreciate to you," Mrs. Assingham added, "your property."

He thought of these things, he thought of everything; but he had always his resource at hand of turning all to the easy. "Has she come with designs upon me?" And then in a moment, as if even this were almost too grave, he sounded the note that had least to do with himself. "Est-elle toujours aussi belle?" That was the furthest point, somehow, to which Charlotte Stant could be relegated.

Mrs. Assingham treated it freely. "Just the same. The person in the world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to appreciation. It's all in the way she affects you. One admires her if one doesn't happen not to. So, as well, one criticises her." 40