Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/104

THE GOLDEN BOWL They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image, the enacted scene, of her passage with Charlotte, which he was actually hearing of for the first time and as to which it would have been natural he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but mark precisely the complication of his fears. "What she does like," he finally said, "is the way it has succeeded."

"Your marriage?"

"Yes—my whole idea. The way I've been justified. That's the joy I give her. If for her either it had failed—!" That however wasn't worth talking about; he had broken off. "You think then you could now risk Fawns?"

"'Risk' it?"

"Well, morally—from the point of view I was talking of; that of our sinking deeper into sloth. Our selfishness somehow seems at its biggest down there."

Maggie had allowed him the amusement of her not taking this up. "Is Charlotte," she had simply asked, "really ready?"

"Oh if you and I and Amerigo are. Whenever one corners Charlotte," he had developed more at his ease, "one finds that she only wants to know what we want. Which is what we got her for!"

"What we got her for—exactly!" And so for a little, even though with a certain effect of oddity in their more or less successful ease, they left it; left it till Maggie made the remark that it was all the same wonderful her stepmother should be willing, before the 94