Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/135

THE PRINCESS road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. "Easily?"

"She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that I was aware at the time of his marriage—as I had been aware at the time of her own—of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife and her husband."

"And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she's herself in ignorance of your knowledge?"

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to say that about this exactly she proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity, something quite other: it could give itself a little the air still of a triumph over his coarseness. "By acting immediately with the blind resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred would act; and by so making Mr. Verver in turn act with the same natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred. They've only to agree about me," the poor lady said; "they've only to feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured; they've only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it's I who have been, and who continue to be cheated—cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but they're not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either of us the benefit of anything. They'll be within their rights to lump us all together as a false cruel conspiring crew and, if 125