Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/136

THE GOLDEN BOWL they can find the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch."

This on each occasion put the matter so at the worst that repetition even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed invariably the sense of making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his almost turning pale when their eyes met at this possibility of their compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man. "Conspiring—so far as you were concerned—to what end?"

"Why to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife—at Maggie's expense. And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr. Verver's."

"Of rendering friendly services, yes—which have produced, as it turns out, complications. But from the moment you didn't do it for the complications, why shouldn't you have rendered them?"

It was extraordinary for her always, in this connexion, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the "worst," speak for herself. Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way. "Oh isn't what I may have meddled 'for'—so far as it can be proved I did meddle—open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver's and Maggie's? Mayn't they see my 126