Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/137

THE PRINCESS motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?" She positively liked to keep it up. "Mayn't they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case and at any price, first; to 'place' him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? Mayn't it have all the air for them of a really equivocal sinister bargain between us—something quite unholy and louche?"

It infallibly produced in the poor Colonel the echo. "'Louche,' love—?"

"Why, haven't you said as much yourself?—haven't you put your finger on that awful possibility?"

She had a way now with his felicities that made him enjoy being reminded of them. "In speaking of your having always had such a 'mash'—?"

"Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly at his ease. A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it only as likely to have been—but we're not talking of course about impartial looks. We're talking of good innocent people deeply worked upon by a horrid discovery and going much further in their view of the lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider awake all round from the first. What I was to have got from my friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for him—well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to myself, for me shrewdly to consider." And she easily lost herself each time in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture. It would have been seen, it would have been heard of before, the case of the 127