Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/138

THE GOLDEN BOWL woman a man doesn't want, or of whom he's tired, or for whom he has no use but such uses, and who's capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all. Cela s'est vu, my dear; and stranger things still—as I needn't tell you! Very good then," she wound up; "there's a perfectly possible conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, no imagination's so lively, once it's started, as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are blasés, are brought up from the first to prowling and mauling. It does give us, you'll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily, however, in what I finally do think."

He was well enough aware by this time of what she finally did think, but he wasn't without a sense again also for his amusement by the way. It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly because he knows what is next to happen. "What of course will pull them up if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume is the profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver's marriage. You weren't at least in love with Charlotte."

"Oh," Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, "my hand in that is easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to him."

"To Mr. Verver?"

"To the Prince—by preventing her in that way 128