Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/141

THE PRINCESS "Why the pretence that she believes me. Believes they're innocent."

"She positively believes then they're guilty? She has arrived at that, she's really content with it, in the absence of proof?"

It was here each time that Fanny Assingham most faltered; but always at last to get the matter for her own sense and with a long sigh sufficiently straight. "It isn't a question of belief or of proof, absent or present; it's inevitably with her a question of natural perception, of insurmountable feeling. She irresistibly knows that there's something between them. But she hasn't 'arrived' at it, as you say, at all; that's exactly what she hasn't done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do. She stands off and off, so as not to arrive; she keeps out to sea and away from the rocks, and what she most wants of me is to keep at a safe distance with her—as I, for my own skin, only ask not to come nearer." After which, invariably, she let him have it all. "So far from wanting proof—which she must get, in a manner, by my siding with her—she wants disproof, as against herself, and has appealed to me, so extraordinarily, to side against her. It's really magnificent when you come to think of it, the spirit of her appeal. If I'll but cover them up brazenly enough, the others, so as to show, round and about them, as happy as a bird, she on her side will do what she can. If I'll keep them quiet, in a word, it will enable her to gain time—time as against any idea of her father's—and so somehow come out. If I'll take care of Charlotte in particular she'll take care of the Prince; and it's beautiful and wonderful, really 131