Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/142

THE GOLDEN BOWL pathetic and exquisite, to see what she feels time may do for her."

"Ah but what does she call, poor little thing, 'time'?"

"Well, this summer at Fawns to begin with. She can live as yet of course but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself, I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. There the lovers—if they are lovers!—will have to mind. They'll feel it for themselves, unless things are too utterly far gone with them."

"And things are not too utterly far gone with them?"

She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article she would have put down her last shilling. "No."

It made him always grin at her. "Is that a lie?"

"Do you think you're worth lying to? If it weren't the truth for me," she added, "I wouldn't have accepted for Fawns. I can, I believe, keep the wretches quiet."

"But how—at the worst?"

"Oh 'the worst'—don't talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work from week to week of itself. You'll see."

He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide—! "Yet if it doesn't work?"

"Ah that's talking about the worst!"

Well, it might be; but what were they doing from 132