Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/145

THE PRINCESS I can't for my life make out is your idea of the old boy."

"Charlotte's too inconceivably funny husband? I have no idea."

"I beg your pardon—you've just shown it. You never speak of him but as too inconceivably funny."

"Well, he is," she always confessed. "That is he may be, for all I know, too inconceivably great. But that's not an idea. It represents only my weak necessity of feeling that he's beyond me—which isn't an idea either. You see he may be stupid too."

"Precisely—there you are."

"Yet on the other hand," she always went on, "he may be sublime: sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But we shall never know." With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she didn't yearningly welcome. "That I can see."

"Oh I say—!" It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.

"I'm not sure even that Charlotte will."

"Oh my dear, what Charlotte doesn't know—!"

But she brooded and brooded. " I'm not sure even that the Prince will." It seemed privation in short for them all. "They'll be mystified, confounded, tormented. But they won't know—and all their possible putting their heads together won't make them. That," said Fanny Assingham, "will be their punishment." And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch. "It will probably also—if I get off with so little—be mine." 135