Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/171

THE PRINCESS its necessity. "In a general way, dear child, yes. But not—a—in connexion with what you've been telling me."

"They were intimate, you see. Intimate," said the Princess. Fanny continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history, so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other time. "There's always the question of what one considers—!"

"What one considers intimate? Well, I know what I consider intimate now. Too intimate," said Maggie, "to let me know anything about it."

It was quiet—yes; but not too quiet for Fanny Assingham's capacity to wince. "Only compatible with letting me, you mean?" She had asked it after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney and wondering even while she took relief from it at this gap in her experience. "But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is perfect."

"They went about together—they're known to have done it. And I don't mean only before—I mean after."

"After?" said Fanny Assingham.

"Before we were married—yes; but after we were engaged."

"Ah I've known nothing about that!" And she said it with a braver assurance—clutching with comfort at something that was apparently new to her.

"That bowl," Maggie went on, "is, so strangely—too strangely almost to believe at this time of day 161