Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/180

THE GOLDEN BOWL pursued. "It was on the whole thing that Amerigo married me." With which her eyes had their turn again at her damnatory piece. "And it was on that—it was on that!" But they came back to her visitor. "And it was on it all that father married her."

Her visitor took it as might be. "They both married—ah that you must believe!—with the highest intentions."

"Father did certainly!" And then at the renewal of this consciousness it all rolled over her. "Ah to thrust such things on us, to do them here between us and with us day after day and in return, in return—! To do it to him—to him, to him!"

Fanny hesitated. "You mean it's for him you most suffer?" And then as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the room—which made the question somehow seem a blunder—"I ask," she continued, "because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may be for him really, may be made for him, quite as if it hadn't been."

But Maggie had the next moment faced about as if without hearing her. "Father did it for me—did it all and only for me."

Mrs. Assingham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she faltered again before she spoke. "Well—!"

It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that it had reached her. "Do you mean that that's the reason, that that's a reason—?"

Fanny at first however, feeling the response in this, didn't say all she meant; she said for the moment something else instead. "He did it for you—largely 170