Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/185

THE PRINCESS won't have done. He'll never have shown that he expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to give."

"I've often wondered," Maggie mused, "what Charlotte really understood. But it's one of the things she has never told me."

"Then as it's one of the things she has never told me either we shall probably never know it, and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things," said Mrs. Assingham, "that we shall never know."

Maggie took it in with a long reflexion. "Never."

"But there are others," her friend went on, "that stare us in the face and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary."

It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way, but she rallied to this with a rush. "Extraordinary."

"Magnificent," said Fanny Assingham. Her companion held tight to it. "Magnificent."

"Then he'll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he'll do to the end. He didn't undertake it to break down; in what—quiet patient exquisite as he is—did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won't have done it on this occasion."

"Ah this occasion!"—and Maggie's wail showed her of a sudden thrown back on it. "Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn't?" 175