Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/186

THE GOLDEN BOWL "If he doesn't then so much the better. Leave him alone."

"Do you mean give him up?"

"Leave her," Fanny Assingham went on. "Leave her to him."

Maggie looked at her darkly. "Do you mean leave him to her? After this?"

"After everything. Aren't they, for that matter, intimately together now?"

"'Intimately'—? How do I know?"

But Fanny kept it up. "Aren't you and your husband—in spite of everything?"

Maggie's eyes still further if possible dilated. "It remains to be seen!"

"If you're not then where's your faith?"

"In my husband—?"

Mrs. Assingham but for an instant hesitated. "In your father. It all comes back to that. Rest on it."

"On his ignorance?"

Fanny met it again. "On whatever he may offer you. Take that."

"Take it—?" Maggie stared.

Mrs. Assingham held up her head. "And be grateful." On which for a minute she let the Princess face her. "Do you see?"

"I see," said Maggie at last.

"Then there you are." But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs. Assingham's reverted to that complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, 176