Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/237

THE PRINCESS might, at need, seek to work upon her. Amerigo's not having "told" her of his passage with his wife gave, for Maggie, altogether a new aspect to Charlotte's consciousness and condition—an aspect with which, for apprehension, for wonder, and even at moments, inconsequently enough, for something like compassion, the Princess had now to reckon. She sought to discover—for she was capable of that—what he had meant by keeping the sharer of his guilt in the dark about a matter touching her otherwise so nearly; what he had meant, that is, for this unmistakeably mystified personage herself. Maggie could imagine what he had meant for her—all sorts of thinkable things, whether things of mere "form" or things of sincerity, things of pity or things of prudence: he had meant for instance in all probability, primarily, to conjure away any such appearance of a changed relation between the two women as his father-in-law might notice and follow up. It would have been open to him however, given the pitch of their intimacy, to avert this danger by some more conceivable course with Charlotte; since an earnest warning, in fact the full freedom of alarm, that of his insisting to her on the peril of suspicion incurred and on the importance accordingly of outward peace at any price, would have been the course really most conceivable. Instead of warning and advising he had reassured and deceived her; so that our young woman, who had been from far back, by the habit of her nature, as much on her guard against sacrificing others as if she felt the great trap of life mainly to be set for one's doing so, now found herself attaching her fancy to that side of the situation of 227