Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/258

THE GOLDEN BOWL Their eyes had to meet on it, and to meet long; Maggie's avoided at least the disgrace of looking away. "What makes you want to ask it?"

"My natural desire to know. You've done that for so long little justice."

Maggie waited a moment. "For so long? You mean you've thought—?"

"I mean, my dear, that I've seen. I've seen, week after week, that you seemed to be thinking—of something that perplexed or worried you. Is it anything for which I'm in any degree responsible?"

Maggie summoned all her powers. "What in the world should it be?"

"Ah that's not for me to imagine, and I should be very sorry to have to try to say! I'm aware of no point whatever at which I may have failed you," said Charlotte; "nor of any at which I may have failed any one in whom I can suppose you sufficiently interested to care. If I've been guilty of some fault I've committed it all unconsciously, and am only anxious to hear from you honestly about it. But if I've been mistaken as to what I speak of—the difference, more and more marked, as I've thought, in all your manner to me—why obviously so much the better. No form of correction received from you could give me greater satisfaction."

She spoke, it struck her companion, with rising, with extraordinary ease; as if hearing herself say it all, besides seeing the way it was listened to, helped her from point to point. She saw she was right—that this was the tone for her to take and the thing for her to do, the thing as to which she was probably 248