Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/268

THE GOLDEN BOWL "Oh yes," he responded philosophically—"I remember the feelings we used to have."

Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little in tender retrospect—as if they had been also respectable. "It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position. But it was worse to be sublime about it—as I was so afraid, as I'm in fact still afraid of being—when it wasn't even there to support one." And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it—which was doubtless too often even now her danger—almost sententious. "One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others—of what they may feel deprived of. However," she added, "Kitty and Dotty couldn't imagine we were deprived of anything. And now, and now—!" But she stopped as for indulgence to their wonder and envy.

"And now they see still more that we can have got everything and kept everything and yet not be proud."

"No, we're not proud," she answered after a moment. "I'm not sure we're quite proud enough." Yet she changed the next instant that subject too. She could only do so however by harking back—as if it had been a fascination. She might have been wishing, under this renewed, this still more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the stream of time and dipping again, for the softness of the water, into the contracted basin of the past. "We talked about it—we talked about it; you don't 258