Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/269

THE PRINCESS remember so well as I. You too didn't know—and it was beautiful of you; like Kitty and Dotty you too thought we had a position, and were surprised when I thought we ought to have told them we weren't doing for them what they supposed. In fact," Maggie pursued, "we're not doing it now. We're not, you see, really introducing them. I mean not to the people they want."

"Then what do you call the people with whom they're now having tea?"

It made her quite spring round. "That's just what you asked me the other time—one of the days there was somebody. And I told you I didn't call anybody anything."

"I remember—that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn't 'count'; that Fanny Assingham knew they didn't." She had awakened, his daughter, the echo; and on the bench there, as before, he nodded his head amusedly, he kept nervously shaking his foot. "Yes, they were only good enough—the people who came—for us. I remember," he said again: "that was the way it all happened."

"That was the way—that was the way. And you asked me," Maggie added, "if I didn't think we ought to tell them. Tell Mrs. Rance in particular I mean that we had been entertaining her up to then under false pretences."

"Precisely—but you said she wouldn't have understood."

"To which you replied that in that case you were like her. You didn't understand."

"No, no—but I remember how, about our having 259