Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/270

THE GOLDEN BOWL in our benighted innocence no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation."

"Well then," said Maggie with every appearance of delight, "I'll crush you again. I told you that you by yourself had one—there was no doubt of that. You were different from me—you had the same one you always had."

"And then I asked you," her father concurred, "why in that case you hadn't the same."

"Then indeed you did." He had brought her face round to him before, and this held it, covering him with its kindled brightness, the result of the attested truth of their being able thus in talk to live again together. "What I replied was that I had lost my position by my marriage. That one—I know how I saw it—would never come back. I had done something to it—I didn't quite know what; given it away somehow and yet not as then appeared really got my return. I had been assured—always by dear Fanny—that I could get it, only I must wake up. So I was trying, you see, to wake up—trying very hard."

"Yes—and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me. But you made much," he said, "of your difficulty." To which he added: "It's the only case I remember, Mag, of your ever making anything of a difficulty."

She kept her eyes on him a moment. "That I was so happy as I was?"

"That you were so happy as you were."

"Well, you admitted"—Maggie kept it up—"that that was a good difficulty. You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful." 260