Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/271

THE PRINCESS He thought a moment. "Yes—I may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me." But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile. "What do you want to put on me now?"

"Only that we used to wonder—that we were wondering then—if our life wasn't perhaps a little selfish."

This also for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed. "Because Fanny Assingham thought so?"

"Oh no; she never thought, she couldn't think, if she would, anything of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools," Maggie developed; "she doesn't seem to think so much about their being wrong—wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked. She doesn't," the Princess further adventured, "quite so much mind their being wicked."

"I see—I see." And yet it might have been for his daughter that he didn't so very vividly see. "Then she only thought us fools?"

"Oh no—I don't say that. I'm speaking of our being selfish."

"And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?"

"Oh I don't say she condones—!" A scruple in Maggie raised its crest. "Besides, I'm speaking of what was."

Her father showed however, after a little, that he hadn't been reached by this discrimination; his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled. "Look here, Mag," he said reflectively—"I ain't selfish. I'll be blowed if I'm selfish." 261