Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/280

THE GOLDEN BOWL smile, have been knowing she was for herself rightly inspired. "What do you make then of what I wanted?"

"I don't make anything, any more than of what you've got. That's exactly the point. I don't put myself out to do so—I never have; I take from you all I can get, all you've provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can. There you are—the rest is your own affair. I don't even pretend to concern myself—!"

"To concern yourself—?" He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

"With what may have really become of you. It's as if we had agreed from the first not to go into that—such an arrangement being of course charming for me. You can't say, you know, that I haven't stuck to it."

He didn't say so then—even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath. He said instead: "Oh my dear—oh, oh!"

But it made no difference, know as she might what a past—still so recent and yet so distant—it alluded to; she repeated her denial, warning him off, on her side, from spoiling the truth of her contention. "I never went into anything, and you see I don't; I've continued to adore you—but what's that from a decent daughter to such a father? what but a question of convenient arrangement, our having two houses, three houses, instead of one (you would have arranged for fifty if I had wished!) and my making it easy for you to see the child? You don't claim, 270