Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/313

THE PRINCESS "That's it—that's all I want. I should be too base—! Besides," Fanny went on, "you're too splendid."

"Splendid?"

"Splendid. Also, you know, you are all but 'through.' You've done it," said Mrs. Assingham. But Maggie only took it from her. "What does it strike you I've done?"

"What you wanted. They're going."

Maggie continued to look at her. "Is that what I wanted?"

"Oh it wasn't for you to say. That was his affair."

"My father's?" Maggie asked after an hesitation.

"Your father's. He has chosen—and now she knows. She sees it all before her—and she can't speak or resist or move a little finger. That's what's the matter with her," said Fanny Assingham.

It made a picture somehow for the Princess as they stood there—the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own. She saw round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature—saw Charlotte somewhere in it virtually at bay and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate. "Has she told you?" she then asked.

Her companion smiled superior. "I don't need to be told—either! I see something, thank God, every day." And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance: "I see the long miles of 303