Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/314

THE GOLDEN BOWL ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State—which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end—and I see them never come back. But never—simply. I see the extraordinary 'interesting' place—which I've never been to, you know, and you have—and the exact degree in which she'll be expected to be interested."

"She will be," Maggie presently replied.

"Expected?"

"Interested."

For a little after this their eyes met on it; at the end of which Fanny said: "She'll be—yes—what she'll have to be. And it will be—won't it?—for ever and ever." She spoke as abounding in her friend's sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her. These were large words and large visions—all the more that now really they spread and spread. In the midst of them however Mrs. Assingham had soon enough continued. "When I talk of 'knowing' indeed I don't mean it as you'd have a right to do. You know because you see—and I don't see him. I don't make him out," she almost crudely confessed. Maggie again took time. "You mean you don't make out Amerigo?"

But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one's intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had taken that without delay from 304