Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/335

THE PRINCESS of that anxious lady's last approach to her young friend at Fawns that her sympathy had ventured, after much accepted privation, again to become inquisitive, and this principle had perhaps never so yielded to that need as on the question of the present odd "line" of the distinguished eccentrics.

"You mean to say really that you're going to stick here?" And then before Maggie could answer: "What on earth will you do with your evenings?"

Maggie waited a moment—Maggie could still tentatively smile. "When people learn we're here—and of course the papers will be full of it!—they'll flock back in their hundreds, from wherever they are, to catch us. You see you and the Colonel have yourselves done it. As for our evenings, they won't, I dare say, be particularly different from anything else that's ours. They won't be different from our mornings or our afternoons—except perhaps that you two dears will sometimes help us to get through them. I've offered to go anywhere," she added; "to take a house if he will. But this—just this and nothing else—is Amerigo's idea. He gave it yesterday," she went on, "a name that as he said described and fitted it. So you see"—and the Princess indulged again her smile that didn't play, but that only, as might have been said, worked—"so you see there's a method in our madness."

It drew Mrs. Assingham's wonder. "And what then is the name?"

"'The reduction to its simplest expression of what we are doing'—that's what he called it. Therefore as we're doing nothing, we're doing it in the most 325