Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/366

THE GOLDEN BOWL With which therefore they stood at difference, he with his head erect and his happy idea perched in its eagerness on his crest. "And how then is she to know?"

"She isn't to know."

"She's only still to think you don't—?"

"And therefore that I'm always a fool? She may think," said Maggie, "what she likes."

"Think it without my protest—?"

The Princess made a movement. "What business is it of yours?"

"Isn't it my right to correct her—?"

Maggie let his question ring—ring long enough for him to hear it himself; only then she took it up. "'Correct' her?"—and it was her own now that really rang. "Aren't you rather forgetting who she is?" After which, while he quite stared for it, as it was the very first clear majesty he had known her to use, she flung down her book and raised a warning hand. "The carriage. Come!"

The "Come!" had matched for lucid firmness the rest of her speech, and when they were below in the hall there was a "Go!" for him, through the open doors and between the ranged servants, that matched even that. He received Royalty, bareheaded, therefore, in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Verver, as it alighted on the pavement, and Maggie was at the threshold to welcome it to her house. Later on, upstairs again, she even herself felt still more the force of the limit of which she had just reminded him; at tea, in Charlotte's affirmed presence—as Charlotte affirmed it—she drew a long breath of richer relief. It was the 356