The Golden Bowl by Henry James (free ebook reader for android TXT) 📕

course it’s awfully quaint! That it’s awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness⁠—by which I don’t mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from whom I’ve so deplorably degenerated⁠—that,” Mrs. Assingham declared, “was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still,” she rather ruefully subjoined, “before they’ve done with me!”

This might be, but it wasn’t what most stood in the Colonel’s way. “You believe so in Mr. Verver’s innocence after two years of Charlotte?”

She stared. “But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn’t really⁠—or what you may call undividedly⁠—had.”

“Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has ‘really or undividedly,’ had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn’t had,” the Colonel conceded, “to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us in admiration.”

So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. “It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is that⁠—strange though this be⁠—her effort for her father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged⁠—the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding⁠—he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn’t worked them out in detail⁠—any more than I had, heaven pity me!⁠—and the queerness has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both,” she neatly wound up, “ ‘help.’ ”

“ ‘Both’⁠—?”

“I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte,” Fanny declared, “works like a horse.”

So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. “And what does the Prince work like?”

She fixed him in return. “Like a Prince!” Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly⁠—decorated back⁠—in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.

He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life⁠—as life had shrunk for him now⁠—the most luminous of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief⁠—how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer⁠—there was another plum in the pie. “What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?”

“The Prince’s? By his not ‘really’ caring?” She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough. “I mean that men don’t, when it has all been too easy. That’s how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works,” she added; “but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays.”

Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”

“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with expression, “he’s⁠—beautifully⁠—a case. They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be⁠—and that’s what makes so much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last⁠—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”

The Colonel considered. “And how must Charlotte⁠—if anything happens⁠—take him?”

The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her. “Nothing⁠—in spite of everything⁠—will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening.”

He looked a trifle disappointed. “I see. For us.”

“For us. For whom else?” And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it. “We know nothing on earth⁠—!” It was an undertaking he must sign.

So he wrote, as it were, his name. “We know nothing on earth.” It was like the soldiers’ watchword at night.

“We’re as innocent,” she went on in the same way, “as babes.”

“Why not rather say,” he asked, “as innocent as they themselves are?”

“Oh, for the best of reasons! Because we’re much more so.”

He wondered. “But how can we be more⁠—?”

“For them? Oh, easily! We can be anything.”

“Absolute idiots then?”

“Absolute idiots. And oh,” Fanny breathed, “the way it will rest us!”

Well, he looked as if there were something in that. “But won’t they know we’re not?”

She barely hesitated. “Charlotte and the Prince think we are⁠—which is so much gained. Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence⁠—but he doesn’t matter.”

“And Maggie? Doesn’t she know⁠—?”

“That we see before our noses?” Yes, this indeed took longer. “Oh, so far as she may guess it she’ll give no sign. So it comes to the same thing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Comes to our not being able