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

“Well, that’s handsome.” He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly. “It’s about all I could expect of you. So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square. I’ll let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up. But am I to understand meanwhile,” he soon went on, “that, ready as you are to see me through my collapse, you’re not ready, or not as ready, to see me through my resistance? I’ve got to be a regular martyr before you’ll be inspired?”

She demurred at his way of putting it. “Why, if you like it, you know, it won’t be a collapse.”

“Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don’t want to like it. That is,” he amended, “unless I feel surer I do than appears very probable. I don’t want to have to think I like it in a case when I really shan’t. I’ve had to do that in some cases,” he confessed⁠—“when it has been a question of other things. I don’t want,” he wound up, “to be made to make a mistake.”

“Ah, but it’s too dreadful,” she returned, “that you should even have to fear⁠—or just nervously to dream⁠—that you may be. What does that show, after all,” she asked, “but that you do really, well within, feel a want? What does it show but that you’re truly susceptible?”

“Well, it may show that”⁠—he defended himself against nothing. “But it shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we’re leading now, numerous and formidable.”

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which, however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular. “Do you feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?”

“Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing. I think she’d do anything.”

“Oh well, I’d help you,” the Princess said with decision, “as against her⁠—if that’s all you require. It’s too funny,” she went on before he again spoke, “that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I’m bound to say, too funny. The thing is,” Maggie developed under this impression, “that I don’t think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don’t at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I’m sure, to Fanny Assingham.”

Mr. Verver⁠—as if from due regard for these persons⁠—considered a little. “What life would they like us to lead?”

“Oh, it’s not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together. She thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater.”

“Greater⁠—?” He echoed it vaguely. “And Amerigo too, you say?”

“Ah yes”⁠—her reply was prompt “but Amerigo doesn’t mind. He doesn’t care, I mean, what we do. It’s for us, he considers, to see things exactly as we wish. Fanny herself,” Maggie pursued, “thinks he’s magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for accepting the ‘social limitations’ of our life, for not missing what we don’t give him.”

Mr. Verver attended. “Then if he doesn’t miss it his magnificence is easy.”

“It is easy-that’s exactly what I think. If there were things he did miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He could be a Hero⁠—he will be one if it’s ever necessary. But it will be about something better than our dreariness. I know,” the Princess declared, “where he’s magnificent.” And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as she had begun. “We’re not, all the same, committed to anything stupid. If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we can be grander. There’s nothing to prevent.”

“Is it a strict moral obligation?” Adam Verver inquired.

“No⁠—it’s for the amusement.”

“For whose? For Fanny’s own?”

“For everyone’s⁠—though I dare say Fanny’s would be a large part.” She hesitated; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring out, which she finally produced. “For yours in particular, say⁠—if you go into the question.” She even bravely followed it up. “I haven’t really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done for you than is done.”

Mr. Verver uttered an odd vague sound. “Don’t you think a good deal is done when you come out and talk to me this way?”

“Ah,” said his daughter, smiling at him, “we make too much of that!” And then to explain: “That’s good, and it’s natural⁠—but it isn’t great. We forget that we’re as free as air.”

“Well, that’s great,” Mr. Verver pleaded. “Great if we act on it. Not if we don’t.”

She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that belied a light tone. “What do you want,” he demanded, “to do to me?” And he added, as she didn’t say: “You’ve got something in your mind.” It had come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to be vague in him. There had been from the first something in her anxious eyes, in the way she occasionally lost herself, that it would perfectly explain. He was therefore now quite sure.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve.”

She had a silence that made him right. “Well, when I tell you you’ll understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes⁠—it