The Golden Bowl - Complete

panted. 'But if he neither denies nor confesses—?'

'He does what's a thousand times better—he lets it alone. He does,' Maggie went on, 'as he would do; as I see now that I was sure he would. He lets me alone.'

Fanny Assingham turned it over. 'Then how do you know so where, as you say, you 'are'?'

'Why, just BY that. I put him in possession of the difference; the difference made, about me, by the fact that I hadn't been, after all—though with a wonderful chance, I admitted, helping me—too stupid to have arrived at knowledge. He had to see that I'm changed for him—quite changed from the idea of me that he had so long been going on with. It became a question then of his really taking in the change—and what I now see is that he is doing so.'

Fanny followed as she could. 'Which he shows by letting you, as you say, alone?'

Maggie looked at her a minute. 'And by letting her.'

Mrs. Assingham did what she might to embrace it—checked a little, however, by a thought that was the nearest approach she could have, in this almost too large air, to an inspiration. 'Ah, but does Charlotte let HIM?'

'Oh, that's another affair—with which I've practically nothing to do. I dare say, however, she doesn't.' And the Princess had a more distant gaze for the image evoked by the question. 'I don't in fact well see how she CAN. But the point for me is that he understands.'

'Yes,' Fanny Assingham cooed, 'understands—?'

'Well, what I want. I want a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger.'

'A brilliant, perfect surface—to begin with at least. I see.'

'The golden bowl—as it WAS to have been.' And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. 'The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.'

For Mrs. Assingham too the image had its force, and the precious object shone before her again, reconstituted, plausible, presentable. But wasn't there still a piece missing? 'Yet if he lets you alone and you only let him—?'

'Mayn't our doing so, you mean, be noticed?—mayn't it give us away? Well, we hope not—we try not—we take such care. We alone know what's between us—we and you; and haven't you precisely been struck, since you've been here,' Maggie asked, 'with our making so good a show?'

Her friend hesitated. 'To your father?'

But it made her hesitate too; she wouldn't speak of her father directly. 'To everyone. To her—now that you understand.'

It held poor Fanny again in wonder. 'To Charlotte—yes: if there's so much beneath it, for you, and if it's all such a plan. That makes it hang together it makes YOU hang together.' She fairly exhaled her admiration. 'You're like nobody else—you're extraordinary.'

Maggie met it with appreciation, but with a reserve. 'No, I'm not extraordinary—but I AM, for every one, quiet.'

'Well, that's just what is extraordinary. 'Quiet' is more than I am, and you leave me far behind.' With which, again, for an instant, Mrs. Assingham frankly brooded. ''Now that I understand,' you say— but there's one thing I don't understand.' And the next minute, while her companion waited, she had mentioned it. 'How can Charlotte, after all, not have pressed him, not have attacked him about it? How can she not have asked him—asked him on his honour, I mean—if you know?'

'How can she 'not'? Why, of course,' said the Princess limpidly, 'she MUST!'

'Well then—?'

'Well then, you think, he must have told her? Why, exactly what I mean,' said Maggie, 'is that he will have done nothing of the sort; will, as I say, have maintained the contrary.'

Fanny Assingham weighed it. 'Under her direct appeal for the truth?'

'Under her direct appeal for the truth.'

'Her appeal to his honour?'

'Her appeal to his honour. That's my point.'

Fanny Assingham braved it. 'For the truth as from him to her?'

'From him to any one.'

Mrs. Assingham's face lighted. 'He'll simply, he'll insistently have lied?'

Maggie brought it out roundly. 'He'll simply, he'll insistently have lied.'

It held again her companion, who next, however, with a single movement, throwing herself on her neck, overflowed. 'Oh, if you knew how you help me!'

Maggie had liked her to understand, so far as this was possible; but had not been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound. This inability in her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as we have seen, was only now in a position to boast of touching bottom. Maggie lived, inwardly, in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend, and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was, for that matter, still going on. They had been duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination—that, no doubt, was what might at present be said for them. She had looked into them, on the eve of her leaving town, almost without penetration: she had made out in those hours, and also, of a truth, during the days which immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation having for its chief mark—whether to be prolonged or not—the absence of any 'intimate' result of the crisis she had invited her husband to recognise. They had dealt with this crisis again, face to face, very briefly, the morning after the scene in her room—but with the odd consequence of her having appeared merely to leave it on his hands. He had received it from her as he might have received a bunch of keys or a list of commissions—attentive to her instructions about them, but only putting them, for the time, very carefully and safely, into his pocket. The instructions had seemed, from day to day, to make so little difference for his behaviour—that is for his speech or his