her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. 'They're doing the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to go—!' And he looked down at her over his cigar.
If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her father's age, Charlotte's need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to 'live into' their queer future—it was high time that they should take up their courage. This was eminent sense, but it didn't arrest the Princess, who, the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. 'But shan't you then so much as miss her a little? She's wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,' Maggie went on —'she's so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for us—for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.'
The Prince smoked hard a minute. 'As you say, she's splendid, but there is—there always will be—much of her left. Only, as you also say, for others.'
'And yet I think,' the Princess returned, 'that it isn't as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It's as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us—as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us.'
He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry. 'Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father's wife?'
They exchanged a long look—the time that it took her to find her reply. 'Because not to—!'
'Well, not to—?'
'Would make me have to speak of him. And I can't,' said Maggie, 'speak of him.'
'You 'can't'—?'
'I can't.' She said it as for definite notice, not to be repeated. 'There are too many things,' she nevertheless added. 'He's too great.'
The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed: 'Too great for whom?' Upon which as she hesitated, 'Not, my dear, too great for you,' he declared. 'For me—oh, as much as you like.'
'Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it,' Maggie said. 'That's enough.'
He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had uttered other words. 'What's of importance is that you're his daughter. That at least we've got. And I suppose that, if I may say nothing else, I may say at least that I value it.'
'Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it.'
This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking connection. 'She ought to have known you. That's what's present to me. She ought to have understood you better.'
'Better than you did?'
'Yes,' he gravely maintained, 'better than I did. And she didn't really know you at all. She doesn't know you now.'
'Ah, yes she does!' said Maggie.
But he shook his head—he knew what he meant. 'She not only doesn't understand you more than I, she understands you ever so much less. Though even I—!'
'Well, even you?' Maggie pressed as he paused. 'Even I, even I even yet—!' Again he paused and the silence held them.
But Maggie at last broke it. 'If Charlotte doesn't understand me, it is that I've prevented her. I've chosen to deceive her and to lie to her.'
The Prince kept his eyes on her. 'I know what you've chosen to do. But I've chosen to do the same.'
'Yes,' said Maggie after an instant—'my choice was made when I had guessed yours. But you mean,' she asked, 'that she understands YOU?'
'It presents small difficulty!'
'Are you so sure?' Maggie went on.
'Sure enough. But it doesn't matter.' He waited an instant; then looking up through the fumes of his smoke, 'She's stupid,' he abruptly opined.
'O—oh!' Maggie protested in a long wail.
It had made him in fact quickly change colour. 'What I mean is that she's not, as you pronounce her, unhappy.' And he recovered, with this, all his logic. 'Why is she unhappy if she doesn't know?'
'Doesn't know—?' She tried to make his logic difficult.
'Doesn't know that YOU know.'
It came from him in such a way that she was conscious, instantly, of three or four things to answer. But what she said first was: 'Do you think that's all it need take?' And before he could reply, 'She knows, she knows!' Maggie proclaimed.
'Well then, what?'
But she threw back her head, she turned impatiently away from him. 'Oh, I needn't tell you! She knows enough. Besides,' she went on, 'she doesn't believe us.'
It made the Prince stare a little. 'Ah, she asks too much!' That drew, however, from his wife another moan of objection, which determined in him a judgment. 'She won't let you take her for unhappy.'
'Oh, I know better than any one else what she won't let me take her for!'
