The Golden Bowl - Complete

'That's exactly what I meant'—the Prince laughed out this allusion to their snatch of talk in Portland Place. 'It's just what I suggested.'

She took, however, no notice of the reminder; she went on in her own way. 'But it isn't a reason. In that case one would never do anything for her. I mean,' Charlotte explained, 'if one took advantage of her character.'

'Of her character?'

'We mustn't take advantage of her character,' the girl, again unheeding, pursued. 'One mustn't, if not for HER, at least for one's self. She saves one such trouble.'

She had spoken thoughtfully, with her eyes on her friend's; she might have been talking, preoccupied and practical, of someone with whom he was comparatively unconnected. 'She certainly GIVES one no trouble,' said the Prince. And then as if this were perhaps ambiguous or inadequate: 'She's not selfish—God forgive her!— enough.'

'That's what I mean,' Charlotte instantly said. 'She's not selfish enough. There's nothing, absolutely, that one NEED do for her. She's so modest,' she developed—'she doesn't miss things. I mean if you love her—or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.'

The Prince frowned a little—as a tribute, after all, to seriousness. 'She lets what—?'

'Anything—anything that you might do and that you don't. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It's of herself that she asks efforts—so far as she ever HAS to ask them. She hasn't, much. She does everything herself. And that's terrible.'

The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn't commit himself. 'Terrible?'

'Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one's decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody,' Charlotte continued in the same manner, 'is decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion, or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is without taking great care. Certainly,' she said, 'such people as you and I are not.'

The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. 'Not good enough to stand it?'

'Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.'

Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. 'Oh, I don't know. May not one's affection for her do something more for one's decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, HER 'decency'—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?'

'Ah, of course it must be all in that.'

But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. 'What it comes to—one can see what you mean—is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.'

'Yes, that's what it comes to,' said Charlotte Stant.

'And why,' he asked, almost soothingly, 'should it be terrible?' He couldn't, at the worst, see that.

'Because it's always so—the idea of having to pity people.'

'Not when there's also, with it, the idea of helping them.'

'Yes, but if we can't help them?'

'We CAN—we always can. That is,' he competently added, 'if we care for them. And that's what we're talking about.'

'Yes'—she on the whole assented. 'It comes back then to our absolutely refusing to be spoiled.'

'Certainly. But everything,' the Prince laughed as they went on—'all your 'decency,' I mean—comes back to that.'

She walked beside him a moment. 'It's just what I meant,' she then reasonably said.

VI

The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered longest, the small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street who was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive—this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the other while they considered the object with which he appeared mainly to hope to tempt them. They had come to him last, for their time was nearly up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting into a hansom at the Marble Arch, having yielded no better result than the amusement invoked from the first. The amusement, of course, was to have consisted in seeking, but it had also involved the idea of finding; which latter necessity would have been obtrusive only if they had found too soon. The question at present was if they were finding, and they put it to each other, in the Bloomsbury shop, while they enjoyed the undiverted attention of the shopman. He was clearly the master, and devoted to his business—the essence of which, in his conception, might precisely have been this particular secret that he possessed for worrying the customer so little that it fairly made for their relations a sort of solemnity. He had not many things, none of the redundancy of 'rot' they had elsewhere seen, and our friends had, on entering, even had the sense of a muster so scant that, as high values obviously wouldn't reign, the effect might be almost pitiful. Then their impression had changed; for, though the show was of small pieces, several taken from the little window and others extracted from a cupboard behind the counter—dusky, in the rather low-browed place, despite its glass doors—each bid for their attention spoke, however modestly, for itself, and the pitch of their entertainer's pretensions was promptly enough given. His array was heterogeneous and not at all imposing; still, it differed agreeably from what they had hitherto seen.

Charlotte, after the incident, was to be full of impressions, of several of which, later on, she gave her companion—always in the interest of their amusement—the benefit; and one of the impressions had been that the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at. The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn't looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connection, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never SAW. One kind of shopman was just like another to him—which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that, where it did notice, noticed so much. He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted—the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. He didn't, no doubt, want to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation—this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired 'type' in faces at hucksters' stalls.