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By Root 7152 0

wife had – which was also what Amerigo had made her do. She had kept her test, Maggie’s test, from becoming possible, and had applied instead a test of her own. It was exactly as if she had known her stepdaughter would fear to be summoned to say, under the least approach to cross-examination, why any change was desirable; and it was for our young woman herself, still more prodigiously, as if her father had been capable of calculations to match, of judging it important that he shouldn’t be brought to demand of her what was the matter with her. Why otherwise, with such an opportunity, hadn’t he demanded it? Always from calculation – that was why, that was why. He was terrified of the retort he might have invoked: ‘What, my dear, if you come to that, is the matter with you?’ When a minute later on he had followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to conjure away the ghost of the anomalous, at that climax verily she would have had to be dumb to the question. ‘There seems a kind of charm, doesn’t there? on our life – and quite as if just lately it had got itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed. A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner, left over, of my old show. That’s the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid – lying like gods together, all careless of mankind.’

‘Do you consider that we’re languid?’ – that form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. ‘Do you consider that we’re careless of mankind? – living as we do in the biggest crowd in the world and running about always pursued and pursuing.’

It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he came up again, as she might have said, smiling. ‘Well, I don’t know. We get nothing but the fun, do we?’

‘No,’ she had hastened to declare; ‘we certainly get nothing but the fun.’

‘We do it all,’ he had remarked, ‘so beautifully.’

‘We do it all so beautifully.’ She hadn’t denied this for a moment. ‘I see what you mean.’

‘Well, I mean too,’ he had gone on, ‘that we haven’t no doubt enough the sense of difficulty.’

‘Enough? Enough for what?’

‘Enough not to be selfish.’

‘I don’t think you are selfish,’ she had returned – and had managed not to wail it.

‘I don’t say it’s me particularly – or that it’s you or Charlotte or Amerigo. But we’re selfish together – we move as a selfish mass. You see we want always the same thing,’ he had gone on – ‘and that holds us, that binds us, together. We want each other,’ he had further explained; ‘only wanting it, each time, for each other. That’s what I call the happy spell; but it’s also a little – possibly – the immorality.’

‘ “The immorality”?’ she had pleasantly echoed.

‘Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves – that is for each other; and I won’t pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal expense you and I for instance are happy. What it comes to, I dare say, is that there’s something haunting – as if it were a bit uncanny – in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless indeed,’ he had rambled on, ‘it’s only I to whom, fantastically, it says so much. That’s all I mean at any rate – that it’s “sort of” soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. “Let us then be up and doing” – what is it Longfellow1 says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in – into our opium-den – to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is at the same time that we are doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We have worked it, and what more can you do than that? It’s a good deal for me,’ he had wound up, ‘to have made Charlotte so happy – to have so perfectly contented her. You, from a good way back, were a matter of course – I mean your being all right; so I needn’t mind your knowing