The Golden Bowl - Henry James [259]
He did his best to do so. ‘Had you mean a social situation?’
‘Yes – after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that at the rate we were going we should never have one.’
‘Which was what put us on Charlotte?’ Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.
Maggie had another pause – taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been at their critical moment ‘put’ on Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more “placed”, or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn’t have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn’t obligingly leave me more exalted by having themselves smaller ideas. For those,’ she said, ‘were the feelings we used to have.’
‘Oh yes,’ he responded philosophically – ‘I remember the feelings we used to have.’
Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little in tender retrospect – as if they had been also respectable. ‘It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position. But it was worse to be sublime about it – as I was so afraid, as I’m in fact still afraid of being – when it wasn’t even there to support one.’ And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it – which was doubtless too often even now her danger – almost sententious. ‘One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others – of what they may feel deprived of. However,’ she added, ‘Kitty and Dotty couldn’t imagine we were deprived of anything. And now, and now –!’ But she stopped as for indulgence to their wonder and envy.
‘And now they see still more that we can have got everything and kept everything and yet not be proud.’
‘No, we’re not proud,’ she answered after a moment. ‘I’m not sure we’re quite proud enough.’ Yet she changed the next instant that subject too. She could only do so however by harking back – as if it had been a fascination. She might have been wishing, under this renewed, this still more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the stream of time and dipping again, for the softness of the water, into the contracted basin of the past. ‘We talked about it – we talked about it; you don’t remember so well as I. You too didn’t know – and it was beautiful of you; like Kitty and Dotty you too thought we had a position, and were surprised when I thought we ought to have told them we weren’t doing for them what they supposed. In fact,’ Maggie pursued, ‘we’re not doing it now. We’re not, you see, really introducing them. I mean not to the people they want.’
‘Then what do you call the people with whom they’re now having tea?’
It made her quite spring round. ‘That’s just what you asked me the other time – one of the days there was somebody. And I told you I didn’t call anybody anything.’
‘I remember – that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn’t “count”; that Fanny Assingham knew they didn’t.’ She had awakened, his daughter, the echo; and on the bench there, as before, he nodded his head amusedly, he kept nervously shaking his foot. ‘Yes, they were only good enough – the people who came – for us. I remember,’ he said again: ‘that was the way it all happened.’
‘That was the way – that was the way. And you asked me,’ Maggie added, ‘if I didn’t think we ought to tell them. Tell Mrs Rance in particular I mean that we had been entertaining her up to then under false pretences.’
‘Precisely – but you said she wouldn’t have understood.’
‘To which you replied that in that case you were like her. You didn’t understand.’
‘No, no – but I remember how, about our having in our benighted innocence no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation.