The Golden Bowl - Henry James [30]
‘Sophisticated as I may appear’ – it was her frequent phrase – she had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do; it made her, as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt. One of these gaps in Mrs Assingham’s completeness was her want of children; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful how little either, in the fulness of time, came to show; sympathy and curiosity could render their objects practically filial, just as an English husband who in his military years had ‘run’ everything in his regiment could make economy blossom like the rose. Colonel Bob had, a few years after his marriage, left the army, which had clearly by that time done its laudable all for the enrichment of his personal experience, and he could thus give his whole time to the gardening in question. There reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things – such things as American girls accepted as ‘good enough’ – hadn’t begun to be; so that the pleasant pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage.13 Mrs Assingham knew better, knew there had been no historic hour, from that of Pocahontas14 down, when some young Englishman hadn’t precipitately believed and some American girl hadn’t, with a few more gradations, availed herself to the full of her incapacity to doubt; but she accepted resignedly the laurel of the founder, since she was in fact pretty well the doyenne,15 above ground, of her transplanted tribe, and since, above all, she had invented combinations, though she hadn’t invented Bob’s own. It was he who had done that, absolutely puzzled it out by himself from its first odd glimmer – resting upon it moreover, through the years to come, as proof enough in him by itself of the higher cleverness. If she kept her own cleverness up it was largely that he should have full credit. There were moments in truth when she privately felt how little – striking out as he had done – he could have afforded that she should show the common limits. But Mrs Assingham’s cleverness was in truth tested when her present visitor at last said to her: ‘I don’t think, you know, that you’re treating me quite right. You’ve something on your mind that you don’t tell me.’
It was positive too that her smile of reply was a trifle dim. ‘Am I obliged to tell you everything I have on my mind?’
‘It isn’t a question of everything, but it’s a question of anything that may particularly concern me. Then you shouldn’t keep it back. You know with what care I desire to proceed, taking everything into account and making no mistake that may possibly injure her.’
Mrs Assingham, at this, had after an instant an odd interrogation. ‘ “Her”?’
‘Her and him. Both our friends. Either Maggie or her father.’
‘I have something on my mind,’ Mrs Assingham