The Golden Bowl - Henry James [38]
‘It doesn’t, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn’t in the least matter over there whether one likes it or not – that is to any one but one’s self. But I didn’t like it,’ said Charlotte Stant.
‘That’s not encouraging then to me, is it?’ the Prince went on.
‘Do you mean because you’re going?’
‘Oh yes, of course we’re going. I’ve wanted immensely to go.’
She waited. ‘But now? – immediately?’
‘In a month or two – it seems to be the new idea.’ On which there was something in her face – as he imagined – that made him say: ‘Didn’t Maggie write to you?’
‘Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you must stay’ – Charlotte was easily clear – ‘as long as possible.’
‘Is that what you did?’ he laughed. ‘You stayed as long as possible?’
‘Well, it seemed to me so – but I hadn’t “interests”. You’ll have them – on a great scale. It’s the country for interests,’ said Charlotte. ‘If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn’t have left it.’
He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. ‘Yours then are rather here?’
‘Oh mine!’ – the girl smiled. ‘They take up little room, wherever they are.’
It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow did for her – it determined in him a speech that would have seemed a few minutes before precarious and in questionable taste. The lead she had given him made the difference, and he felt it as really a lift on finding an honest and natural word rise, by its licence, to his lips. Nothing surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high bravery. ‘I’ve been thinking it all the while so probable, you know, that you would have seen your way to marrying.’
She looked at him an instant, and during these seconds he feared for what he might have spoiled. ‘To marrying whom?’
‘Why some good kind clever rich American.’
Again his security hung in the balance – then she was, as he felt, admirable. ‘I tried every one I came across. I did my best. I showed I had come, quite publicly, for that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At any rate it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have me.’ Then she seemed to betray regret for his having to hear of her anything so disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it; if he was disappointed she would cheer him up. ‘Existence, you know, all the same, doesn’t depend on that. I mean,’ she smiled, ‘on having caught a husband.’
‘Oh – existence!’ the Prince vaguely commented.
‘You think I ought to argue for more than mere existence?’ she asked. ‘I don’t see why my existence – even reduced as much as you like to being merely mine – should be so impossible. There are things of sorts I should be able to have – things I should be able to be. The position of a single woman to-day is very favourable, you know.’
‘Favourable to what?’
‘Why, just to existence – which may contain after all, in one way and another, so much. It may contain at the worst even affections; affections in fact quite particularly; fixed, that is, on one’s friends. I’m extremely fond of Maggie for instance – I quite adore her. How could I adore her more if I were married to one of the people you speak of?’
The Prince gave a laugh. ‘You might adore him more –!’
‘Ah but it isn’t, is it,’ she asked, ‘a question of that?’
‘My dear friend,’ he returned, ‘it’s always a question of doing the best for one’s self one can – without injury to others.’ He felt by this time that they were indeed on an excellent basis; so he went on again as if to show frankly his sense of its firmness. ‘I venture therefore to repeat my hope that you’ll marry some capital fellow; and also to repeat my belief that such a marriage will be more favourable to you, as you call it, than even the spirit of the age.’
She looked at him at first only for answer, and would have appeared to take it with meekness hadn’t she perhaps appeared a little more