The Golden Bowl - Henry James [49]
He took it at last as it came. ‘You hold there’s no limit to what you “can”?’
‘I don’t say there’s no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chances – enough of them for hope. Why shouldn’t there be when a girl is after all what she is?’
‘By after “all” you mean after she’s in love with somebody else?’
The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. ‘She’s not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.’
‘Has she told you so?’
‘Not yet. It’s too soon. But she will. Meanwhile however I don’t require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.’
‘And what truth?’
‘The truth of everything I say.’
‘Prove it to whom?’
‘Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me – to work for her. What it will prove,’ Mrs Assingham presently went on, ‘will be that she’s cured. That she accepts the situation.’
He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. ‘The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?’
His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. ‘The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her the chance to be magnificent.’
He slowly emitted his smoke. ‘And best give you, by the same token, yours to be magnificent with her?’
‘I shall be as magnificent at least as I can.’
Bob Assingham got up. ‘And you call me immoral?’
It made her hesitate a moment. ‘I’ll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed to a certain point is, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?’ This he was unable to tell her; which left her more definitely to conclude. ‘Besides, it’s all, at the worst, great fun.’
‘Oh if you simply put it at that – !’
His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even thus he couldn’t catch her by it. ‘Oh I don’t mean,’ she said from the threshold, ‘the fun that you mean. Good-night.’ In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd short groan, almost a grunt. He had apparently meant some particular kind.
5
‘Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.’ So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. ‘I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this,’ she repeated as under the influence of her tone the Prince had already come to a pause.
‘For “this”?’ He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to him – or were, rather, a quantity that couldn’t at the most be much.
It would be as much however as she should be able to make it. ‘To have one hour alone with you.’
It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her with expression from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich low-browed weather-washed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it