The Golden Bowl - Henry James [51]
He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. ‘ “Funny”?’
‘Oh I don’t mean a comic toy – I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely right, in its comparative cheapness. That’s what I call funny,’ she had explained. ‘You used,’ she had also added, ‘to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn’t say – the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August.’
‘Ah but I don’t understand your English buying, and I confess I find it dull.’ So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. ‘I understood my poor dear Romans.’
‘It was they who understood you – that was your pull,’ she had laughed. ‘Our amusement here is just that they don’t understand us. We can make it amusing. You’ll see.’
If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. ‘The amusement surely will be to find our present.’
‘Certainly – as I say.’
‘Well, if they don’t come down –?’
‘Then we’ll come up. There’s always something to be done. Besides, Prince,’ she had gone on, ‘I’m not, if you come to that, absolutely a pauper. I’m too poor for some things,’ she had said – yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; ‘but I’m not too poor for others.’ And she had paused again at the top. ‘I’ve been saving up.’
He had really challenged it. ‘In America?’
‘Yes, even there – with my motive. And we oughtn’t, you know,’ she had wound up, ‘to leave it beyond to-morrow.’
That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed – he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather than magnify. Beyond which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He was making her – she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in him, didn’t at all do. That was accordingly in fine how they had come to where they were: he was engaged as hard as possible in the policy of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making the point, and as if it were almost the whole point, that Maggie of course wasn’t to have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she shouldn’t suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her – as Charlotte on her side would – that they had been anywhere at all together or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn’t betray her. There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs Assingham’s and another to arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between them in Cadogan Place – though not mentioning those of Mrs Assingham’s absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked his assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery – what had made him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough for her to notice it – was the sense of the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a ‘Do you want then