The Golden Bowl - Henry James [106]
‘I’m sure, my dear Charlotte,’ Fanny Assingham laughed, ‘I don’t want to upset you.’
‘Indeed, love, you simply couldn’t even if you thought it necessary – that’s all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I’m, by no merit of my own, just fixed – fixed as fast as a pin stuck up to its head in a cushion. I’m placed – I can’t imagine any one more placed. There I am!’
Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. ‘I dare say – but your statement of your position, however you see it, isn’t an answer to my enquiry. I confess it seems to me at the same time,’ Mrs Assingham added, ‘to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being “frank”. How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay, and if she’s willing to leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren’t the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable?’
‘If they’re not,’ Charlotte replied, ‘it’s only from their being in a way too evident. They’re not grounds for me – they weren’t when I accepted Adam’s preference that I should come to-night without him: just as I accept absolutely, as a fixed rule, all his preferences. But that of course doesn’t alter the fact that my husband’s daughter rather than his wife should have felt she could after all be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour – seeing especially that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field.’ With which she produced, as it were, her explanation. ‘I’ve simply to see the truth of the matter – see that Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such,’ she went on, ‘that this becomes immediately, don’t you understand? a thing I have to count with.’
Mrs Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. ‘If you mean such a thing as that she doesn’t adore the Prince –!’
‘I don’t say she doesn’t adore him. What I say is that she doesn’t think of him. One of those conditions doesn’t always at all stages involve the other. This is just how she adores him,’ Charlotte said. ‘And what reason is there in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn’t, as you say, show together? We’ve shown together, my dear,’ she smiled, ‘before.’
Her friend, for a little, only looked at her – speaking then with abruptness. ‘You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such good people.’
The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had the next instant caused further to brighten. ‘Does one ever put into words anything so fatuously rash? It’s a thing that must be said, in prudence, for one – by somebody who’s so good as to take the responsibility: the more that it gives one always a chance to show one’s best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly, you’ll never have the distress, or whatever, of hearing me complain.’
‘Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!’ – and the elder woman’s spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy.
To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. ‘With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up – still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him. She missed his company – a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can – a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments – which has all the same everything in its favour,’ Charlotte hastened to declare