The Golden Bowl - Henry James [250]
‘Then what do you call the people with whom they’re now having tea?’
It made her quite spring round. ‘That’s just what you asked me the other time – one of the days there was somebody. And I told you I didn’t call anybody anything.’
‘I remember – that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn’t “count”; that Fanny Assingham knew they didn’t.’ She had awakened, his daughter, the echo; and on the bench there, as before, he nodded his head amusedly, he kept nervously shaking his foot. ‘Yes, they were only good enough – the people who came – for us. I remember,’ he said again: ‘that was the way it all happened.’
‘That was the way – that was the way. And you asked me,’ Maggie added, ‘if I didn’t think we ought to tell them. Tell Mrs Rance in particular I mean that we had been entertaining her up to then under false pretences.’
‘Precisely – but you said she wouldn’t have understood.’
‘To which you replied that in that case you were like her. You didn’t understand.’
‘No, no – but I remember how, about our having in our benighted innocence no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation.’
‘Well then,’ said Maggie with every appearance of delight, ‘I’ll crush you again. I told you that you by yourself had one – there was no doubt of that. You were different from me – you had the same one you always had.’
‘And then I asked you,’ her father concurred, ‘why in that case you hadn’t the same.’
‘Then indeed you did.’ He had brought her face round to him before, and this held it, covering him with its kindled brightness, the result of the attested truth of their being able thus in talk to live again together. ‘What I replied was that I had lost my position by my marriage. That one – I know how I saw it – would never come back. I had done something to it – I didn’t quite know what; given it away somehow and yet not as then appeared really got my return. I had been assured – always by dear Fanny – that I could get it, only I must wake up. So I was trying, you see, to wake up – trying very hard.’
‘Yes – and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me. But you made much,’ he said, ‘of your difficulty.’ To which he added: ‘It’s the only case I remember, Mag, of your ever making anything of a difficulty.’
She kept her eyes on him a moment. ‘That I was so happy as I was?’
‘That you were so happy as you were.’
‘Well, you admitted’ – Maggie kept it up – ‘that that was a good difficulty. You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful.’
He thought a moment. ‘Yes – I may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me.’ But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile. ‘What do you want to put on me now?’
‘Only that we used to wonder – that we were wondering then – if our life wasn’t perhaps a little selfish.’
This also for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed. ‘Because Fanny Assingham thought so?’
‘Oh no; she never thought, she couldn’t think, if she would, anything of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools,’ Maggie developed; ‘she doesn’t seem to think so much about their being wrong – wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked. She doesn’t,’ the Princess further adventured, ‘quite so much mind their being wicked.’
‘I see – I see.’ And yet it might have been for his daughter that he didn’t so very vividly see. ‘Then she only thought us fools?’
‘Oh no – I don’t say that. I’m speaking of our being selfish.’
‘And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?’
‘Oh I don’t say she condones –!’ A scruple in Maggie raised its crest. ‘Besides, I’m speaking of what was.’
Her father showed however, after a little, that he hadn’t been reached by this discrimination; his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled. ‘Look here, Mag,’ he said reflectively – ‘I ain’t selfish. I’ll be blowed if I’m selfish.’
Well, Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce. ‘Then, father, I am.’
‘Oh shucks!’ said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back. ‘I’ll believe it,’ he presently added,