The Golden Bowl - Henry James [49]
‘I hate to encourage you – and for such a purpose, after all – to spend your money.’
She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. ‘Because you think I must have so little? I’ve enough, at any rate – enough for us to take our hour. Enough,’ she had smiled, ‘is as good as a feast! And then,’ she had said, ‘it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor – something precisely that no rich person could ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.’ Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. ‘Only as it can’t be fine it ought to be funny – and that’s the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself.’
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