The Golden Bowl - Henry James [82]
It produced in Maggie’s face another gratitude. ‘Then, dear sir, that’s all I want.’
And it would apparently have settled their question and ended their talk if her father hadn’t, after a little, shown the disposition to revert. ‘How many times are you supposing she has tried?’
Once more, at this, and as if she hadn’t been, couldn’t be, hated to be, in such delicate matters, literal, she was moved to attenuate. ‘Oh I don’t say she absolutely ever tried –!’
He looked perplexed. ‘But if she has so absolutely failed, what then has she done?’
‘She has suffered – she has done that.’ And the Princess added: ‘She has loved – and she has lost.’
Mr Verver, however, still wondered. ‘But how many times?’
Maggie hesitated, but it cleared up. ‘Once is enough. Enough, that is, for one to be kind to her.’
Her father listened, yet not challenging – only as with a need of some basis on which, under these new lights, his bounty could be firm. ‘But has she told you nothing?’
‘Ah thank goodness, no!’
He stared. ‘Then don’t young women tell?’
‘Because, you mean, it’s just what they’re supposed to do?’ She looked at him, flushed again now; with which, after another hesitation, ‘Do young men tell?’ she asked.
He gave a short laugh. ‘How do I know, my dear, what young men do?’
‘Then how do I know, father, what vulgar girls do?’
‘I see – I see,’ he quickly returned.
But she spoke the next moment as if she might, odiously, have been sharp. ‘What happens at least is that where there’s a great deal of pride there’s a great deal of silence. I don’t know, I admit, what I should do if I were lonely and sore – for what sorrow, to speak of, have I ever had in my life? I don’t know even if I’m proud – it seems to me the question has never come up for me.’
‘Oh I guess you’re proud, Mag,’ her father cheerfully interposed. ‘I mean I guess you’re proud enough.’
‘Well then I hope I’m humble enough too. I might at all events, for all I know, be abject under a blow. How can I tell? Do you realise, father, that I’ve never had the least blow?’
He gave her a long quiet look. ‘Who should realise if I don’t?’
‘Well, you’ll realise when I have one!’ she exclaimed with a short laugh that resembled, as for good reasons, his own of a minute before. ‘I wouldn’t in any case have let her tell me what would have been dreadful to me. For such wounds and shames are dreadful: at least,’ she added, catching herself up, ‘I suppose they are; for what, as I say, do I know of them? I don’t want to know!’ – she spoke quite with vehemence. ‘There are things that are sacred – whether they’re joys or pains. But one can always, for safety, be kind,’ she kept on; ‘one feels when that’s right.’
She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together hadn’t closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another – the appearance of some slight slim draped ‘antique’ of Vatican or Capitoline1 halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred absent eyes, the smoothed elegant nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, ‘generalised’ in its grace, a figure with which his human connexion was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, something shyly mythological and nymph-like. The trick, he wasn’t uncomplacently aware, was mainly of his own mind; it came from his caring for precious vases only less than for precious daughters. And what was more to the point still, it often operated while he was quite at the same time conscious that Maggie had been described, even in her prettiness, as