She could n't have been sure beforehand and really (344) had n't been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion. Nothing in the world of a truth had ever been so sweet to her as his look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She troubled him--which had n't been at all her purpose; she mystified him--which she could n't help and comparatively did n't mind; then it came over her that he had after all a simplicity, very considerable, on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discovery--not like the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which he thought her capable. They were all apparently queer for him, but she had at least with the lapse of the months created the perception that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there, beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with. There was something of his own in his mind to which she was sure he referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go of it from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room after his encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging at him, on the question of her father's view of him, her determined "Find out for yourself!" She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out and had been seeking above all to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him with violence, or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source. Nothing however had reached him; nothing (345) he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation. What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer to him, her father's and her own, of an opportunity to separate from Mrs. Verver with the due amount of form--and all the more that he was in so pathetic a way unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on the score of taste. Taste in him as a touchstone was now all at sea; for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine of them, would n't be exactly that taste by itself, the taste he had always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile at all events he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She was invoking that reflexion at the very moment he brought out, in reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just affected her at first as a high oddity. "They're doing the wisest thing, you know.
For if they were ever to go--! And he looked down at her over his cigar.
If they were ever to go in short it was high time with her father's age, Charlotte's need of initiation, (346) and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to "live into" their queer future, it was high time they should take up their courage.
This was eminent sense, but it did n't arrest the Princess, who the next moment had found a form for her challenge. "But shan't you then so much as miss her a little? She's wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically," Maggie went on--"she's naturally so far, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for us--for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left."
The Prince smoked hard a minute. "As you say, she's splendid, but there is--there always will be--much of her left. Only, as you also say, for others."
"And yet I think," the Princess returned, "that it is n't as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It's as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us--as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us."
He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid enquiry.
"Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father's wife?"
They exchanged a long look--the time that it took her to find her reply.
"Because not to--!"
"Well, not to--?"
"Would make me have to speak of HIM. And I can't," said Maggie, "speak of him."
"You 'can't'--?"
"I can't." She said it for definite notice, not to (347) be repeated.
"There are too many things," she nevertheless added. "He's too great."
The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed:
"Too great for whom?" Upon which as she hesitated, "Not, my dear, too great for you," he declared. "For me--oh as much as you like."
"Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it," Maggie said.
"That's enough."
He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had uttered other words. "What's of importance is that you're his daughter. That at least we've got. And I suppose that if I may say nothing else I may say at least that I value it."
"Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it."
This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking connexion. "She ought to have KNOWN you. That's what's present to me. She ought to have understood you better."
"Better than you did?"
"Yes," he gravely maintained, "better than I did. And she did n't really know you at all. She does n't know you now."
"Ah yes she does!" said Maggie.
