THE PRINCESS
the same relation with her fifty times! It's of the number of kinds of relation with her that I speak—a number that doesn't matter really so long as there wasn't only the one kind father and I supposed. One kind," she went on, "was there before us; we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never thought of there being another kept out of our sight. But after the evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had before that my idea—which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and she, vaguely yet uneasily conscious of the difference. But it's within these last hours that I've most seen where we are; and as I've been in communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let her know my certainty—with the determination of which however you must understand she has had nothing to do. She defends you," Maggie remarked.
He had given her all his attention, and, with this impression for her again that he was in essence fairly reaching out to her for time—time, only time, she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of his losing almost everything else by it. It was still for a minute as if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that he too—as was his right—should know where he was. What stirred in him above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech, must have been the impulse to take up something she put
191
