THE GOLDEN BOWL
spiration had come, and it had trebled the next moment into sound. "Do you mean I'm your difficulty?"
"You and he together—since it's always with you that I've had to see him. But it's a difficulty that I'm facing, if you wish to know; that I've already faced; that I propose to myself to surmount. The struggle with it—none too pleasant—hasn't been for me, as you may imagine, in itself charming; I've felt in it at times, if I must tell you all, too great and too strange an ugliness. Yet I believe it may succeed."
She had risen with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved for the emphasis of it a few steps away; while Maggie, motionless at first, but sat and looked at her. "You want to take my father from me?"
The sharp successful almost primitive wail in it made Charlotte turn, and this movement attested for the Princess the felicity of her deceit. Something in her throbbed as it had throbbed the night she stood in the drawing-room and denied that she had suffered. She was ready to lie again if her companion would but give her the opening. Then she should know she had done all. Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare her face with her note of resentment; and Maggie, feeling this, met it with the signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of defeat! "I want really to possess him," said Mrs. Verver. "I happen also to feel that he's worth it."
Maggie rose as if to receive her. "Oh—worth it!" she wonderfully threw off.
The tone, she instantly saw, again had its effect: Charlotte flamed aloft—might truly have been be-
316
