THE GOLDEN BOWL
impressions. That, I think," she added, "is the way I've best known."
"'Known'?" he repeated after a moment.
"Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were things that hadn't been told me—and that gave their meaning little by little to other things that were before me."
"Would they have made a difference in the matter of our marriage," the Prince presently asked, "if you had known them?"
She took her time to think. "I grant you not—in the matter of ours." And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn't keep down: "The question is so much bigger than that. You see how much what I know makes of it for me." That was what acted on him, this iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity of the various bearings of which he couldn't on the spot trust himself to pretend in any high way to go. What her claim, as she made it, represented for him—that he couldn't help betraying if only as a consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct "know, know," on his nerves. She was capable of being sorry for his nerves at a time when he should need them for dining out, pompously, rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she wasn't to let that prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme clearness. "I didn't force this upon you, you must recollect, and it probably wouldn't have happened for you if you hadn't come in."
200
