THE GOLDEN BOWL
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 didn'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 isn'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 as for definite notice, not to
346
