THE GOLDEN BOWL
"For asking him to go off? Why the very simplest—if you conscientiously can. The desire," said Maggie, "to be agreeable to him. Just that only."
Something in this reply made her husband again reflect. "'Conscientiously'? Why shouldn't I conscientiously? It wouldn't, by your own contention," he developed, "represent any surprise for him. I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him."
Ah there it was again, for Maggie—the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least, as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it in the others as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion-to Charlotte. Before she was well aware accordingly she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amerigo's last words. "You're the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him."
She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband's eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard—though his answer when it came was straight enough. "Why isn't that just what we've been talking about—that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it,"
64
