She hesitated. "I'll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity
pushed to a certain point IS, you know, immorality. Just so what
is morality but high intelligence?" This he was unable to tell
her; which left her more definitely to conclude. "Besides, it's
all, at the worst, great fun."
"Oh, if you simply put it at THAT--!"
His implication was that in this case they had a common ground;
yet even thus he couldn't catch her by it. "Oh, I don't mean,"
she said from the threshold, "the fun that you mean. Good-night."
In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave
an odd, short groan, almost a grunt. He HAD apparently meant some
particular kind.
V
"Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest."
So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into
the Park. "I don't want to pretend, and I can't pretend a moment
longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don't care. I
knew I shouldn't and I find now how little. I came back for this.
Not really for anything else. For this," she repeated as, under
the influence of her tone, the Prince had already come to a
pause.
"For 'this'?" He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated
were vague to him--or were, rather, a quantity that couldn't, at
the most, be much.
It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it.
"To have one hour alone with you." It had rained heavily in the
night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a
cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering,
thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The
multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a
wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of
odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked
about her, with expression, from the first of their coming in,
quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day
was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed,
weatherwashed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for
her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in
fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the
case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague
Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly,
an American--as indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for
all sorts of things: so long as you hadn't, blessedly or not, to
remain in America. The Prince had, by half-past ten--as also by
definite appointment--called in Cadogan Place for Mrs.
Assingham's visitor, and then, after brief delay, the two had
walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park
from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its
place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the
appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs.
Assingham's drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had
done nothing to invalidate--everything, much rather, to place in
a light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn't have fitted that
anyone should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter,
to raise one, from the moment Mrs. Assingham, informed and
apparently not disapproving, didn't intervene? This the young man
had asked himself--with a very sufficient sense of what would
have made him ridiculous. He wasn't going to begin--that at least
was certain--by showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp
in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped;
so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called
it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.
The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his
own wedding-guests and by Maggie's scarce less absorbed
entertainment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together
in Portland Place; whom she had not, as wouldn't have been
convenient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had
been present, with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at
tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts--he had never in his life,
it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating--whenever he had
looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a
minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he
had not seen even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even
Maggie, nothing was more natural than that he shouldn't have seen
Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of
the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase had sufficiently
enabled the girl to remind him--so ready she assumed him to be--
of what they were to do. Time pressed if they were to do it at
all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations had brought
wonders--how did they still have, where did they still find, such
treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet
even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn't be put
off. She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie,
he must remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the
minute so far as to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then
to risk bringing his reason out. The risk was because he might
hurt her--hurt her pride, if she had that particular sort. But
she might as well be hurt one way as another; and, besides, that
particular sort of pride was just what she hadn't. So his slight
resistance, while they lingered, had been just easy enough not to
be impossible.
"I hate to encourage you--and for such a purpose, after all--to
spend your money."
She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked
up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed
with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was
mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. "Because
you think I must have so little? I've enough, at any rate--enough
for us to take our hour. Enough," she had smiled, "is as good as
a feast! And then," she had said, "it isn't of course a question
of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it
isn't a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in
the way of the priceless, hasn't she got? Mine is to be the
offering of the poor--something, precisely, that--no rich person
COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy
it, she would therefore never have." Charlotte had spoken as if
after so much thought. "Only, as it can't be fine, it ought to be
funny--and that's the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in
London, besides, is amusing in itself."
He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. "'Funny'?"
"Oh, I don't mean a comic toy--I mean some little thing with a
charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That's
what I call funny," she had explained. "You used," she had also
added, "to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid
for beating down. I have them all still, I needn't say--the
little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in
August."
"Ah, but I don't understand your English buying, and I confess I
find it dull." So much as that, while they turned to go up
together, he had objected. "I understood my poor dear Romans."
"It was they who understood you--that was your pull," she had
laughed. "Our amusement here is just that they don't understand
us. We can make it amusing. You'll see."
If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted.
"The amusement surely will be to find our present."
"Certainly--as I say."
"Well, if they don't come down--?"
"Then we'll come up. There's always something to be done.
Besides, Prince," she had gone on, "I'm not, if you come to that,
absolutely a pauper. I'm too poor for some things," she had
said--yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; "but I'm not too
poor for others." And she had paused again at the top. "I've been
saving up."