“That’s not encouraging then to me, is it?” the Prince went on.
“Do you mean because you’re going?”
“Oh yes, of course we’re going. I’ve wanted immensely to go.” She hesitated. “But now?—immediately?”
“In a month or two—it seems to be the new idea.” On which there was something in her face—as he imagined—that made him say: “Didn’t Maggie write to you?”
“Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you must stay”—Charlotte was easily clear—“as long as possible.”
“Is that what you did?” he laughed. “You stayed as long as possible?”
“Well, it seemed to me so—but I hadn’t ‘interests.’ You’ll have them—on a great scale. It’s the country for interests,” said Charlotte. “If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn’t have left it.”
He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. “Yours then are rather here?”
“Oh, mine!”—the girl smiled. “They take up little room, wherever they are.”
It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow did for her—it determined in him a speech that would have seemed a few minutes before precarious and in questionable taste. The lead she had given him made the difference, and he felt it as really a lift on finding an honest and natural word rise, by its license, to his lips. Nothing surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high bravery. “I’ve been thinking it all the while so probable, you know, that you would have seen your way to marrying.”