“Ah, that as much as you please!”
Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next moment determined in her friend a fresh reaction. “You think, both of you, so abysmally and yet so quietly. But it’s what will have saved you.”
“Oh,” Maggie returned, “it’s what—from the moment they discovered we could think at all—will have saved THEM. For they’re the ones who are saved,” she went on. “We’re the ones who are lost.”
“Lost—?”
“Lost to each other—father and I.” And then as her friend appeared to demur, “Oh yes,” Maggie quite lucidly declared, “lost to each other much more, really, than Amerigo and Charlotte are; since for them it’s just, it’s right, it’s deserved, while for us it’s only sad and strange and not caused by our fault. But I don’t know,” she went on, “why I talk about myself, for it’s on father it really comes. I let him go,” said Maggie.
“You let him, but you don’t make him.”
“I take it from him,” she answered.
“But what else can you do?”
“I take it from him,” the Princess repeated. “I do what I knew from the first I SHOULD do. I get off by giving him up.”
“But if he gives you?” Mrs. Assingham presumed to object. “Doesn’t it moreover then,” she asked, “complete the very purpose with which he married—that of making you and leaving you more free?”