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 be repeated. “There are too many things,” she nevertheless added. “He’s too great.”
The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed: “Too great for whom?” Upon which as she hesitated, “Not, my dear, too great for you,” he declared. “For me—oh, as much as you like.”
“Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it,” Maggie said. “That’s enough.”
He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had uttered other words. “What’s of importance is that you’re his daughter. That at least we’ve got. And I suppose that, if I may say nothing else, I may say at least that I value it.”
“Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it.”
This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking connection. “She ought to have known you. That’s what’s present to me. She ought to have understood you better.”