“Sure enough. But it doesn’t matter.” He waited an instant; then looking up through the fumes of his smoke, “She’s stupid,” he abruptly opined.
“O—oh!” Maggie protested in a long wail.
It had made him in fact quickly change colour. “What I mean is that she’s not, as you pronounce her, unhappy.” And he recovered, with this, all his logic. “Why is she unhappy if she doesn’t know?”
“Doesn’t know—?” She tried to make his logic difficult.
“Doesn’t know that YOU know.”
It came from him in such a way that she was conscious, instantly, of three or four things to answer. But what she said first was: “Do you think that’s all it need take?” And before he could reply, “She knows, she knows!” Maggie proclaimed.
“Well then, what?”
But she threw back her head, she turned impatiently away from him. “Oh, I needn’t tell you! She knows enough. Besides,” she went on, “she doesn’t believe us.”
It made the Prince stare a little. “Ah, she asks too much!” That drew, however, from his wife another moan of objection, which determined in him a judgment. “She won’t let you take her for unhappy.”
“Oh, I know better than any one else what she won’t let me take her for!”