“Well, say also of a lost time.”
The girl considered. “Then if it’s so precious, how comes it to be cheap?”
Her interlocutor once more hung fire, but by this time the Prince had lost patience. “I’ll wait for you out in the air,” he said to his companion, and, though he spoke without irritation, he pointed his remark by passing immediately into the street, where, during the next minutes, the others saw him, his back to the shopwindow, philosophically enough hover and light a fresh cigarette. Charlotte even took, a little, her time; she was aware of his funny Italian taste for London street-life.
Her host meanwhile, at any rate, answered her question. “Ah, I’ve had it a long time without selling it. I think I must have been keeping it, madam, for you.”
“You’ve kept it for me because you’ve thought I mightn’t see what’s the matter with it?”
He only continued to face her—he only continued to appear to follow the play of her mind. “What IS the matter with it?”
“Oh, it’s not for me to say; it’s for you honestly to tell me. Of course I know something must be.”
“But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?”
“I probably SHOULD find out as soon as I had paid for it.”
“Not,” her host lucidly insisted, “if you hadn’t paid too much.”
“What do you call,” she asked, “little enough?”
“Well, what should you say to fifteen pounds?”
“I should say,” said Charlotte with the utmost promptitude, “that it’s altogether too much.”
The dealer shook his head slowly and sadly, but firmly. “It’s my price, madam—and if you admire the thing I think it really might be yours. It’s not too much. It’s too little. It’s almost nothing. I can’t go lower.”
Charlotte, wondering, but resisting, bent over the bowl again. “Then it’s impossible. It’s more than I can afford.”
“Ah,” the man returned, “one can sometimes afford for a present more than one can afford for one’s self.” He said it so coaxingly that she found herself going on without, as might be said, putting him in his place. “Oh, of course it would be only for a present—!”
“Then it would be a lovely one.”
“Does one make a present,” she asked, “of an object that contains, to one’s knowledge, a flaw?”
“Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith,” the man smiled, “is always there.”
“And leave the person to whom one gives the thing, you mean, to discover it?”
“He wouldn’t discover it—if you’re speaking of a gentleman.”
“I’m not speaking of anyone in particular,” Charlotte said.
“Well, whoever it might be. He might know—and he might try. But he wouldn’t find.”
She kept her eyes on him as if, though unsatisfied, mystified, she yet had a fancy for the bowl. “Not even if the thing should come to pieces?” And then as he was silent: “Not even if he should have to say to me ‘The Golden Bowl is broken’?”
He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile. “Ah, if anyone should WANT to smash it—!”
She laughed; she almost admired the little man’s expression. “You mean one could smash it with a hammer?”
“Yes; if nothing else would do. Or perhaps even by dashing it with violence—say upon a marble floor.”
“Oh, marble floors!” But she might have been thinking—for they were a connection, marble floors; a connection with many things: with her old Rome, and with his; with the palaces of his past, and, a little, of hers; with the possibilities of his future, with the sumptuosities of his marriage, with the wealth of the Ververs. All the same, however, there were other things; and they all together held for a moment her fancy. “Does crystal then break—when it IS crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness.”
Her friend, in his way, discriminated. “Its beauty is its BEING crystal. But its hardness is certainly, its safety. It doesn’t break,” he went on, “like vile glass. It splits—if there is a split.”
“Ah!”—Charlotte breathed with interest. “If there is a split.” And she looked down again at the bowl. “There IS a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?”
“On lines and by laws of its own.”
“You mean if there’s a weak place?”
For all answer, after an hesitation, he took the bowl up again, holding it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the finest, sweetest sound. “Where is the weak place?”
She then did the question justice. “Well, for ME, only the price. I’m poor, you see—very poor. But I thank you and I’ll think.” The Prince, on the other side of the shop-window, had finally faced about and, as to see if she hadn’t done, was trying to reach, with his eyes, the comparatively dim interior. “I like it,” she said—“I want it. But I must decide what I can do.”
The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself. “Well, I’ll keep it for you.”
The small quarter-of-an-hour had had its marked oddity—this she felt even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury aspects had again, in their protest against the truth of her gathered impression, made her more or less their own. Yet the oddity might have been registered as small as compared to the other effect that, before they had gone much further, she had, with her companion, to take account of. This latter was simply the effect of their having, by some tacit logic, some queer inevitability, quite dropped the idea of a continued pursuit. They didn’t say so, but it was on the line of giving up Maggie’s present that they practically proceeded—the line of giving it up without more reference to it. The Prince’s first reference was in fact quite independently made. “I hope you satisfied yourself, before you had done, of what was the matter with that bowl.”
“No indeed, I satisfied myself of nothing. Of nothing at least but that the more I looked at it the more I liked it, and that if you weren’t so unaccommodating this would be just the occasion for your giving me the pleasure of accepting it.”
He looked graver for her, at this, than he had looked all the morning. “Do you propose it seriously—without wishing to play me a trick?”
She wondered. “What trick would it be?”
He looked at her harder. “You mean you really don’t know?”
“But know what?”
“Why, what’s the matter with it. You didn’t see, all the while?”
She only continued, however, to stare. “How could you see—out in the street?”
“I saw before I went out. It was because I saw that I did go out. I didn’t want to have another scene with you, before that rascal, and I judged you would presently guess for yourself.”
“Is he a rascal?” Charlotte asked. “His price is so moderate.” She waited but a moment. “Five pounds. Really so little.”
“Five pounds?”
He continued to look at her. “Five pounds.”
He might have been doubting her word, but he was only, it appeared, gathering