for you."

"An alternative to what?"

"Well, to your simply missing what you've lost--without anything being
done about it."

"But what HAVE I lost?"

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she
more and more saw it. "Well, whatever it was that, BEFORE, kept us from
thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It
was as if you couldn't be in the market when you were married to me. Or
rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now
that I'm married to some one else you're, as in consequence, married to
nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People
don't see why you shouldn't be married to THEM."

"Isn't it enough of a reason," he mildly inquired, "that I don't want to
be?"

"It's enough of a reason, yes. But to BE enough of a reason it has to be
too much of a trouble. I mean FOR you. It has to be too much of a fight.
You ask me what you've lost," Maggie continued to explain. "The not
having to take the trouble and to make the fight--that's what you've
lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were--because I
was just as _I_ was--that's what you miss."

"So that you think," her father presently said, "that I had better get
married just in order to be as I was before?"

The detached tone of it--detached as if innocently to amuse her by
showing his desire to accommodate--was so far successful as to draw from
her gravity a short, light laugh. "Well, what I don't want you to feel
is that if you were to I shouldn't understand. I SHOULD understand.
That's all," said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. "You don't go so far as to wish
me to take somebody I don't like?"

"Ah, father," she sighed, "you know how far I go--how far I COULD go.
But I only wish that if you ever SHOULD like anybody, you may never
doubt of my feeling how I've brought you to it. You'll always know that
I know that it's my fault."

"You mean," he went on in his contemplative way, "that it will be you
who'll take the consequences?"

Maggie just considered. "I'll leave you all the good ones, but I'll take
the bad."

"Well, that's handsome." He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her
closer and holding her more tenderly. "It's about all I could expect of
you. So far as you've wronged me, therefore, we'll call it square. I'll
let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up.
But am I to un