BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS (continued 3)

Maggie looked at her with wide eyes. “I had much rather you should denounce me than denounce them. Denounce me, denounce me,” she said, “if you can see your way.” It was exactly what she appeared to have argued out with herself. “If, conscientiously, you can denounce me; if, conscientiously, you can revile me; if, conscientiously, you can put me in my place for a low-minded little pig—!”

“Well?” said Mrs. Assingham, consideringly, as she paused for emphasis.

“I think I shall be saved.”

Her friend took it, for a minute, however, by carrying thoughtful eyes, eyes verily portentous, over her head. “You say you’ve no one to speak to, and you make a point of your having so disguised your feelings—not having, as you call it, given yourself away. Have you then never seen it not only as your right, but as your bounden duty, worked up to such a pitch, to speak to your husband?”

“I’ve spoken to him,” said Maggie.

Mrs. Assingham stared. “Ah, then it isn’t true that you’ve made no sign.”

Maggie had a silence. “I’ve made no trouble. I’ve made no scene. I’ve taken no stand. I’ve neither reproached nor accused him. You’ll say there’s a way in all that of being nasty enough.”

“Oh!” dropped from Fanny as if she couldn’t help it.

“But I don’t think—strangely enough—that he regards me as nasty. I think that at bottom—for that IS,” said the Princess, “the strangeness—he’s sorry for me. Yes, I think that, deep within, he pities me.”

Her companion wondered. “For the state you’ve let yourself get into?”

“For not being happy when I’ve so much to make me so.”

“You’ve everything,” said Mrs. Assingham with alacrity. Yet she remained for an instant embarrassed as to a further advance. “I don’t understand, however, how, if you’ve done nothing—”

An impatience from Maggie had checked her. “I’ve not done absolutely ‘nothing.’”

“But what then—?”

“Well,” she went on after a minute, “he knows what I’ve done.”

It produced on Mrs. Assingham’s part, her whole tone and manner exquisitely aiding, a hush not less prolonged, and the very duration of which inevitably gave it something of the character of an equal recognition. “And what then has HE done?”

Maggie took again a minute. “He has been splendid.”

“‘Splendid’? Then what more do you want?”

“Ah, what you see!” said Maggie. “Not to be afraid.”

It made her guest again hang fire. “Not to be afraid really to speak?”

“Not to be afraid NOT to speak.”

Mrs. Assingham considered further. “You can’t even to Charlotte?” But as, at this, after a look at her, Maggie turned off with a movement of suppressed despair, she checked herself and might have been watching her, for all the difficulty and the pity of it, vaguely moving to the window and the view of the hill street. It was almost as if she had had to give up, from failure of responsive wit in her friend—the last failure she had feared—the hope of the particular relief she had been working for. Mrs. Assingham resumed the next instant, however, in the very tone that seemed most to promise her she should have to give up nothing. “I see, I see; you would have in that case too many things to consider.” It brought the Princess round again, proving itself thus the note of comprehension she wished most to clutch at. “Don’t be afraid.”

Maggie took it where she stood—which she was soon able to signify. “Thank-you.”

It very properly encouraged her counsellor. “What your idea imputes is a criminal intrigue carried on, from day to day, amid perfect trust and sympathy, not only under your eyes, but under your father’s. That’s an idea it’s impossible for me for a. moment to entertain.”

“Ah, there you are then! It’s exactly what I wanted from you.”

“You’re welcome to it!” Mrs. Assingham breathed.

“You never HAVE entertained it?” Maggie pursued.

“Never for an instant,” said Fanny with her head very high.

Maggie took it again, yet again as wanting more. “Pardon my being so horrid. But by all you hold sacred?”

Mrs. Assingham faced her. “Ah, my dear, upon my positive word as an honest woman.”

“Thank-you then,” said the Princess.

So they remained a little; after which, “But do you believe it, love?” Fanny inquired.

“I believe YOU.”

“Well, as I’ve faith in THEM, it comes to the same thing.”

Maggie, at this last, appeared for a moment to think again; but she embraced the proposition. “The same thing.”

“Then you’re no longer unhappy?” her guest urged, coming more gaily toward her.

“I doubtless shan’t be a great while.”

But it was now Mrs. Assingham’s turn to want more. “I’ve convinced you it’s impossible?”

She had held out her arms, and Maggie, after a moment, meeting her, threw herself into them with a sound that had its oddity as a sign of relief. “Impossible, impossible,” she emphatically, more than emphatically, replied; yet the next minute she had burst into tears over the impossibility, and a few seconds later, pressing, clinging, sobbing, had even caused them to flow, audibly, sympathetically and perversely, from her friend.

The understanding appeared to have come to be that the Colonel and his wife were to present themselves toward the middle of July for the “good long visit” at Fawns on which Maggie had obtained from her father that he should genially insist; as well as that the couple from Eaton Square should welcome there earlier in the month, and less than a week after their own arrival, the advent of the couple from Portland Place. “Oh, we shall give you time to breathe!” Fanny remarked, in reference to the general prospect, with a gaiety that announced itself as heedless of criticism, to each member of the party in turn; sustaining and bracing herself by her emphasis, pushed even to an amiable cynicism, of the confident view of these punctualities of the Assinghams. The ground she could best occupy, to her sense, was that of her being moved, as in this connexion she had always been moved, by the admitted grossness of her avidity, the way the hospitality of the Ververs met her convenience and ministered to her ease, destitute as the Colonel had kept her, from the first, of any rustic retreat, any leafy bower of her own, any fixed base for the stale season now at hand. She had explained at home, she had repeatedly reexplained, the terms of her dilemma, the real difficulty of her, or—as she now put it—of their position. When the pair could do nothing else, in Cadogan Place, they could still talk of marvellous little Maggie, and of the charm, the sinister charm, of their having to hold their breath to watch her; a topic the momentous midnight discussion at which we have been present was so far from having exhausted. It came up, irrepressibly, at all private hours; they had planted it there between them, and it grew, from day to day, in a manner to make their sense of responsibility almost yield to their sense of fascination. Mrs. Assingham declared at such moments that in the interest of this admirable young thing—to whom, she also declared, she had quite “come over”—she was ready to pass with all the world else, even with the Prince himself, the object, inconsequently, as well, of her continued, her explicitly shameless appreciation, for a vulgar, indelicate, pestilential woman, showing her true character in an abandoned old age. The Colonel’s confessed attention had been enlisted, we have seen, as never yet, under pressure from his wife, by any guaranteed imbroglio; but this, she could assure him she perfectly knew, was not a bit because he was sorry for her, or touched by what she had let herself in for, but because, when once they had been opened, he couldn’t keep his eyes from resting complacently, resting almost intelligently, on the Princess. If he was in love with HER now, however, so much the better; it would help them both not to wince at what they would have to do for her. Mrs. Assingham had come back to that, whenever he groaned or grunted; she had at no beguiled moment—since Maggie’s little march WAS positively beguiling—let him lose sight of the grim necessity awaiting them. “We shall have, as I’ve again and again told you, to lie for her—to lie till we’re black in the face.”

“To lie ‘for’ her?” The Colonel often, at these hours, as from a vague vision of old chivalry in a new form, wandered into apparent lapses from lucidity.

“To lie TO her, up and down, and in and out—it comes to the same thing. It will consist just as much of lying to the others too: to the Prince about one’s belief in HIM; to Charlotte about one’s belief in HER; to Mr. Verver, dear sweet man, about one’s belief in everyone. So we’ve work cut out—with the biggest lie, on top of all, being that we LIKE to be there for such a purpose. We hate it unspeakably—I’m more ready to be a coward before it, to let the whole thing, to let everyone, selfishly and pusillanimously slide, than before any social duty, any felt human call, that has ever forced me to be decent. I speak at least for myself. For you,” she had added, “as I’ve given you so perfect an opportunity to fall in love with Maggie, you’ll doubtless find your account in being so much nearer to her.”

“And what do you make,” the Colonel could, at this, always imperturbably enough ask, “of the account you yourself will find in being so much nearer to the Prince; of your confirmed, if not exasperated, infatuation with whom—to say nothing of my weak good-nature about it—you give such a pretty picture?”

To the picture in question she had been always, in fact, able contemplatively to return. “The difficulty of my enjoyment of that is, don’t you see? that I’m making, in my loyalty to Maggie, a sad hash of his affection for me.”

“You find means to call it then, this whitewashing of his crime, being ‘loyal’ to Maggie?”

“Oh, about that particular crime there is always much to say. It is always more interesting to us than any other crime; it has at least that for it. But of course I call everything I have in mind at all being loyal to Maggie. Being loyal to her is, more than anything else, helping her with her father—which is what she most wants and needs.”

The Colonel had had it before, but he could apparently never have too much of it. “Helping her ‘with’ him—?”

“Helping her against him then. Against what we’ve already so fully talked of—its having to be recognised between them that he doubts. That’s where my part is so plain—to see her through, to see her through to the end.” Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham’s reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the next instant, to qualify her view of it. “When I talk of my obligation as clear I mean that it’s absolute; for just HOW, from day to day and through thick and thin, to keep the thing up is, I grant you, another matter. There’s one way, luckily, nevertheless, in which I’m strong. I can perfectly count on her.”

The Colonel seldom failed here, as from the insidious growth of an excitement, to wonder, to encourage. “Not to see you’re lying?”

“To stick to me fast, whatever she sees. If I stick to her—that is to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them ALL—she’ll stand by me to the death. She won’t give me away. For, you know, she easily can.”

This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. “Easily?”

“She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that I was aware, at the time of his marriage—as I had been aware at the time of her own—of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife and her husband.”

“And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she is herself in ignorance of your knowledge?”

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to say that about this, exactly, she proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity, something quite other: it could give itself a little the air, still, of a triumph over his coarseness. “By acting, immediately with the blind resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred would act; and by so making Mr. Verver, in turn, act with the same natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred. They’ve only to agree about me,” the poor lady said; “they’ve only to feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured; they’ve only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it’s I who have been, and who continue to be, cheated—cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but they’re not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either of us the benefit of anything. They’ll be within their rights to lump us all together as a false, cruel, conspiring crew, and, if they can find the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch.”

This, on each occasion, put the matter so at the worst that repetition even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed, invariably, the sense of making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his almost turning pale, when their eyes met, at this possibility of their compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man. “Conspiring—so far as YOU were concerned—to what end?”

“Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife—at Maggie’s expense. And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr. Verver’s.”

“Of rendering friendly services, yes—which have produced, as it turns out, complications. But from the moment you didn’t do it FOR the complications, why shouldn’t you have rendered them?”

It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connexion, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the “worst,” speak for herself. Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way. “Oh, isn’t what I may have meddled ‘for’—so far as it can be proved I did meddle—open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s? Mayn’t they see my motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?” She positively liked to keep it up. “Mayn’t they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to ‘place’ him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? Mayn’t it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain between us—something quite unholy and louche?”

It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo. “‘Louche,’ love—?”

“Why, haven’t you said as much yourself?—haven’t you put your finger on that awful possibility?”

She had a way now, with his felicities, that made him enjoy being reminded of them. “In speaking of your having always had such a ‘mash’—?”

“Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly at his ease. A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it only as likely to have been—but we’re not talking, of course, about impartial looks. We’re talking of good innocent people deeply worked upon by a horrid discovery, and going much further, in their view of the lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider awake, all round, from the first. What I was to have got from my friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for him—well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to myself, for me shrewdly to consider.” And she easily lost herself, each time, in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture. “It would have been seen, it would have been heard of, before, the case of the woman a man doesn’t want, or of whom he’s tired, or for whom he has no use but SUCH uses, and who is capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all. Cela s’est vu, my dear; and stranger things still—as I needn’t tell YOU! Very good then,” she wound up; “there is a perfectly possible conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, there’s no imagination so lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are blases, are brought up, from the first, to prowling and mauling. It does give us, you’ll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily, however, in what I finally do think.”

He was well enough aware, by this time, of what she finally did think; but he was not without a sense, again, also for his amusement by the way. It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly because he knows what is next to happen. “What of course will pull them up, if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume, is the profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver’s marriage. You weren’t at least in love with Charlotte.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, “my hand in that is easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to HIM.”

“To Mr. Verver?”

“To the Prince—by preventing her in that way from taking, as he was in danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he wouldn’t be able to open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law. I’ve brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man.”

“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?”

“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress.” She brought it out grandly—it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly, for her husband’s, its effect. “The facilities in the case, thanks to the particular conditions, being so quite ideal.”

“Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little—from your own point of view—as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of TWO beautiful women.”

“Down even to THAT—to the monstrosity of my folly. But not,” Mrs. Assingham added, “‘two’ of anything. One beautiful woman—and one beautiful fortune. That’s what a creature of pure virtue exposes herself to when she suffers her pure virtue, suffers her sympathy, her disinterestedness, her exquisite sense for the lives of others, to carry her too far. Voila.”

“I see. It’s the way the Ververs have you.”

“It’s the way the Ververs ‘have’ me. It’s in other words the way they would be able to make such a show to each other of having me—if Maggie weren’t so divine.”

“She lets you off?” He never failed to insist on all this to the very end; which was how he had become so versed in what she finally thought.

“She lets me off. So that now, horrified and contrite at what I’ve done, I may work to help her out. And Mr. Verver,” she was fond of adding, “lets me off too.”

“Then you do believe he knows?”

It determined in her always, there, with a significant pause, a deep immersion in her thought. “I believe he would let me off if he did know—so that I might work to help HIM out. Or rather, really,” she went on, “that I might work to help Maggie. That would be his motive, that would be his condition, in forgiving me; just as hers, for me, in fact, her motive and her condition, are my acting to spare her father. But it’s with Maggie only that I’m directly concerned; nothing, ever—not a breath, not a look, I’ll guarantee—shall I have, whatever happens, from Mr. Verver himself. So it is, therefore, that I shall probably, by the closest possible shave, escape the penalty of my crimes.”

“You mean being held responsible.”

“I mean being held responsible. My advantage will be that Maggie’s such a trump.”

“Such a trump that, as you say, she’ll stick to you.”

“Stick to me, on our understanding—stick to me. For our understanding’s signed and sealed.” And to brood over it again was ever, for Mrs. Assingham, to break out again with exaltation. “It’s a grand, high compact. She has solemnly promised.”

“But in words—?”

“Oh yes, in words enough—since it’s a matter of words. To keep up HER lie so long as I keep up mine.”

“And what do you call ‘her’ lie?”

“Why, the pretence that she believes me. Believes they’re innocent.”

“She positively believes then they’re guilty? She has arrived at that, she’s really content with it, in the absence of proof?” It was here, each time, that Fanny Assingham most faltered; but always at last to get the matter, for her own sense, and with a long sigh, sufficiently straight. “It isn’t a question of belief or of proof, absent or present; it’s inevitably, with her, a question of natural perception, of insurmountable feeling. She irresistibly knows that there’s something between them. But she hasn’t ‘arrived’ at it, as you say, at all; that’s exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do. She stands off and off, so as not to arrive; she keeps out to sea and away from the rocks, and what she most wants of me is to keep at a safe distance with her—as I, for my own skin, only ask not to come nearer.” After which, invariably, she let him have it all. “So far from wanting proof—which she must get, in a manner, by my siding with her—she wants DISproof, as against herself, and has appealed to me, so extraordinarily, to side against her. It’s really magnificent, when you come to think of it, the spirit of her appeal. If I’ll but cover them up brazenly enough, the others, so as to show, round and about them, as happy as a bird, she on her side will do what she can. If I’ll keep them quiet, in a word, it will enable her to gain time—time as against any idea of her father’s—and so, somehow, come out. If I’ll take care of Charlotte, in particular, she’ll take care of the Prince; and it’s beautiful and wonderful, really pathetic and exquisite, to see what she feels that time may do for her.”

“Ah, but what does she call, poor little thing, ‘time’?”

“Well, this summer at Fawns, to begin with. She can live as yet, of course, but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself, I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. THERE the lovers—if they ARE lovers!—will have to mind. They’ll feel it for themselves, unless things are too utterly far gone with them.”

“And things are NOT too utterly far gone with them?”

She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as, for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article, she would have put down her last shilling. “No.”

It made him always grin at her. “Is THAT a lie?”

“Do you think you’re worth lying to? If it weren’t the truth, for me,” she added, “I wouldn’t have accepted for Fawns. I CAN, I believe, keep the wretches quiet.”

“But how—at the worst?”

“Oh, ‘the worst’—don’t talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work, from week to week, of itself. You’ll see.”

He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide—! “Yet if it doesn’t work?”

“Ah, that’s talking about the worst!”

Well, it might be; but what were they doing, from morning to night, at this crisis, but talk? “Who’ll keep the others?”

“The others—?”

“Who’ll keep THEM quiet? If your couple have had a life together, they can’t have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about them. They’ve had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they’ve had to arrange; for if they haven’t met, and haven’t arranged, and haven’t thereby, in some quarter or other, had to give themselves away, why are we piling it up so? Therefore if there’s evidence, up and down London—”

“There must be people in possession of it? Ah, it isn’t all,” she always remembered, “up and down London. Some of it must connect them—I mean,” she musingly added, “it naturally WOULD—with other places; with who knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But whatever there may have been, it will also all have been buried on the spot. Oh, they’ve known HOW—too beautifully! But nothing, all the same, is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself.”

“Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have been so squared?” And then inveterately, before she could say—he enjoyed so much coming to this: “What will have squared Lady Castledean?”

“The consciousness”—she had never lost her promptness—“of having no stones to throw at any one else’s windows. She has enough to do to guard her own glass. That was what she was doing,” Fanny said, “that last morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be helped—if it wasn’t perhaps, rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint, that HE might be. They put in together, therefore, of course, that day; they got it clear—and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they didn’t become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening.” On this historic circumstance Mrs. Assingham was always ready afresh to brood; but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add “Only we know nothing whatever else—for which all our stars be thanked!”

The Colonel’s gratitude was apt to be less marked. “What did they do for themselves, all the same, from the moment they got that free hand to the moment (long after dinner-time, haven’t you told me?) of their turning up at their respective homes?”

“Well, it’s none of your business!”

“I don’t speak of it as mine, but it’s only too much theirs. People are always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something, sooner or later, happens; somebody, sooner or later, breaks the holy calm. Murder will out.”

“Murder will—but this isn’t murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I verily believe,” she had her moments of adding, “that, for the amusement of the row, you would prefer an explosion.”

This, however, was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up, for the most part, after a long, contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. “What I can’t for my life make out is your idea of the old boy.”

“Charlotte’s too inconceivably funny husband? I HAVE no idea.”

“I beg your pardon—you’ve just shown it. You never speak of him but as too inconceivably funny.”

“Well, he is,” she always confessed. “That is he may be, for all I know, too inconceivably great. But that’s not an idea. It represents only my weak necessity of feeling that he’s beyond me—which isn’t an idea either. You see he MAY be stupid too.”

“Precisely—there you are.”

“Yet on the other hand,” she always went on, “he MAY be sublime: sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But we shall never know.” With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she didn’t yearningly welcome. “THAT I can see.”

“Oh, I say—!” It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.

“I’m not sure, even, that Charlotte will.”

“Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn’t know—!”

But she brooded and brooded. “I’m not sure even that the Prince will.” It seemed privation, in short, for them all. “They’ll be mystified, confounded, tormented. But they won’t know—and all their possible putting their heads together won’t make them. That,” said Fanny Assingham, “will be their punishment.” And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch. “It will probably also—if I get off with so little—be mine.”

“And what,” her husband liked to ask, “will be mine?”

“Nothing—you’re not worthy of any. One’s punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we SHALL feel.” She was splendid with her “ours”; she flared up with this prophecy. “It will be Maggie herself who will mete it out.”

“Maggie—?”

“SHE’LL know—about her father; everything. Everything,” she repeated. On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. “But she’ll never tell us.”

If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her good friend or to any one else, more than she meant about her father, she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer. This was because of the odd element of the unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto. She was used, herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone with them. She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him as alone with Charlotte—and this, strangely enough, even while fixing her sense to the full on his wife’s power of preserving, quite of enhancing, every felicitous appearance. Charlotte had done that—under immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed—during the numerous months of their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs. Verver’s stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit. It was the present so much briefer interval, in a situation, possibly in a relation, so changed—it was the new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte’s art. The Princess could pull herself up, repeatedly, by remembering that the real “relation” between her father and his wife was a thing that she knew nothing about and that, in strictness, was none of her business; but she none the less failed to keep quiet, as she would have called it, before the projected image of their ostensibly happy isolation. Nothing could have had less of the quality of quietude than a certain queer wish that fitfully flickered up in her, a wish that usurped, perversely, the place of a much more natural one. If Charlotte, while she was about it, could only have been WORSE!—that idea Maggie fell to invoking instead of the idea that she might desirably have been better. For, exceedingly odd as it was to feel in such ways, she believed she mightn’t have worried so much if she didn’t somehow make her stepmother out, under the beautiful trees and among the dear old gardens, as lavish of fifty kinds of confidence and twenty kinds, at least, of gentleness. Gentleness and confidence were certainly the right thing, as from a charming woman to her husband, but the fine tissue of reassurance woven by this lady’s hands and flung over her companion as a light, muffling veil, formed precisely a wrought transparency through which she felt her father’s eyes continually rest on herself. The reach of his gaze came to her straighter from a distance; it showed him as still more conscious, down there alone, of the suspected, the felt elaboration of the process of their not alarming or hurting him. She had herself now, for weeks and weeks, and all unwinkingly, traced the extension of this pious effort; but her perfect success in giving no sign—she did herself THAT credit—would have been an achievement quite wasted if Mrs. Verver should make with him those mistakes of proportion, one set of them too abruptly, too incoherently designed to correct another set, that she had made with his daughter. However, if she HAD been worse, poor woman, who should say that her husband would, to a certainty, have been better?

One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry which would tend, by his calculation, to brush private criticism from its last perching-place. The truth was, in this connection, that she had different sorts of terrors, and there were hours when it came to her that these days were a prolonged repetition of that night-drive, of weeks before, from the other house to their own, when he had tried to charm her, by his sovereign personal power, into some collapse that would commit her to a repudiation of consistency. She was never alone with him, it was to be said, without her having sooner or later to ask herself what had already become of her consistency; yet, at the same time, so long as she breathed no charge, she kept hold of a remnant of appearance that could save her from attack. Attack, real attack, from him, as he would conduct it was what she above all dreaded; she was so far from sure that under that experience she mightn’t drop into some depth of weakness, mightn’t show him some shortest way with her that he would know how to use again. Therefore, since she had given him, as yet, no moment’s pretext for pretending to her that she had either lost faith or suffered by a feather’s weight in happiness, she left him, it was easy to reason, with an immense advantage for all waiting and all tension. She wished him, for the present, to “make up” to her for nothing. Who could say to what making-up might lead, into what consenting or pretending or destroying blindness it might plunge her? She loved him too helplessly, still, to dare to open the door, by an inch, to his treating her as if either of them had wronged the other. Something or somebody—and who, at this, which of them all?—would inevitably, would in the gust of momentary selfishness, be sacrificed to that; whereas what she intelligently needed was to know where she was going. Knowledge, knowledge, was a fascination as well as a fear; and a part, precisely, of the strangeness of this juncture was the way her apprehension that he would break out to her with some merely general profession was mixed with her dire need to forgive him, to reassure him, to respond to him, on no ground that she didn’t fully measure. To do these things it must be clear to her what they were FOR; but to act in that light was, by the same effect, to learn, horribly, what the other things had been. He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of ANY beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, her hand-to-mouth success, accordingly, was in his neither perceiving nor divining this, thanks to such means as she could take to prevent him; take, literally from hour to hour, during these days of more unbroken exposure. From hour to hour she fairly expected some sign of his having decided on a jump. “Ah yes, it HAS been as you think; I’ve strayed away, I’ve fancied myself free, given myself in other quantities, with larger generosities, because I thought you were different—different from what I now see. But it was only, only, because I didn’t know—and you must admit that you gave me scarce reason enough. Reason enough, I mean, to keep clear of my mistake; to which I confess, for which I’ll do exquisite penance, which you can help me now, I too beautifully feel, to get completely over.”

That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender. She was keeping her head, for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her keeping the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her greatest danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of the thought that, if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention to her couldn’t help being a sense of the growth of her importance. Taking the measure, with him, as she had taken it with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was NOT, all the same, important. A single touch from him—oh, she should know it in case of its coming!—any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act, other than abjectly, for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn’t keep it up forever; so that, really, one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out, in thought, to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn’t look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle. To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness—to see him at all, in short, brave a name that would represent him as in opposition— was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm. Should he guess they were having, in their so occult manner, a HIGH fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high—in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.

The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation, in him, there, would inevitably find some of its directness diverted. This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father’s placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention. Besides which there would be always Charlotte herself to draw him off. Charlotte would help him again, doubtless, to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic; but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute, in its degree, to protect the secret of her own fermentation. It is not even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince’s spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver’s too perfect competence. What it would most come to, after all, she said to herself, was a renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch her. Very well, then: with the elements after all so mixed in him, how long would he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act? For she had by this time made up her mind that in Charlotte’s company he deferred to Charlotte’s easier art of mounting guard. Wouldn’t he get tired—to put it only at that—of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? Maggie had gone far, truly for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she was not incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her chickens before they were hatched. How sure she should have to be of so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo’s expression and a logic in his weariness!

One of her dissimulated arts for meeting their tension, meanwhile, was to interweave Mrs. Assingham as plausibly as possible with the undulations of their surface, to bring it about that she should join them, of an afternoon, when they drove together or if they went to look at things—looking at things being almost as much a feature of their life as if they were bazaar-opening royalties. Then there were such combinations, later in the day, as her attendance on them, and the Colonel’s as well, for such whimsical matters as visits to the opera no matter who was singing, and sudden outbreaks of curiosity about the British drama. The good couple from Cadogan Place could always unprotestingly dine with them and “go on” afterwards to such publicities as the Princess cultivated the boldness of now perversely preferring. It may be said of her that, during these passages, she plucked her sensations by the way, detached, nervously, the small wild blossoms of her dim forest, so that she could smile over them at least with the spacious appearance, for her companions, for her husband above all, of bravely, of altogether frivolously, going a-maying. She had her intense, her smothered excitements, some of which were almost inspirations; she had in particular the extravagant, positively at moments the amused, sense of using her friend to the topmost notch, accompanied with the high luxury of not having to explain. Never, no never, should she have to explain to Fanny Assingham again—who, poor woman, on her own side, would be charged, it might be forever, with that privilege of the higher ingenuity. She put it all off on Fanny, and the dear thing herself might henceforth appraise the quantity. More and more magnificent now in her blameless egoism, Maggie asked no questions of her, and thus only signified the greatness of the opportunity she gave her. She didn’t care for what devotions, what dinners of their own the Assinghams might have been “booked”; that was a detail, and she could think without wincing of the ruptures and rearrangements to which her service condemned them. It all fell in beautifully, moreover; so that, as hard, at this time, in spite of her fever, as a little pointed diamond, the Princess showed something of the glitter of consciously possessing the constructive, the creative hand. She had but to have the fancy of presenting herself, of presenting her husband, in a certain high and convenient manner, to make it natural they should go about with their gentleman and their lady. To what else but this, exactly, had Charlotte, during so many weeks of the earlier season, worked her up?—herself assuming and discharging, so far as might be, the character and office of one of those revolving subordinate presences that float in the wake of greatness.

The precedent was therefore established and the group normally constituted. Mrs. Assingham, meanwhile, at table, on the stairs, in the carriage or the opera-box, might—with her constant overflow of expression, for that matter, and its singularly resident character where men in especial were concerned—look across at Amerigo in whatever sense she liked: it was not of that Maggie proposed to be afraid. She might warn him, she might rebuke him, she might reassure him, she might—if it were impossible not to—absolutely make love to him; even this was open to her, as a matter simply between them, if it would help her to answer for the impeccability he had guaranteed. And Maggie desired in fact only to strike her as acknowledging the efficacy of her aid when she mentioned to her one evening a small project for the morrow, privately entertained—the idea, irresistible, intense, of going to pay, at the Museum, a visit to Mr. Crichton. Mr. Crichton, as Mrs. Assingham could easily remember, was the most accomplished and obliging of public functionaries, whom every one knew and who knew every one—who had from the first, in particular, lent himself freely, and for the love of art and history, to becoming one of the steadier lights of Mr. Verver’s adventurous path. The custodian of one of the richest departments of the great national collection of precious things, he could feel for the sincere private collector and urge him on his way even when condemned to be present at his capture of trophies sacrificed by the country to parliamentary thrift. He carried his amiability to the point of saying that, since London, under pettifogging views, had to miss, from time to time, its rarest opportunities, he was almost consoled to see such lost causes invariably wander at last, one by one, with the tormenting tinkle of their silver bells, into the wondrous, the already famous fold beyond the Mississippi. There was a charm in his “almosts” that was not to be resisted, especially after Mr. Verver and Maggie had grown sure—or almost, again—of enjoying the monopoly of them; and on this basis of envy changed to sympathy by the more familiar view of the father and the daughter, Mr. Crichton had at both houses, though especially in Eaton Square, learned to fill out the responsive and suggestive character. It was at his invitation, Fanny well recalled, that Maggie, one day, long before, and under her own attendance precisely, had, for the glory of the name she bore, paid a visit to one of the ampler shrines of the supreme exhibitory temple, an alcove of shelves charged with the gold-and-brown, gold-and-ivory, of old Italian bindings and consecrated to the records of the Prince’s race. It had been an impression that penetrated, that remained; yet Maggie had sighed, ever so prettily, at its having to be so superficial. She was to go back some day, to dive deeper, to linger and taste; in spite of which, however, Mrs. Assingham could not recollect perceiving that the visit had been repeated. This second occasion had given way, for a long time, in her happy life, to other occasions—all testifying, in their degree, to the quality of her husband’s blood, its rich mixture and its many remarkable references; after which, no doubt, the charming piety involved had grown, on still further grounds, bewildered and faint.

It now appeared, none the less, that some renewed conversation with Mr. Crichton had breathed on the faintness revivingly, and Maggie mentioned her purpose as a conception of her very own, to the success of which she designed to devote her morning. Visits of gracious ladies, under his protection, lighted up rosily, for this perhaps most flower-loving and honey-sipping member of the great Bloomsbury hive, its packed passages and cells; and though not sworn of the province toward which his friend had found herself, according to her appeal to him, yearning again, nothing was easier for him than to put her in relation with the presiding urbanities. So it had been settled, Maggie said to Mrs. Assingham, and she was to dispense with Amerigo’s company. Fanny was to remember later on that she had at first taken this last fact for one of the finer notes of her young woman’s detachment, imagined she must be going alone because of the shade of irony that, in these ambiguous days, her husband’s personal presence might be felt to confer, practically, on any tribute to his transmitted significance. Then as, the next moment, she felt it clear that so much plotted freedom was virtually a refinement of reflection, an impulse to commemorate afresh whatever might still survive of pride and hope, her sense of ambiguity happily fell and she congratulated her companion on having anything so exquisite to do and on being so exquisitely in the humour to do it. After the occasion had come and gone she was confirmed in her optimism; she made out, in the evening, that the hour spent among the projected lights, the annals and illustrations, the parchments and portraits, the emblazoned volumes and the murmured commentary, had been for the Princess enlarging and inspiring. Maggie had said to her some days before, very sweetly but very firmly, “Invite us to dine, please, for Friday, and have any one you like or you can—it doesn’t in the least matter whom;” and the pair in Cadogan Place had bent to this mandate with a docility not in the least ruffled by all that it took for granted.

It provided for an evening—this had been Maggie’s view; and she lived up to her view, in her friend’s eyes, by treating the occasion, more or less explicitly, as new and strange. The good Assinghams had feasted in fact at the two other boards on a scale so disproportionate to the scant solicitations of their own that it was easy to make a joke of seeing how they fed at home, how they met, themselves, the question of giving to eat. Maggie dined with them, in short, and arrived at making her husband appear to dine, much in the manner of a pair of young sovereigns who have, in the frolic humour of the golden years of reigns, proposed themselves to a pair of faithfully-serving subjects. She showed an interest in their arrangements, an inquiring tenderness almost for their economies; so that her hostess not unnaturally, as they might have said, put it all down—the tone and the freedom of which she set the example—to the effect wrought in her afresh by one of the lessons learned, in the morning, at the altar of the past. Hadn’t she picked it up, from an anecdote or two offered again to her attention, that there were, for princesses of such a line, more ways than one of being a heroine? Maggie’s way to-night was to surprise them all, truly, by the extravagance of her affability. She was doubtless not positively boisterous; yet, though Mrs. Assingham, as a bland critic, had never doubted her being graceful, she had never seen her put so much of it into being what might have been called assertive. It was all a tune to which Fanny’s heart could privately palpitate: her guest was happy, happy as a consequence of something that had occurred, but she was making the Prince not lose a ripple of her laugh, though not perhaps always enabling him to find it absolutely not foolish. Foolish, in public, beyond a certain point, he was scarce the man to brook his wife’s being thought to be; so that there hovered before their friend the possibility of some subsequent scene between them, in the carriage or at home, of slightly sarcastic inquiry, of promptly invited explanation; a scene that, according as Maggie should play her part in it, might or might not precipitate developments. What made these appearances practically thrilling, meanwhile, was this mystery—a mystery, it was clear, to Amerigo himself—of the incident or the influence that had so peculiarly determined them.

The lady of Cadogan Place was to read deeper, however, within three days, and the page was turned for her on the eve of her young confidant’s leaving London. The awaited migration to Fawns was to take place on the morrow, and it was known meanwhile to Mrs. Assingham that their party of four were to dine that night, at the American Embassy, with another and a larger party; so that the elder woman had a sense of surprise on receiving from the younger, under date of six o’clock, a telegram requesting her immediate attendance. “Please come to me at once; dress early, if necessary, so that we shall have time: the carriage, ordered for us, will take you back first.” Mrs. Assingham, on quick deliberation, dressed, though not perhaps with full lucidity, and by seven o’clock was in Portland Place, where her friend, “upstairs” and described to her on her arrival as herself engaged in dressing, instantly received her. She knew on the spot, poor Fanny, as she was afterwards to declare to the Colonel, that her feared crisis had popped up as at the touch of a spring, that her impossible hour was before her. Her impossible hour was the hour of its coming out that she had known of old so much more than she had ever said; and she had often put it to herself, in apprehension, she tried to think even in preparation, that she should recognise the approach of her doom by a consciousness akin to that of the blowing open of a window on some night of the highest wind and the lowest thermometer. It would be all in vain to have crouched so long by the fire; the glass would have been smashed, the icy air would fill the place. If the air in Maggie’s room then, on her going up, was not, as yet, quite the polar blast she had expected, it was distinctly, none the less, such an atmosphere as they had not hitherto breathed together. The Princess, she perceived, was completely dressed—that business was over; it added indeed to the effect of her importantly awaiting the assistance she had summoned, of her showing a deck cleared, so to speak, for action. Her maid had already left her, and she presented herself, in the large, clear room, where everything was admirable, but where nothing was out of place, as, for the first time in her life rather “bedizened.” Was it that she had put on too many things, overcharged herself with jewels, wore in particular more of them than usual, and bigger ones, in her hair?—a question her visitor presently answered by attributing this appearance largely to the bright red spot, red as some monstrous ruby, that burned in either of her cheeks. These two items of her aspect had, promptly enough, their own light for Mrs. Assingham, who made out by it that nothing more pathetic could be imagined than the refuge and disguise her agitation had instinctively asked of the arts of dress, multiplied to extravagance, almost to incoherence. She had had, visibly, her idea—that of not betraying herself by inattentions into which she had never yet fallen, and she stood there circled about and furnished forth, as always, in a manner that testified to her perfect little personal processes. It had ever been her sign that she was, for all occasions, FOUND ready, without loose ends or exposed accessories or unremoved superfluities; a suggestion of the swept and garnished, in her whole splendid, yet thereby more or less encumbered and embroidered setting, that reflected her small still passion for order and symmetry, for objects with their backs to the walls, and spoke even of some probable reference, in her American blood, to dusting and polishing New England grandmothers. If her apartment was “princely,” in the clearness of the lingering day, she looked as if she had been carried there prepared, all attired and decorated, like some holy image in a procession, and left, precisely, to show what wonder she could work under pressure. Her friend felt—how could she not?—as the truly pious priest might feel when confronted, behind the altar, before the festa, with his miraculous Madonna. Such an occasion would be grave, in general, with all the gravity of what he might look for. But the gravity to-night would be of the rarest; what he might look for would depend so on what he could give.

“Something very strange has happened, and I think you ought to know it.”

Maggie spoke this indeed without extravagance, yet with the effect of making her guest measure anew the force of her appeal. It was their definite understanding: whatever Fanny knew Fanny’s faith would provide for. And she knew, accordingly, at the end of five minutes, what the extraordinary, in the late occurrence, had consisted of, and how it had all come of Maggie’s achieved hour, under Mr. Crichton’s protection, at the Museum. He had desired, Mr. Crichton, with characteristic kindness, after the wonderful show, after offered luncheon at his incorporated lodge hard by, to see her safely home; especially on his noting, in attending her to the great steps, that she had dismissed her carriage; which she had done, really, just for the harmless amusement of taking her way alone. She had known she should find herself, as the consequence of such an hour, in a sort of exalted state, under the influence of which a walk through the London streets would be exactly what would suit her best; an independent ramble, impressed, excited, contented, with nothing to mind and nobody to talk to, and shop-windows in plenty to look at if she liked: a low taste, of the essence, it was to be supposed, of her nature, that she had of late, for so many reasons, been unable to gratify. She had taken her leave, with her thanks—she knew her way quite enough; it being also sufficiently the case that she had even a shy hope of not going too straight. To wander a little wild was what would truly amuse her; so that, keeping clear of Oxford Street and cultivating an impression as of parts she didn’t know, she had ended with what she had more or less had been fancying, an encounter with three or four shops—an old bookseller’s, an old printmonger’s, a couple of places with dim antiquities in the window—that were not as so many of the other shops, those in Sloane Street, say; a hollow parade which had long since ceased to beguile. There had remained with her moreover an allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before—seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in Bloomsbury such “funny little fascinating” places and even sometimes such unexpected finds. There could perhaps have been no stronger mark than this sense of well-nigh romantic opportunity—no livelier sign of the impression made on her, and always so long retained, so watchfully nursed, by any observation of Charlotte’s, however lightly thrown off. And then she had felt, somehow, more at her ease than for months and months before; she didn’t know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly, had done it; it was as if she hadn’t come into so many noble and beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn possibly to something still worse. “I believed in him again as much as ever, and I felt how I believed in him,” she said with bright, fixed eyes; “I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having, for the moment, to wonder and watch; having, on the contrary, almost nothing on my mind.”

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father’s birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns, where they had kept it before—since it would be the twenty-first of the month; and she mightn’t have another chance of making sure of something to offer him. There was always the impossibility, of course, of finding him anything, the least bit “good,” that he wouldn’t already, long ago, in his rummagings, have seen himself—and only not to think a quarter good enough; this, however, was an old story, and one could not have had any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the friendship’s offering, was, by a rigorous law of nature, a foredoomed aberration, and that the more it was so the more it showed, and the more one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been. The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects, in fact, as a general thing, were the bravest, the tenderest mementos, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home, but not worthy of the temple—dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced, gods. She herself, naturally, through the past years, had come to be much represented in those receptacles; against the thick, locked panes of which she still liked to flatten her nose, finding in its place, each time, everything she had on successive anniversaries tried to believe he might pretend, at her suggestion, to be put off with, or at least think curious. She was now ready to try it again: they had always, with his pleasure in her pretence and her pleasure in his, with the funny betrayal of the sacrifice to domestic manners on either side, played the game so happily. To this end, on her way home, she had loitered everywhere; quite too deludedly among the old books and the old prints, which had yielded nothing to her purpose, but with a strange inconsequence in one of the other shops, that of a small antiquarian, a queer little foreign man, who had shown her a number of things, shown her finally something that, struck with it as rather a rarity and thinking it would, compared to some of her ventures, quite superlatively do, she had bought—bought really, when it came to that, for a price. “It appears now it won’t do at all,” said Maggie, “something has happened since that puts it quite out of the question. I had only my day of satisfaction in it, but I feel, at the same time, as I keep it here before me, that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

She had talked, from the first of her friend’s entrances coherently enough, even with a small quaver that overstated her calm; but she held her breath every few seconds, as if for deliberation and to prove she didn’t pant—all of which marked for Fanny the depth of her commotion: her reference to her thought about her father, about her chance to pick up something that might divert him, her mention, in fine, of his fortitude under presents, having meanwhile, naturally, it should be said, much less an amplitude of insistence on the speaker’s lips than a power to produce on the part of the listener herself the prompt response and full comprehension of memory and sympathy, of old amused observation. The picture was filled out by the latter’s fond fancy. But Maggie was at any rate under arms; she knew what she was doing and had already her plan—a plan for making, for allowing, as yet, “no difference”; in accordance with which she would still dine out, and not with red eyes, nor convulsed features, nor neglected items of appearance, nor anything that would raise a question. Yet there was some knowledge that, exactly to this support of her not breaking down, she desired, she required, possession of; and, with the sinister rise and fall of lightning unaccompanied by thunder, it played before Mrs. Assingham’s eyes that she herself should have, at whatever risk or whatever cost, to supply her with the stuff of her need. All our friend’s instinct was to hold off from this till she should see what the ground would bear; she would take no step nearer unless INTELLIGIBLY to meet her, and, awkward though it might be to hover there only pale and distorted, with mere imbecilities of vagueness, there was a quality of bald help in the fact of not as yet guessing what such an ominous start could lead to. She caught, however, after a second’s thought, at the Princess’s allusion to her lost reassurance.

“You mean you were so at your ease on Monday—the night you dined with us?”

“I was very happy then,” said Maggie.

“Yes—we thought you so gay and so brilliant.” Fanny felt it feeble, but she went on. “We were so glad you were happy.”

Maggie stood a moment, at first only looking at her. “You thought me all right, eh?”

“Surely, dearest; we thought you all right.”

“Well, I daresay it was natural; but in point of fact I never was more wrong in my life. For, all the while, if you please, this was brewing.”

Mrs. Assingham indulged, as nearly as possible to luxury, her vagueness. “‘This’—?”

“THAT!” replied the Princess, whose eyes, her companion now saw, had turned to an object on the chimney-piece of the room, of which, among so many precious objects—the Ververs, wherever they might be, always revelled peculiarly in matchless old mantel ornaments—her visitor had not taken heed.

“Do you mean the gilt cup?”

“I mean the gilt cup.”

The piece now recognised by Fanny as new to her own vision was a capacious bowl, of old-looking, rather strikingly yellow gold, mounted, by a short stem, on an ample foot, which held a central position above the fire-place, where, to allow it the better to show, a clearance had been made of other objects, notably of the Louis-Seize clock that accompanied the candelabra. This latter trophy ticked at present on the marble slab of a commode that exactly matched it in splendour and style. Mrs. Assingham took it, the bowl, as a fine thing; but the question was obviously not of its intrinsic value, and she kept off from it, admiring it at a distance. “But what has that to do—?”

“It has everything. You’ll see.” With which again, however, for the moment, Maggie attached to her strange wide eyes. “He knew her before—before I had ever seen him.”

“‘He’ knew—?” But Fanny, while she cast about her for the links she missed, could only echo it.

“Amerigo knew Charlotte—more than I ever dreamed.”

Fanny felt then it was stare for stare. “But surely you always knew they had met.”

“I didn’t understand. I knew too little. Don’t you see what I mean?” the Princess asked.

Mrs. Assingham wondered, during these instants, how much she even now knew; it had taken a minute to perceive how gently she was speaking. With that perception of its being no challenge of wrath, no heat of the deceived soul, but only a free exposure of the completeness of past ignorance, inviting derision even if it must, the elder woman felt, first, a strange, barely credible relief: she drew in, as if it had been the warm summer scent of a flower, the sweet certainty of not meeting, any way she should turn, any consequence of judgment. She shouldn’t be judged—save by herself; which was her own wretched business. The next moment, however, at all events, she blushed, within, for her immediate cowardice: she had thought of herself, thought of “getting off,” before so much as thinking—that is of pitifully seeing—that she was in presence of an appeal that was ALL an appeal, that utterly accepted its necessity. “In a general way, dear child, yes. But not—a—in connexion with what you’ve been telling me.”

“They were intimate, you see. Intimate,” said the Princess.

Fanny continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history, so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other time. “There’s always the question of what one considers—!”

“What one considers intimate? Well, I know what I consider intimate now. Too intimate,” said Maggie, “to let me know anything about it.”

It was quiet—yes; but not too quiet for Fanny Assingham’s capacity to wince. “Only compatible with letting ME, you mean?” She had asked it after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney and wondering, even while she took relief from it, at this gap in her experience. “But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is perfect.”

“They went about together—they’re known to have done it. And I don’t mean only before—I mean after.”

“After?” said Fanny Assingham.

“Before we were married—yes; but after we were engaged.”

“Ah, I’ve known nothing about that!” And she said it with a braver assurance—clutching, with comfort, at something that was apparently new to her.

“That bowl,” Maggie went on, “is, so strangely—too strangely, almost, to believe at this time of day—the proof. They were together all the while—up to the very eve of our marriage. Don’t you remember how just before that she came back, so unexpectedly, from America?”

The question had for Mrs. Assingham—and whether all consciously or not—the oddest pathos of simplicity. “Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America—and how she stayed with US, and what view one had of it.”

Maggie’s eyes still, all the time, pressed and penetrated; so that, during a moment, just here, she might have given the little flare, have made the little pounce, of asking what then “one’s” view had been. To the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood, for her minute, wittingly exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten—quite saw the Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of itself. She saw her—or she believed she saw her—look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt herself, with this fact, hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery—since it was, however obscurely, a case of “discovery”—could make less needful. These seconds were brief—they rapidly passed; but they lasted long enough to renew our friend’s sense of her own extraordinary undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of the terms on which she was let off—her quantity of release having made its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte’s old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed—ah, so inspiringly when it came to that! her steady view, clear from the first, of the beauty of her companion’s motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice for a larger conquest “Only see me through now, do it in the face of this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom isn’t to be said!” The aggravation of fear—or call it, apparently, of knowledge—had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat with his knees; and she might absolutely have been putting it to her guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only “meet” nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she had definitely met Fanny yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, passed, through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at crossroads, with a lantern for the darkness and wavings away for unadvised traffic, look out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie’s reply. “They spent together hours—spent at least a morning—the certainty of which has come back to me now, but that I didn’t dream of it at the time. That cup there has turned witness—by the most wonderful of chances. That’s why, since it has been here, I’ve stood it out for my husband to see; put it where it would meet him, almost immediately, if he should come into the room. I’ve wanted it to meet him,” she went on, “and I’ve wanted him to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that hasn’t taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here—yes, in particular lately—he hasn’t showed to-day.” It was with her managed quietness, more and more, that she talked—an achieved coherence that helped her, evidently, to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together. “It’s quite as if he had an instinct—something that has warned him off or made him uneasy. He doesn’t quite know, naturally, what has happened, but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and isn’t in a hurry to be confronted with it. So, in his vague fear, he keeps off.”

“But being meanwhile in the house—?”

“I’ve no idea—not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before luncheon. He spoke to me then,” the Princess freely explained, “of a ballot, of great importance, at a club—for somebody, some personal friend, I think, who’s coming up and is supposed to be in danger. To make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there. You see the efforts he can make”—for which Maggie found a smile that went to her friend’s heart. “He’s in so many ways the kindest of men. But it was hours ago.”

Mrs. Assingham thought. “The more danger then of his coming in and finding me here. I don’t know, you see, what you now consider that you’ve ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object that you declare so damning.” Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared the Prince’s mystic apprehension. The golden bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as a “document,” somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace. “His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly disagreeable—for all of us—than you intend or than would necessarily help us. And I must take time, truly, to understand what it means.”

“You’re safe, as far as that goes,” Maggie returned; “you may take it from me that he won’t come in; and that I shall only find him below, waiting for me, when I go down to the carriage.”

Fanny Assingham took it from her, took it and more. “We’re to sit together at the Ambassador’s then—or at least you two are—with this new complication thrust up before you, all unexplained; and to look at each other with faces that pretend, for the ghastly hour, not to be seeing it?”

Maggie looked at HER with a face that might have been the one she was preparing. “‘Unexplained,’ my dear? Quite the contrary—explained: fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add. My own love”—she kept it up—“I don’t want anything more. I’ve plenty to go upon and to do with, as it is.”

Fanny Assingham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links, verily, still missing; but the most acceptable effect of this was, singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact. “But when you come home—? I mean he’ll come up with you again. Won’t he see it then?”

On which Maggie gave her, after an instant’s visible thought, the strangest of slow headshakes. “I don’t know. Perhaps he’ll never see it—if it only stands there waiting for him. He may never again,” said the Princess, “come into this room.”

Fanny more deeply wondered, “Never again? Oh—!”

“Yes, it may be. How do I know? With THIS!” she quietly went on. She had not looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express and include for her the whole of her situation. “Then you intend not to speak to him—?”

Maggie waited. “To ‘speak’—?”

“Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it represents.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I shall speak—if he doesn’t. But his keeping away from me because of that—what will that be but to speak? He can’t say or do more. It won’t be for me to speak,” Maggie added in a different tone, one of the tones that had already so penetrated her guest. “It will be for me to listen.”

Mrs. Assingham turned it over. “Then it all depends on that object that you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?”

“I think I may say that I depend on it. I can’t,” said Maggie, “treat it as nothing now.”

Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney—quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her companion’s vision. She looked at the precious thing—if precious it was—found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie’s knowledge. It was brave and rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable. She didn’t touch it, but if after a minute she turned away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of doing so. “Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your future does? For that’s what it comes to, I judge.”

“What it comes to,” Maggie presently returned, “is what that thing has put me, so almost miraculously, in the way of learning: how far they had originally gone together. If there was so much between them before, there can’t—with all the other appearances—not be a great deal more now.” And she went on and on; she steadily made her points. “If such things were already then between them they make all the difference for possible doubt of what may have been between them since. If there had been nothing before there might be explanations. But it makes to-day too much to explain. I mean to explain away,” she said.

Fanny Assingham was there to explain away—of this she was duly conscious; for that at least had been true up to now. In the light, however, of Maggie’s demonstration the quantity, even without her taking as yet a more exact measure, might well seem larger than ever. Besides which, with or without exactness, the effect of each successive minute in the place was to put her more in presence of what Maggie herself saw. Maggie herself saw the truth, and that was really, while they remained there together, enough for Mrs. Assingham’s relation to it. There was a force in the Princess’s mere manner about it that made the detail of what she knew a matter of minor importance. Fanny had in fact something like a momentary shame over her own need of asking for this detail. “I don’t pretend to repudiate,” she said after a little, “my own impressions of the different times I suppose you speak of; any more,” she added, “than I can forget what difficulties and, as it constantly seemed to me, what dangers, every course of action—whatever I should decide upon—made for me. I tried, I tried hard, to act for the best. And, you know,” she next pursued, while, at the sound of her own statement, a slow courage and even a faint warmth of conviction came back to her—“and, you know, I believe it’s what I shall turn out to have done.”

This produced a minute during which their interchange, though quickened and deepened, was that of silence only, and the long, charged look; all of which found virtual consecration when Maggie at last spoke. “I’m sure you tried to act for the best.”

It kept Fanny Assingham again a minute in silence. “I never thought, dearest, you weren’t an angel.”

Not, however, that this alone was much help! “It was up to the very eve, you see,” the Princess went on—“up to within two or three days of our marriage. That, THAT, you know—!” And she broke down for strangely smiling.

“Yes, as I say, it was while she was with me. But I didn’t know it. That is,” said Fanny Assingham, “I didn’t know of anything in particular.” It sounded weak—that she felt; but she had really her point to make. “What I mean is that I don’t know, for knowledge, now, anything I didn’t then. That’s how I am.” She still, however, floundered. “I mean it’s how I WAS.”

“But don’t they, how you were and how you are,” Maggie asked, “come practically to the same thing?” The elder woman’s words had struck her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too factitious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove. The situation had changed by—well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak of the definite; and this could keep Maggie at least firm. She was firm enough as she pursued. “It was ON the whole thing that Amerigo married me.” With which her eyes had their turn again at her damnatory piece. “And it was on that—it was on that!” But they came back to her visitor. “And it was on it all that father married HER.”

Her visitor took it as might be. “They both married—ah, that you must believe!—with the highest intentions.”

“Father did certainly!” And then, at the renewal of this consciousness, it all rolled over her. “Ah, to thrust such things on us, to do them here between us and with us, day after day, and in return, in return—! To do it to HIM—to him, to him!”

Fanny hesitated. “You mean it’s for him you most suffer?” And then as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the room—which made the question somehow seem a blunder—“I ask,” she continued, “because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may be for him, really may be MADE for him, quite as if it hadn’t been.”

But Maggie had, the next moment faced about as if without hearing her. “Father did it for ME—did it all and only for me.”

Mrs. Assingham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she faltered again before she spoke. “Well—!”

It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that it had reached her. “Do you mean that that’s the reason, that that’s A reason—?”

Fanny at first, however, feeling the response in this, didn’t say all she meant; she said for the moment something else instead. “He did it for you—largely at least for you. And it was for you that I did, in my smaller, interested way—well, what I could do. For I could do something,” she continued; “I thought I saw your interest as he himself saw it. And I thought I saw Charlotte’s. I believed in her.”

“And I believed in her,” said Maggie.

Mrs. Assingham waited again; but she presently pushed on. “She believed then in herself.”

“Ah?” Maggie murmured.

Something exquisite, faintly eager, in the prompt simplicity of it, supported her friend further. “And the Prince believed. His belief was real. Just as he believed in himself.”

Maggie spent a minute in taking it from her. “He believed in himself?”

“Just as I too believed in him. For I absolutely did, Maggie.” To which Fanny then added: “And I believe in him yet. I mean,” she subjoined—“well, I mean I DO.”

Maggie again took it from her; after which she was again, restlessly, set afloat. Then when this had come to an end: “And do you believe in Charlotte yet?”

Mrs. Assingham had a demur that she felt she could now afford. “We’ll talk of Charlotte some other day. They both, at any rate, thought themselves safe at the time.”

“Then why did they keep from me everything I might have known?”

Her friend bent upon her the mildest eyes. “Why did I myself keep it from you?”

“Oh, you weren’t, for honour, obliged.”

“Dearest Maggie,” the poor woman broke out on this, “you ARE divine!”

“They pretended to love me,” the Princess went on. “And they pretended to love HIM.”

“And pray what was there that I didn’t pretend?”

“Not, at any rate, to care for me as you cared for Amerigo and for Charlotte. They were much more interesting—it was perfectly natural. How couldn’t you like Amerigo?” Maggie continued.

Mrs. Assingham gave it up. “How couldn’t I, how couldn’t I?” Then, with a fine freedom, she went all her way. “How CAN’T I, how can’t I?”

It fixed afresh Maggie’s wide eyes on her. “I see—I see. Well, it’s beautiful for you to be able to. And of course,” she added, “you wanted to help Charlotte.”

“Yes”—Fanny considered it—“I wanted to help Charlotte. But I wanted also, you see, to help you—by not digging up a past that I believed, with so much on top of it, solidly buried. I wanted, as I still want,” she richly declared, “to help every one.”

It set Maggie once more in movement—movement which, however, spent itself again with a quick emphasis. “Then it’s a good deal my fault—if everything really began so well?”

Fanny Assingham met it as she could. “You’ve been only too perfect. You’ve thought only too much.”

But the Princess had already caught at the words. “Yes—I’ve thought only too much!” Yet she appeared to continue, for the minute, full of that fault. She had it in fact, by this prompted thought, all before her. “Of him, dear man, of HIM—!”

Her friend, able to take in thus directly her vision of her father, watched her with a new suspense. THAT way might safety lie—it was like a wider chink of light. “He believed—with a beauty!—in Charlotte.”

“Yes, and it was I who had made him believe. I didn’t mean to, at the time, so much; for I had no idea then of what was coming. But I did it, I did it!” the Princess declared.

“With a beauty—ah, with a beauty, you too!” Mrs. Assingham insisted.

Maggie, however, was seeing for herself—it was another matter, “The thing was that he made her think it would be so possible.”

Fanny again hesitated. “The Prince made her think—?”

Maggie stared—she had meant her father. But her vision seemed to spread. “They both made her think. She wouldn’t have thought without them.”

“Yet Amerigo’s good faith,” Mrs. Assingham insisted, “was perfect. And there was nothing, all the more,” she added, “against your father’s.”

The remark, however, kept Maggie for a moment still. “Nothing perhaps but his knowing that she knew.”

“‘Knew’?”

“That he was doing it, so much, for me. To what extent,” she suddenly asked of her friend, “do you think he was aware that she knew?”

“Ah, who can say what passes between people in such a relation? The only thing one can be sure of is that he was generous.” And Mrs. Assingham conclusively smiled. “He doubtless knew as much as was right for himself.”

“As much, that is, as was right for her.”

“Yes then—as was right for her. The point is,” Fanny declared, “that, whatever his knowledge, it made, all the way it went, for his good faith.”

Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her successive movements. “Isn’t the point, very considerably, that his good faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in me as he himself took?”

Fanny Assingham thought. “He recognised, he adopted, your long friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness.”

“No,” said Maggie with still deeper consideration: “he counted her selfishness out almost as he counted his own.”

“So you may say.”

“Very well,” Maggie went on; “if he had none of his own, he invited her, may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only since have found that out.”

Mrs. Assingham looked blank. “Since—?”

“And he may have become aware,” Maggie pursued, “that she has found it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage,” she explained, “of how much he had asked of her—more, say, than she had understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand was, in the long run, to affect her.”

“He may have done many things,” Mrs. Assingham responded; “but there’s one thing he certainly won’t have done. He’ll never have shown that he expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to give.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Maggie mused, “what Charlotte really understood. But it’s one of the things she has never told me.”

“Then as it’s one of the things she has never told me either, we shall probably never know it; and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things,” said Mrs. Assingham, “that we shall never know.”

Maggie took it in with a long reflection. “Never.”

“But there are others,” her friend went on, “that stare us in the face and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.”

It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way; but she rallied to this with a rush. “Extraordinary.”

“Magnificent,” said Fanny Assingham.

Her companion held tight to it. “Magnificent.”

“Then he’ll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he’ll do to the end. He didn’t undertake it to break down; in what—quiet, patient, exquisite as he is—did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won’t have done it on this occasion.”

“Ah, this occasion!”—and Maggie’s wail showed her, of a sudden, thrown back on it. “Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn’t?”

“If he doesn’t then, so much the better. Leave him alone.”

“Do you mean give him up?”

“Leave HER,” Fanny Assingham went on. “Leave her TO him.”

Maggie looked at her darkly. “Do you mean leave him to HER? After this?”

“After everything. Aren’t they, for that matter, intimately together now?”

“‘Intimately’—? How do I know?”

But Fanny kept it up. “Aren’t you and your husband—in spite of everything?”

Maggie’s eyes still further, if possible, dilated. “It remains to be seen!”

“If you’re not then, where’s your faith?”

“In my husband—?”

Mrs. Assingham but for an instant hesitated. “In your father. It all comes back to that. Rest on it.”

“On his ignorance?”

Fanny met it again. “On whatever he may offer you. TAKE that.”

“Take it—?” Maggie stared.

Mrs. Assingham held up her head. “And be grateful.” On which, for a minute, she let the Princess face her. “Do you see?”

“I see,” said Maggie at last.

“Then there you are.” But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window, as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs. Assingham’s reverted to that complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, was that both of recurrent wonder and recurrent protest. She went over it, looked at it afresh and yielded now to her impulse to feel it in her hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and was surprised, thus, with the weight of it—she had seldom handled so much massive gold. That effect itself somehow prompted her to further freedom and presently to saying: “I don’t believe in this, you know.”

It brought Maggie round to her. “Don’t believe in it? You will when I tell you.”

“Ah, tell me nothing! I won’t have it,” said Mrs. Assingham. She kept the cup in her hand, held it there in a manner that gave Maggie’s attention to her, she saw the next moment, a quality of excited suspense. This suggested to her, oddly, that she had, with the liberty she was taking, an air of intention, and the impression betrayed by her companion’s eyes grew more distinct in a word of warning. “It’s of value, but its value’s impaired, I’ve learned, by a crack.”

“A crack?—in the gold—?”

“It isn’t gold.” With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie smiled.

“That’s the point.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s glass—and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.”

“Glass?—of this weight?”

“Well,” said Maggie, “it’s crystal—and was once, I suppose, precious. But what,” she then asked, “do you mean to do with it?”

She had come away from her window, one of the three by which the wide room, enjoying an advantageous “back,” commanded the western sky and caught a glimpse of the evening flush; while Mrs. Assingham, possessed of the bowl, and possessed too of this indication of a flaw, approached another for the benefit of the slowly-fading light. Here, thumbing the singular piece, weighing it, turning it over, and growing suddenly more conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently spoke again. “A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.”