 CHAPTER XXIX There was nothing to show that her effort in any degree fell short till they got well into the park, and he struck her as giving, unexpectedly, the go-by to any serious search for the principino. The way they sat down a while in the sun was a sign of that. His dropping with her into the first pair of sequestered chairs they came across, and waiting a little, after they were placed, as if now at last she might bring out, as between them, something more specific. It made her but feel the more sharply how the specific, and almost any direction, was utterly forbidden her, how the use of it would be for all the world, like undoing the leash of a dog eager to follow up a scent. It would come out, the specific, where the dog would come out, would run to earth, somehow the truth, for she was believing herself in relation to the truth, at which she mustn't so much as indirectly point. Such at any rate was the fashion in which her passionate prudence played over possibilities of danger, reading symptoms and betrayals into everything she looked at, and yet having to make it evident, while she recognized them, that she didn't wince. There were moments between them and their chairs, when he might have been watching her guard herself, and trying to think of something new that would trip her up. There were pauses during which, with her affection as sweet and still as the sunshine, she might yet, as at some hard game over a table for money, have been defying him to fasten upon her the least little complication of consciousness. She was positively proud afterwards of the great style in which she had kept this up. Later on, at the hour's end, when they had retraced their steps to find Amorigo and Charlotte awaiting them at the house, she was able to say to herself that truly she had put her plan through, even though once more setting herself the difficult task of making their relation, every minute of the time, not fall below the standard of that other hour and the treasured past which hung there behind them like a framed picture in a museum, a high watermark for the history of their old fortune. The summer evening in the park at Fonds, when side by side under the trees, just as now, they had let their happy confidence lull them with its most golden tone. There had been the possibility of a trap for her at present, and the very question of their taking up anew that residence, wherefore she had not been the first to sound it in spite of the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She was saying to herself in secret, Can we again in this form migrate there? Can I for myself undertake it? Face all the intenser keeping up and stretching out indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the country, as we've established and accepted them, would stand for? She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt so much she was subsequently to remember, but remembering then, too, that her companion, though perceptibly perhaps as if not to be eager, had broken the ice very much as he had broken it in Eaton Square after the banquet to the Castle Deans. Her mind had taken a long excursion, wandered far into the vision of what a summer at Fonds, with Amorigo and Charlotte still more eminently in presence against that higher sky would bring forth. Wasn't her father meanwhile only pretending to talk of it? Just as she was in a manner pretending to listen? He got off it finally at all events. For the transition it couldn't well help thrusting out at him. It had amounted exactly to an arrest of her private excursion by the sense that he had begun to imitate—oh, is never yet—the ancient tone of gold. It had verily come from him at last, the question of whether she thought it would be very good—but very good indeed—that he should leave England for a series of weeks on some pretext with the Prince. Then it had been that she was to know her husband's menace hadn't really dropped, since she was face to face with the effect of it. Ah, the effect of it had occupied all the rest of their walk, had stayed out with them and come home with them, besides making it impossible that they shouldn't presently feign to recollect how rejoining the child had been their original purpose. Maggie's unaffaced note was that it had, at the end of five minutes more, driven them to that endeavor as to a refuge, and caused them afterwards to rejoice as well, that the boy's irrepressibly importunate company, in due course secured and enjoyed, with the extension imparted by his governess, a person expectant of consideration, constituted a cover for any awkwardness. For that was what it had all come to, that the dear man had spoken to her, to try her, quite as he had been spoken to himself by Charlotte, with the same fine idea. The Princess took it in on the spot, firmly grasping it. She heard them together, her father and his wife, dealing with the queer case. The Prince tells me that Maggie has a plan for your taking some foreign journey with him, and as he likes to do everything she wants, he has suggested my speaking to you for it as the thing most likely to make you consent. So I do speak, see, being always so eager myself, as you know, to meet Maggie's wishes. I speak but without quite understanding, this time, what she has in her head. Why should she, of a sudden, at this particular moment, desire to ship you off together and to remain here alone with me? The compliments all to me, I admit, and you must decide quite as you like. The Prince is quite ready, evidently, to do his part, but you'll have it out with him. That is, you'll have it out with her. Something of that kind was what, in her mind's ear, Maggie heard, and this, after his waiting for her to appeal to him directly, was her father's invitation to her to have it out. Well, as she could say to herself all the rest of the day, that was what they did while they continued to sit there in their penny-chairs, that was what they had done, as much as they would now ever ever have out anything. The measure of this, at least, had been given, that each would fight to the last for the protection, for the perversion of any real anxiety. She had confessed instantly, with her humbugging grin, not flinching by a hair, meeting his eyes as mildly as he met hers. She had confessed to her fancy that they might both, he and his son-in-law, have welcomed such an escapade, since they had both been so long, so furiously domestic. She had almost cocked her hat under the inspiration of this opportunity to hint how a couple of spirited young men, reacting from confinement and sallying forth arm in arm, might encounter some of the agreeable and forms that would strike them for the time, at least, as novel. She had felt for fifty seconds, with her eyes, also sweetly and falsely, in her companions, horribly vulgar. Yet without minding it either, such luck should she have if it to be nothing worse than vulgar would see her through. "'And I thought Amorigo might like it better,' she had said, then wandering off alone. "'Do you mean that he won't go unless I take him?' She had considered here, and never in her life had she considered so promptly and so intently. If she really put it that way, her husband, challenged, might belie the statement, so that what would that do but make her father wonder, make him perhaps ask straight out, why she was exerting pressure. She couldn't, of course, afford to be suspected for an instant of exerting pressure, which was why she was obliged only to make answer. "'Wouldn't that be just what you must have out with him?' Decidedly, if he makes me the proposal, but he hasn't made it yet. "'Oh, once more, how she was to feel,' she had smirked. "'Perhaps he's too shy.' "'Because you're so sure he so really wants my company?' "'I think he has thought you might like it.' "'Well, I should.' But with this he looked away from her, and she held her breath to hear him either ask if she wished him to address the question to Amarigo straight, or inquire if she should be greatly disappointed by his letting it drop. What had settled her, as she was privately to call it, was that he had done neither of these things, and had thereby markedly stood off from the risk involved in trying to draw out her reason. To attenuate on the other hand this appearance, and quite as if to fill out the two large receptacle made so musingly by his abstention, he had himself presently given her a reason, had positively spared her the effort of asking whether he judged Charlotte not to have approved. He had taken everything on himself. That was what had settled her. She had had to wait very little more to feel with this how much he was taking. The point he made was his lack of any eagerness to put time and space on any such scale between himself and his wife. He wasn't so unhappy with her. Far from it, and Maggie was to hold that he had grinned back paternally through his rather shielding glasses in easy emphasis of this, as to be able to hint that he required the relief of absence. Therefore, unless it was for the prince himself—'Oh, I don't think it would have been for Amarigo himself.' Amarigo and I, Maggie had said, perfectly rub on together. Well, then, there we are. I see—and she had again was sublime blandness assented. There we are. Charlotte and I, too, her father had gaily proceeded, perfectly rub on together. And then he had appeared for a little to be making time. To put it only so—he had mildly and happily added—to put it only so—he had spoken as if he might easily put it much better, yet as if the humor of contented understatement fairly sufficed for the occasion. He had played, then, either all consciously or all unconsciously into Charlotte's hands, and the effect of this was to render trebly oppressive Maggie's conviction of Charlotte's plan. She had done what she wanted, his wife had, which was also what Amarigo had made her do. She had kept her test, Maggie's test, from becoming possible and had applied instead a test of her own. It was exactly as if she had known that her stepdaughter would be afraid to be summoned to say, under the least approach to cross-examination, why any change was desirable. And it was, for our young woman herself, still more prodigiously, as if her father had been capable of calculations to match, of judging and important he shouldn't be brought to demand of her what was the matter with her. Why otherwise was such an opportunity hadn't he demanded it? Always from calculation, that was why. That was why. He was terrified of the retort he might have invoked. What, my dear, if you come to that is the matter with you! When, a minute later on, he had followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to conjure away the ghost of the anomalous at that climax verily she would have had to be dumb to the question. There seems a kind of charm, doesn't there, on our life, and quite as if just lately it had got itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed. A kind of wicked selfish prosperity, perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner left over of my old show. That's the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid, lying like gods together, all careless of mankind. Do you consider that we're languid? That form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. Do you consider that we are careless of mankind, living as we do in the biggest crowd in the world and running about always pursued and pursuing? It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant, but he came up again, as she might have said, smiling. Well, I don't know. We get nothing but the fun, do we? No, she had hastened to declare. We certainly get nothing but the fun. We do it all, he had remarked, so beautifully. We do it all so beautifully. She hadn't denied this for a moment. I see what you mean. Well, I mean too, he had gone on, that we haven't, no doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty. Enough? Enough for what? Enough not to be selfish. I don't think you are selfish, she had returned, and had managed not to wail it. I don't say that it's me particularly, or that it's you or Charlotte or Amarigo, but we're selfish together. We move as a selfish mass. You see we want always the same thing, he had gone on. And that holds us, that binds us together. We want each other, he had further explained, only wanting it each time for each other. That's what I call the happy spell. But it's also a little possibly the immorality. The immorality? She had pleasantly echoed. Well, we're tremendously moral for ourselves, that is for each other, and I won't pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal expense you and I, for instance, are happy. What it comes to, I dare say, is that there's something haunting, as if it were a bit uncanny, and such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless indeed, he had rambled on. It's only I to whom fantastically it says so much. That's all I mean at any rate, that it's sort of soothing, as if we were sitting about on the vans with pigtails smoking opium and seeing visions. Let us then be up and doing. What is it long fellow says? That seems sometimes to ring out, like the police breaking in into our opium den to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is, at the same time, that we are doing. We're doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We're working at our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We have worked it, and what more can you do than that? It's a good deal for me, he had wound up, to have made Charlotte so happy, to have so perfectly contented her. You, from a good way back, were a matter of course. I mean you're being all right. So that I needn't mind your knowing that my great interest since then has rather inevitably been in making sure of the same success very much to your advantage as well for Charlotte. If we've worked our life, our idea really, as I say, if at any rate I can sit here and say that I've worked my share of it, it has not been what you may call leased by our having put Charlotte so at her ease. That has been soothing all round. That has curled up as the biggest of the blue fumes or whatever they are of the opium. Don't you see what a cropper we would have come if she hadn't settled down as she has? And he had concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn't really have thought of. You, darling, in that case, I verily believe would have been the one to hate it most. Would you hate it, Maggie had wondered. To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off, and I dare say I should have hated it for you even more than for myself. That's not unlikely, perhaps, when it was for me, after all, that you did it. He had hesitated, but only a moment. I never told you so. Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me. But I never told her, her father had answered. Are you very sure? She had presently asked. Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her and how right I was, and how fortunate to have that for my basis. I told her all the good I thought of her. Then that, Maggie had returned, was precisely part of the good. I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully understand. Yes, understand everything. Everything, and in particular your reasons. Her telling me that showed me how she had understood. They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his color rise. It was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image. The enacted scene of her passage was Charlotte, which he was now hearing of for the first time, and as to which it would have been natural he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but mark precisely the complication of his fears. What she does like, he finally said, is the way it has succeeded. Your marriage? Yes, my whole idea. The way I've been justified. That's the joy I give her. If for her, either, it had failed. That, however, was not worth talking about, he had broken off. You think, then, you could now risk fawns? Risk it? Well, morally, from the point of view I was talking of, that of our sinking deeper into sloth, our selfishness somehow seems at its biggest down there. He had allowed him the amusement of her not taking this up. Is Charlotte, she had simply asked. Really ready? Oh, if you and I and Amorigo are, whenever one corners Charlotte, he had developed more at his ease, one finds that she only wants to know what we want, which is what we got her for. What we got her for? Exactly. And so, for a little, even though with a certain effect of oddity and their more or less successful ease, they left it. Left it till Maggie made the remark that it was all the same wonderful her stepmother should be willing, before the season was out, to exchange so much company for so much comparative solitude. Ah, he had then made answer. That's because her idea, I think, this time, is that we shall have more people, more than we've hitherto had in the country. Don't you remember that that, originally, was what we were to get her for? Oh, yes, to give us a life. Maggie had gone through the form of recalling this and the light of their ancient candor, shining from so far back had seemed to bring out some things so strangely that, with the sharpness of the vision, she had risen to her feet. Well, with a life, fawns will certainly do. She had remained in his place while she looked over his head. The picture and her vision had suddenly swarmed. The vibration was that of one of the lurches of the mystic train in which, with her companion, she was travelling. But she was having to steady herself this time before meeting his eyes. She had measured indeed the full difference between the move to fawns, because each of them now knew the others wanted it, and the pairing off, for a journey, of her husband and her father, which nobody knew that either wanted. More company, at fawns, would be effectually enough the key in which her husband and her stepmother were at work. There was truly no question but that she and her father must accept any array of visitors. No one could try to marry him now. What he had just said was a direct plea for that, and what was the plea itself but an act of submission to Charlotte. He had, from his chair, been noting her look, but he had the next minute also risen. And then it was they had reminded each other of their having come out for the boy. Their junction with him and with his companion successfully affected. The four had moved home more slowly and still more vaguely, yet with a vagueness that permitted of Maggie's reverting an instant to the larger issue. If we have people in the country then, as you were saying, do you know for whom my first fancy would be? You may be amused but it would be for the castledeens. I see, but why should I be amused? Well, I mean I am myself. I don't think I like her and yet I like to see her, which as Amarigo says is rum, but don't you feel she's very handsome? Her father inquired. Yes, but it isn't for that. Then what is it for? Simply that she may be there, just there before us. It's as if she may have a value, as if something may come of her. I don't in the least know what, and she rather irritates me meanwhile. I don't even know I admit why, but if we see her often enough I may find out. Does it matter so very much? Her companion had asked while they moved together. She had hesitated. You mean because you do rather like her? He on his side too had waited a little, but then he had taken it from her. Yes, I guess I do rather like her. Which she accepted for the first case she could recall of their not being affected by a person in the same way. It came back therefore to his pretending. If she had gone far enough, and to add to her appearance of levity, she further observed that, though they were so far from a novelty, she should also immediately desire at Fonz the presence of the Asinghums. That put everything on a basis independent of explanations. Yet it was extraordinary at the same time how much, once in the country again with the others, she was going, as I used to say at home, to need the presence of the good Fanny. It was the strangest thing in the world, but it was as if Mrs. Asingham might in a manner mitigate the intensity of her consciousness of Charlotte. It was as if the two would balance, one against the other, as if it came round again in that fashion to her idea of the equilibrium. It would be like putting this friend into her scale to make weight, into the scale with her father and herself. Amarigo and Charlotte would be in the other. Or it would take the three of them to keep that one straight. And as this played all duskily in her mind, it had received from her father, with a sound of suddenness, a luminous contribution. Aw, rather! Do, let's have the Asinghums. It would be to have them, she had said, as we used so much to have them, for a long good stay in the old way and on the old terms, as regular borders Fanny used to call it. That is, if they'll come. As regular borders, on the old terms, that's what I should like too, but I guess they'll come. Her companion had added in a tone into which she had read meanings. The main meaning was that he felt he was going to require them quite as much as she was. His recognition of the new terms as different from the old, what was that practically, but a confession that something had happened, and a perception that, interested in the situation she had helped to create, Mrs. Asingham would be, by so much as this, concerned in its inevitable development. It amounted to an intimation off his guard that he should be thankful for someone to turn to. If she had wished covertly to sound him, he had now, in short, quite given himself away. And if she had, even at the start, needed anything more to settle her, here assuredly was enough. He had hold of his small grandchild as they retraced their steps, swinging the boy's hand, and not bored as he never was, by his always bristling like a fat little porcupine, with shrill interrogation points, so that secretly, while they went, she had wondered again if the equilibrium mightn't have been more real, mightn't above all have demanded less strange a study, had it only been on the books that Charlotte should give him a principino of his own. She had repossessed herself now of his other arm, only this time she was drawing him back, gently, helplessly back, to what they had tried for the hour, to get away from. Just as he was consciously drawing the child, and as high Miss Bogle on her left, representing the duties of home, was complacently drawing her. The duties of home, when the house and Portland place reappeared, showed even from a distance, as vividly there before them. Amarigo and Charlotte had come in, that is, Amarigo had, Charlotte rather having come out, and the pair were perched together in the balcony. He bareheaded, she divested of her jacket, her mantle, or whatever, but crowned with a brilliant, brave hat, responsive to the balmy day which Maggie immediately spotted as new, as insuperably original, as worn in characteristic generous harmony for the first time. All evidently to watch for the return of the absent, to be there to take them over again as punctually as possible. They were gay, they were amused in the pleasant morning. They leaned across the rail and called down their greeting, lighting up the front of the great black house with an expression that quite broke the monotony that might almost have shocked the decency of Portland place. The group on the pavement stared up as at the peopled battlements of a castle. Even Miss Bogle, who carried her head most aloft, gaped a little, through the interval of space, as toward truly superior beings. There could scarce have been so much of the open mouth, since the dingy weights on Christmas Eve had so lamentably chanted for pennies, the time when Amarigo, insatiable for English customs, had come out, with a gasped, centissima virgine, to marvel at the depositaries of this tradition and purchase a reprieve. Maggie's individual gape was inevitably again for the thought of how the pair would be at work. CHAPTER XXXXX she had not again for weeks had Mrs. Assiam so effectually in presence, as on the afternoon of that lady's return from the Easter Party at Machum. But the intermission was made up as soon as the date of the migration to Fonz, that of the more or less simultaneous adjournment of the two houses, began to be discussed. It had struck her promptly that this renewal, with an old friend of the old terms she had talked of with her father, was the one opening for her spirit that wouldn't too much advertise or betray her. Even her father, who had always, as he would have said, believed in their ancient ally, wouldn't necessarily suspect her of invoking Fanny's aid toward any special inquiry, and least of all, if Fanny would only act as Fanny so easily might. Maggie's measure of Fanny's ease would have been agitating to Mrs. Assiam had it been all at once revealed to her. As for that matter, it was soon destined to become, even on a comparatively graduated showing. Our young woman's idea, in particular, was that her safety, her escape from being herself suspected of suspicion, would proceed from this friend's power to cover, to protect and as might be, even showily, to represent her. Represent that is, her relation to the form of the life they were all actually leading. This would doubtless be, as people said, a large order. But that Mrs. Assiam existed substantially, or could somehow be made prevailingly to exist, for her private benefit, was the finest flower Maggie had plucked from among the suggestions sown, like abundant seed, on the occasion of the entertainment offered in Portland Place to the Machum Company. Mrs. Assiam, that night, rebounding from dejection, had bristled with bravery and sympathy. She had then absolutely, she had perhaps recklessly, for herself, betrayed the deeper and darker consciousness, an impression it would now be late for her inconsistently to attempt to undo. It was with a wonderful air of giving out all these truths that the Princess at present approached her again, making doubtless at first a sufficient scruple of letting her know what in a special she asked of her, yet not a bit ashamed, as she in fact quite expressly declared, a fanny's discern foreboding of the strange uses she might perhaps have for her. Quite from the first, really, Maggie said extraordinary things to her, such as, You can help me, you know, my dear, when nobody else can. Such as I almost wish upon my word that you had something to matter with you, that you had lost your health or your money or your reputation, forgive me, love, so that I might be with you as much as I want, or keep you with me, without exciting comment, without exciting any other remark than that such kindnesses are like me. We have each our own way of making up for our unselfishness, and Maggie, who had no small self at all as against her husband or her father, and only a weak and uncertain one as against her stepmother, would verily at this crisis, have seen Mrs. Asingham's personal life or liberty sacrificed without a pang. The attitude that the appetite in question maintained in her was to draw peculiar support, moreover, from the current aspects and agitations of her victim. This personage has struck her in truth as ready for almost anything, as not perhaps effusively protesting, yet as wanting with the restances of her own to know what she wanted. And in the long run, which was none so long, either, there was to be no difficulty as happened about that. It was as if, for all the world, Maggie had let her see that she held her, that she made her, fairly responsible for something. Not to begin with, dotting all the eyes nor hooking together all the links, but treating her without insistence, rather with caressing confidence, as there to see and to know, to advise and to assist. The theory visibly had patched itself together for her that the dear woman had somehow, from the early time, had a hand in all their fortunes, so that there was no turn of their common relations and affairs that couldn't be traced back in some degree to her original affectionate interest. On this affectionate interest the good lady's young friend now built, before her eyes, very much as a wise or even as a mischievous child playing on the floor, might pile up blocks, skillfully and dizzily, with an eye on the face of a covertly watching elder. When the blocks tumble down they but acted after the nature of blocks. Yet the hour would come for their rising so high that the structure would have to be noticed and admired. Mrs. Asingham's appearance of unreservedly giving herself involved meanwhile on her own side, no separate recognitions. Her face of almost anxious attention was directed altogether to her young friend's so vivid felicity. It suggested that she took for granted, at the most, certain vague recent enhancements of that state. If the princess now, more than before, was going and going, she was prompt to publish that she beheld her go, that she had always known she would, sooner or later, and that any appeal for participation must more or less contain and invite the note of triumph. There was a blankness in her blandness, assuredly, and very nearly an extravagance in her generalizing gaiety. A precipitation of cheer particularly marked whenever they met again after short separations, meetings during the first flush of which Maggie sometimes felt reminded of other looks and other faces, of two strangely unabliterated impressions above all. The physiognomic light that had played out in her husband at the shock, she had come at last to talk to herself of the shock, of his first vision of her on his return from matchum and Gloucester, and the wonder of Charlotte's beautiful bold wavering gaze when, the next morning in Eaton Square, this old friend had turned from the window to begin to deal with her. If she had dared to think of it so crudely, she would have said that Fanny was afraid of her, afraid of something she might say or do, even as, for their few brief seconds, Amorigo and Charlotte had been, which made exactly an expressive element common to the three. The difference, however, was that this look had in the dear woman its oddity of a constant renewal, whereas it had never for the least little instant again peeped out of the others. Other looks, other lights, radiant and steady, with the others, had taken its place, reaching a climax so short a time ago, that morning of the appearance of the pair on the balcony of her house to overlook what she had been doing with her father, when their general interested brightness and beauty, attuned to the outbreak of summer, had seemed to shed down warmth and welcome and the promise of protection. They were conjoined not to do anything to startle her, and now it lasts so completely that, with experience and practice, they had almost ceased to fear their liability. Mrs. Asingham, on the other hand, deprecating such an accident not less, had yet less assurance as having less control. The high pitch of her cheer, accordingly, the tentative adventurous expressions of the would-be smiling order that preceded her approach even like a squad of skirmishers or whatever they were called moving ahead of the baggage train. These things had at the end of a fortnight brought a dozen times to our young woman's lips a challenge that had the cunning to await its right occasion, but of the relief of which, as a demonstration, she meanwhile felt no little need. You've such a dread of my possibly complaining to you that you keep peeling all the bells to drown my voice, but don't cry out my dear till you're hurt, and, above all, ask yourself how I can be so wicked as to complain. What in the name of all that's fantastic can you dream that I have to complain of? Such inquiries the Princess temporarily succeeded in repressing, and she did so in a measure by the aid of her wondering if this ambiguity with which her friend affected her wouldn't be at present a good deal like the ambiguity with which she herself must frequently affect her father. She wondered how she should enjoy, on his part, such a take-up as she but just succeeded from day to day in sparing Mrs. Asingham, and that made for her trying to be as easy with this associate as Mr. Verver, blessed man, all indulgent but all inscrutable, was with his daughter. She had extracted from her, nonetheless, a vow in respect to the time that, if the colonel might be depended on, they would spend at fawns, and nothing came home to her more in this connection or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocritus forbear to observe that Charlotte's view of a long visit, even from such allies, was there to be reckoned with. Fanny stood off from that proposition as visibly to the Princess and as consciously to herself as she might have backed away from the edge of a chasm unto which she feared to slip, a truth that contributed again to keep before our young woman her own constant danger of advertising her subtle processes, that Charlotte should have begun to be restrictive about the Asingham's, which she had never and for a hundred obviously good reasons been before. This in itself was a fact of the highest value for Maggie, and of a value enhanced by the silence in which Fanny herself so much too unmistakably dressed it. What gave it quite thrillingly its price was exactly the circumstance that it thus opposed her to her stepmother more actively. If she was to back up her friends for holding out, then she had ever yet been opposed, though of course with the involved result of the fine chance given Mrs. Verver to ask her husband for explanations. Ah, from the moment she should be definitely caught in opposition, there would be naturally no saying how much Charlotte's opportunities might multiply. What would become of her father, she hauntedly asked, if his wife on the one side should begin to press him to call his daughter to order, and the force of old habit, to put it only at that, should dispose him not less effectively to believe in this young person at any price. There she was all round, imprisoned in the circle of the reasons it was impossible she should give, certainly give him. The house in the country was his house, and thereby was his residence. It was her own and Amorigo's only so far as its proper master and mistress should profusely place it at their disposal. Maggie felt, of course, that she saw no limit to her father's profusion, but this couldn't be even at the best the case was Charlotte's, whom it would never be decent when all was said, to reduce to fighting for her preferences. There were hours truly when the princess saw herself as not unarmed for battle if battle might only take place without spectators. This last advantage for her was, however, too sadly out of the question. Her soul strength lay in her being able to see that if Charlotte wouldn't want the assingums, it would be because that sentiment too would have motives and grounds. She had all the while command of one way of meeting any objection, any complaint on his wife's part, reported to her by her father. It would be open to her to retort to his possible, what are your reasons, my dear? By elucidly produced. What are her's love, please? Isn't that what we had better know? May it her reasons be a dislike, beautifully founded of the presence and thereby of the observation, of persons who perhaps know about her things that's inconvenient to her they should know? That hideous card she might in mere logic play, being by this time at her still swift or private place, intimately familiar with all the fingered pasteboard in her pack. But she could play it only on the forbidden issue of sacrificing him, the issue so forbidden that it involved even a horror of finding out if he would really have consented to be sacrificed. What she must do, she must do by keeping her hands off him, and nothing, meanwhile, as we see, had less in common with that scruple than such a merciless manipulation of their yielding beneficiaries as her spirit so boldly reveled in. She saw herself in this connection without detachment, saw others alone with intensity. Otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused by her free assignment of the Pachydermatist quality. If she could face the awkwardness of the persistence of her friends at Fawn's in spite of Charlotte, she somehow looked to them for an inspiration of courage that would improve upon her own. They were in short not only themselves to find a plausibility and an audacity, but were somehow, by the way, to pick up these swarms for her, Maggie, as well. And she felt, indeed, that she was giving them scant time longer when, one afternoon in Portland Place, she broke out within relevance that was merely superficial. What awfulness in Heaven's name is there between them? What do you believe? What do you know? Oh, if she went by faces, her visitor's sudden whiteness that this might have carried her far, Fanny Assingham turned pale for it. But there was something of such an appearance, in the look it put into the eyes, that renewed Maggie's conviction of what this companion had been expecting. She had been watching it come, come from afar, and now that it was there, after all, and the first convulsion over, they would doubtless soon find themselves in a more real relation. It was there because of the Sunday luncheon they had partaken of alone together. It was there, as strangely as one would, because of the bad weather, the cold perverse June rain, that was making the day wrong. It was there because it stood for the whole sum of the perplexities and duplicities among which our young woman felt herself lately to have picked her steps. It was there because Amarigo and Charlotte were again paying together alone a weekend visit, which it had been Maggie's plan infernally to promote, just to see if, this time, they really would. It was there because she had kept fanny, on her side, from paying one she would manifestly have been glad to pay, and made her come instead, stupidly, vacantly, boringly, to luncheon. All in the spirit of celebrating the fact that the Prince and Mrs. Verver had thus put it into her own power to describe them exactly as they were. It had abruptly occurred, in truth, that Maggie required the preliminary help of determining how they were. So on the other hand, before her guest had answered her question, everything in the hour and the place, everything in all the conditions, affected her as crying it out. Her guests stare of ignorance above all, that of itself at first, cried it out. "'Between them, what do you mean? Anything there shouldn't be, there shouldn't have been all this time. Do you believe there is, or what's your idea?' Fanny's idea was clearly to begin with that her young friend had taken her breath away, but she looked at her very straight and very hard. "'Do you speak from a suspicion of your own? I speak at last from a torment. Forgive me if it comes out. I've been thinking for months and months, and I've no one to turn to, no one to help me to make things out. No impression but my own, don't you see, to go by. You've been thinking for months and months,' Mrs. Asingham took it in. "'But what then, dear Maggie, have you been thinking?' Well, horrible things, like a little beast that I perhaps am, that there may be something, something wrong and dreadful, something they cover up.' The elder woman's color had begun to come back. She was able, though with a visible effort, to face the question less amazingly. "'You imagine, poor child, that the wretches are in love. Is that it?' But Maggie, for a minute, only stared back at her. "'Help me to find out what I imagine. I don't know. I've nothing but my perpetual anxiety. Have you any? Do you see what I mean? If you'll tell me truly that at least one way or the other will do something for me.' Fanny's look had taken a peculiar gravity, a fullness with which it seemed to shine. "'Is what it comes to that you're jealous of Charlotte? Do you mean whether I hate her?' And Maggie thought. "'No, not on account of father.' "'Ah,' Mrs. Asingham returned. "'That isn't what one would suppose. What I ask is if you're jealous on account of your husband.' "'Well,' said Maggie presently, "'perhaps that may be all. If I'm unhappy I'm jealous. It must come to the same thing. And with you at least I'm not afraid of the word. If I'm jealous, don't you see? I'm tormented,' she went on, and all the more if I'm helpless. And if I'm both helpless and tormented, I stuff my pocket handkerchief into my mouth. I keep it there for the most part night and day, so as not to be heard to indecently moaning. Only now, with you at last, I can't keep it longer. I've pulled it out, and here I am fairly screaming at you. There away, she wound up. So they can't hear. And I'm by a miracle of arrangement, not at luncheon with father at home. I live in the midst of miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit are my own. I go about on tiptoe. I watch for every sound, I feel every breath, and yet I try all the while to seem as smooth as old satin-dyed rose-color. Have you ever thought of me, she asked, is really feeling as I do? Her companion conspicuously required to be clear. Jealous, unhappy, tormented? No, said Mrs. Asingham. But at the same time, and though you may laugh at me for it, I'm bound to confess that I've never been so awfully sure of what I may call knowing you. Here you are indeed, as you say, such a deep little person. I've never imagined your existence poisoned, and since you wish to know if I consider that it need be, I've not the least difficulty in speaking on the spot. Nothing decidedly strikes me as more unnecessary. For a minute after this they remained face to face. Maggie had sprung up while her friend sat enthroned, and after moving to and fro in her intensity, now paused to receive the light she had invoked. It had accumulated considerably by this time round Mrs. Asingham's ample presence, and it made, even to our young woman's own sense, a medium in which she could at last take a deeper breath. I've affected you these months and these last weeks in a special, as quiet and natural and easy, but it was a question that took not imperceptibly some answering. You've never affected me from the first hour I beheld you as anything but, in a way, all your own, absolutely good and sweet and beautiful. In a way, as I say, Mrs. Asingham almost caressingly repeated, just all your very own, nobody else's at all, I've never thought of you but as outside of ugly things, so ignorant of any falsity or cruelty or vulgarity as never to have to be touched by them or to touch them. I've never mixed you up with them. There would have been time enough for that if they had seemed to be near you, but they haven't, if that's what you want to know. You've only believed me contented then because you've believed me stupid. Mrs. Asingham had a free smile now for the length of this stride, dissimulated though it might be in a graceful little frisk. If I had believed you stupid I shouldn't have thought you interesting, and if I hadn't thought you interesting I shouldn't have noted whether I knew you as I've called it or not. What I've always been conscious of is your having concealed about you somewhere no small amount of character. Quite as much, in fact, Fanny smiled, as one could suppose a person of your size able to carry. The only thing was, she explained, that thanks to your never calling one's attention to it I hadn't made out much more about it and should have been vague, above all, as to where you carried it or kept it. Somewhere under, I should simply have said, like that little silver cross you once showed me, blessed by the Holy Father that you always wear out of sight next to your skin. That relic I've had a glimpse of, with which she continued to invoke the privilege of humor, but the precious little innermost say this time little golden personal nature of you, blessed by a greater power, I think, even than the Pope, that you've never consentently shown me, I'm not sure you've ever consentently shown it to anyone, you've been, in general, too modest. Maggie, trying to follow, almost achieved a little folder for forehead. I strike you as modest today, modest when I stand here and scream at you? Oh, you're screaming I've granted you as something new. I must fit it on somewhere. The question is, however, Mrs. Asingham further preceded, of what the deuce I can fit it on, too, do you mean, she asked, to the fact of our friends being, from yesterday to tomorrow, at a place where they may more or less irresponsibly meet? She spoke with the air of putting it as badly for them as possible. Are you thinking of their being there alone, of their having consented to be? And then, as she had waited without result for her companion to say, But isn't it true that, after you had this time again at the eleventh hour, said you wouldn't, they would really much rather not have gone? Yes, they would certainly much rather not have gone, but I wanted them to go. Then, my dear child, what in the world is the matter? I wanted to see if they would, and they've had to, Maggie added, it was the only thing. Her friend appeared to wonder, From the moment you and your father backed out, Oh, I don't mean go for those people, I mean go for us, for father and me, Maggie went on, because now they know. They know, Van Asingham quavered, That I've been for some time past taking more notice, notice of the queer things in our life. She saw her companion for an instant on the point of asking her what these queer things might be, but Mrs. Asingham had the next minute brushed by that ambiguous opening, and taken, as she evidently felt, a better one. And is it for that you did it? I mean gave up the visit. It's for that I did it, to leave them to themselves, as they less and less want, or at any rate less and less venture to appear to want to be left. As they had for so long arranged things, the princess went on, you see they sometimes have to be. And then, as if baffled by the lucidity of this, Mrs. Asingham for a little said nothing. Now do you think I'm modest? With time, however, Fanny could brilliantly think anything that would serve. I think you're wrong. That, my dear, is my answer to your question. It demands assuredly the straightest I can make. I see no awfulness. I suspect none. I'm deeply distressed, she added, that you should do anything else. It drew again from Maggie a long look. You've never even imagined anything? Oh, God forbid, for it's exactly as a woman of imagination that I speak. There's no moment of my life at which I'm not imagining something, and it's thanks to that, darling, Mrs. Asingham pursued, that I figure the sincerity with which your husband, whom you see as viciously occupied with your stepmother, is interested, is tenderly interested, and is admirable, adorable wife. She paused a minute as to give her friend the full benefit of this, as to Maggie's measure of which, however, no sign came, and then, poor woman, haplessly, she crowned her effort. He wouldn't hurt a hair of your head. It had produced in Maggie at once, and apparently in the intended form of a smile, the most extraordinary expression. Ah, there it is! But her guests had already gone on. And I'm absolutely certain that Charlotte wouldn't either. It kept the Princess with her strange grimace standing there. No. Charlotte wouldn't either. That's how they've had again to go off together. They've been afraid not to, lest it should disturb me, aggravate me, somehow work upon me, as I insisted that they must, that we couldn't all fail, though Father and Charlotte hadn't really accepted. As I did this, they had to yield to the fear that they're showing as afraid to move together would count for them as the greatest danger, which would be the danger, you see, of my feeling myself wronged. Their least danger, they know, is in going on with all the things that I've seemed to accept, and that I've given no indication at any moment of not accepting. Everything that has come up for them has come up in an extraordinary manner without my having by a sound or a sign given myself away, so that it's all as wonderful as you may conceive. They move at any rate among the dangers I speak of, between that of their doing too much, and that of their not having any longer the confidence or the nerve, or whatever you may call it to do enough. Her tone by this time might have shown a strangeness to match her smile, which was still more marked as she wound up, and that's how I make them do what I like. It had an effect on Mrs. Asingham, who rose with the deliberation that, from point to point, marked the widening of her grasp. My dear child, you're amazing. Amazing? You're terrible. Maggie thoughtfully shook her head. No, I'm not terrible, and you don't think me so. I do strike you as surprising, no doubt, but surprisingly mild, because don't you see I am mild? I can bear anything. Oh, bear, Mrs. Asingham fluted. For love, said the princess, fanny hesitated. Of your father? For love, Maggie repeated. It kept her friend watching. Of your husband? For love, Maggie said again. It was for the moment, as if the distinctness of this might have determined in her companion a choice between two or three highly different alternatives. Mrs. Asingham rejoined her at all events, however much or however little it was a choice, was presently a triumph. Speaking with this love of your own, then, have you undertaken to convey to me that you believe your husband and your father's wife to be inacted and, in fact, lovers of each other? And then, as the princess didn't at first answer, do you call such an allegation as that mild? Oh, I'm not pretending to be mild to you, but I've told you, and moreover you must have seen for yourself how much so I've been to them. Mrs. Asingham, more brightly again, bridled. Is that what you call it when you make them, for terror, as you say, do as you like? Ah, there wouldn't be any terror for them if they had nothing to hide. Mrs. Asingham faced her, quite steady now. Are you really conscious, love, of what you're saying? I'm saying that I'd be wilted and tormented, and that I've no one but you to speak to. I've thought, I've in fact been sure, that you've seen for yourself how much this is the case. It's why I believe you would meet me half way. Half way to what? To denouncing, Fanny asked. Two persons, friends of yours, whom I've always immensely admired and liked, and against whom I have at the shadow of a charge to make. 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. Asingham, 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 portentious 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. Asingham 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. And 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. Asingham 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. Asingham'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. Asingham 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 in 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. Asingham 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 counselor. 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. Asingham 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. Asingham faced her. Ah, my dear, upon my positive word is 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 faith in them, it comes to the same thing. Maggie, at this last, appeared for a moment to think again, as 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. Asingham's turn to want more. I 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. CHAPTER XXXI 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 Fonz, 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 assingums. The grounds she could best occupy to her sense was that of her being moved as in this connection 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 re-explained 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 marvelous 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, and a manner to make their sense of responsibility almost yield to their sense of fascination. Mrs. Asingham 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 embryo. 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. Asingham 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 have 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 worked 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. In what do you make, the Colonel could at this always and perturbably 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 picturing 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's 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. It's having to be recognized between them that he doubts. That's where my part is so plain, to see her through, to see her through to the end. Exultation for the moment always lighted Mrs. Asingham'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 your 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. Don't give me away, for you know she easily can. This regularly was the most lurid turn of their road, but Bob Asingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. Easily she can utterly dishonor 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. Asingham 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 of 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 practiced 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 control, 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 of the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with a 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 connection, how, with time given him, he felt a speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the worst, weak 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? May it they see my motive in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimized father and daughter? She positively liked to keep it up. May it 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 as fill of money? May it it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain between us, something quite unholy and loosh? It produced in the poor carnal, infallibly, the echo. Loosh, 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 hard 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 have 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, say la sévue, 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 behavior of your sweet wife, since as I say there is no imagination so lively once it started as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, our blasé 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 favorite 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. Asing, amid 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. Asingham 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. Being ever, not a breath, not a look, I'll guarantee, shall I have whatever happens for 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, shall 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. Asingham, 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. Then what do you call her lie? Why, the pretense 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, and the absence of proof. It was here each time that Fanny Asingham 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 see 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 as 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 is against any idea of her fathers, 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 Fonz 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 Fonz, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. Care of 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 shelling. 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 Fonz. 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 will keep the others? The others? Who will 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 Casseldinge? The consciousness, she had never lost her promptness, of having no stones to throw at anyone 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 Matchum, 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, and as much as they didn't become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening. On this historic circumstance Mrs. Asingham 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. What's too inconceivably funny, husband? I have no idea. I beg your pardon. You've just shown it. You never speak of him, but is 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 is short for them all. They'll be mystified, confounded, tormented, but they won't know, and all they're possible putting their heads together won't make them. That, said Fanny Asingham, 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 hours. She flared up with this prophecy. It will be Maggie herself who will meet it out. Maggie. She'll know about her father, everything. Everything, she repeated. From the vision of which each time Mrs. Asingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. But she'll never tell us. End of Chapter 31