"That danger being their position. What their position contains--of all the elements--I needn't at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily--for that's the mercy--everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness," said f.a.n.n.y, "is primarily her husband's."

He stood for a moment; he WOULD have it straight. "Whose husband's?"

"Mr. Verver's," she went on. "The blindness is most of all his. That they feel--that they see. But it's also his wife's."

"Whose wife's?" he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention. And then as she only gloomed: "The Prince's?"

"Maggie's own--Maggie's very own," she pursued as for herself.

He had a pause. "Do you think Maggie so blind?"

"The question isn't of what I think. The question's of the conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte--who have better opportunities than I for judging."

The Colonel again wondered. "Are you so very sure their opportunities are better?"

"Well," his wife asked, "what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?"

"Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity--of their extraordinary situation and relation--as much as they."

"With the difference, darling," she returned with some spirit, "that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat they're in, but I'm not, thank G.o.d, in it myself. To-day, however," Mrs.

a.s.singham added, "to-day in Eaton Square I did see."

"Well then, what?"

But she mused over it still. "Oh, many things. More, somehow, than ever before. It was as if, G.o.d help me, I was seeing FOR them--I mean for the others. It was as if something had happened--I don't know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place--that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes." These eyes indeed of the poor lady's rested on her companion's, meanwhile, with the l.u.s.tre not so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously, to rea.s.sure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action: she must rea.s.sure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon. "It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them--"

"What makes them?"--he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.

"Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say, to-day," she went on, "it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes." On which, as to shake off her perversity, f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham sprang up. But she remained there, under the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of "type," to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. "I can imagine the way it works," she said; "it's so easy to understand. Yet I don't want to be wrong," she the next moment broke out "I don't, I don't want to be wrong!"

"To make a mistake, you mean?"

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. "I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate--in thought--crimes."

And she spoke with all intensity. "I'm a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I'd do it again--feel that I'd do things myself."

"Ah, my dear!" the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.

"Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you you never have. You've done every thing else, but you've never done that.

But what I really don't a bit want," she declared, "is to abet them or to protect them."

Her companion turned this over. "What is there to protect them from?--if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing that justly exposes them."

And it in fact half pulled her up. "Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think."

"Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing--?"

She waited again. "It isn't my 'whole' idea. Nothing is my 'whole'

idea--for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so much in the air."

"Oh, in the air--!" the Colonel dryly breathed.

"Well, what's in the air always HAS--hasn't it?--to come down to the earth. And Maggie," Mrs. a.s.singham continued, "is a very curious little person. Since I was 'in,' this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done--well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I hadn't yet felt it."

"For 'some' reason? For what reason?" And then, as his wife at first said nothing: "Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?"

"She's always so different from anyone else in the world that it's hard to say when she's different from herself. But she has made me," said f.a.n.n.y after an instant, "think of her differently. She drove me home."

"Home here?"

"First to Portland Place--on her leaving her father: since she does, once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived--if they have arrived--expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know--she has clothes."

The Colonel didn't in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. "Oh, you mean a change?"

"Twenty changes, if you like--all sorts of things. She dresses, really, Maggie does, as much for her father--and she always did--as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married--and just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. n.o.ble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I a.s.sure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up."

It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob a.s.singham could more or less enter. "Maggie and the child spread so?"

"Maggie and the child spread so."

Well, he considered. "It IS rather rum,"

"That's all I claim"--she seemed thankful for the word. "I don't say it's anything more--but it IS, distinctly, rum."

Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. "'More'? What more COULD it be?"

"It could be that she's unhappy, and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy"--Mrs. a.s.singham had figured it out--"that's just the way, I'm convinced, she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since--as I'm also convinced--she, in the midst of everything, adores her husband as much as ever?"

The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. "Then if she's so happy, please what's the matter?"

It made his wife almost spring at him. "You think then she's secretly wretched?"

But he threw up his arms in deprecation. "Ah, my dear, I give them up to YOU. I've nothing more to suggest."

"Then it's not sweet of you." She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. "You admit that it is 'rum.'"

And this indeed fixed again, for a moment, his intention. "Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?"

"Never, that I know of, a word. It isn't the sort of thing she does. And whom has she, after all," Mrs. a.s.singham added, "to complain to?"

"Hasn't she always you?"

"Oh, 'me'! Charlotte and I, nowadays--!" She spoke as of a chapter closed. "Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me, more and more, as extraordinary."

A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel's face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then, isn't that why one must just resign one's self to wash one's hands of them--to be lost?"

Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for--her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. "Hasn't she then, Charlotte, always her husband--?"

"To complain to? She'd rather die."

"Oh!"--and Bob a.s.singham's face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. "Hasn't she the Prince then?"