She had paused there before him while he wondered. "You mean she'll get the Prince back?"

She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. "It isn't a question of recovery. It won't be a question of any vulgar struggle. To 'get him back' she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him." With which f.a.n.n.y shook her head.

"What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while, she really HASN'T had him. Never."

"Ah, my dear--!" the poor Colonel panted.

"Never!" his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. "Do you remember what I said to you long ago--that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?"

The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be feared, robust. "What haven't you, love, said in your time?"

"So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, That therefore," f.a.n.n.y continued, "is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense will have to open."

"I see." He nodded. "To the wrong." He nodded again, almost cheerfully--as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a lunatic. "To the very, very wrong."

But his wife's spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher. "To what's called Evil--with a very big E: for the first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it." And she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure. "To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed"--and here Mrs. a.s.singham noted a limit "unless indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough."

He considered. "But enough for what then, dear--if not enough to break her heart?"

"Enough to give her a shaking!" Mrs. a.s.singham rather oddly replied. "To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won't break her heart.

It will make her," she explained--"well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world."

"But isn't it a pity," the Colonel asked, "that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?"

"Oh, 'disagreeable'--? They'll have had to be disagreeable--to show her a little where she is. They'll have HAD to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live."

Bob a.s.singham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to "time" her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife's words ideally implied.

"Decide to live--ah yes!--for her child."

"Oh, bother her child!"--and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when f.a.n.n.y now stopped short. "To live, you poor dear, for her father--which is another pair of sleeves!"

And Mrs. a.s.singham's whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. "Any idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She'll have to save HIM."

"To 'save' him--?"

"To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT"--and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband's very eyes--"will be work cut out!"

With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. "Good night!"

There was something in her manner, however--or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. "Ah, but, you know, that's rather jolly!"

"Jolly'--?" she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.

"I mean it's rather charming."

"'Charming'--?" It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.

"I mean it's rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be.

Only," he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections. .h.i.therto dim--"only I don't quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so 'rum,' hasn't also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on."

"Ah, there you are! It's the question that I've all along been asking myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued--she let him have it straight. "And it's the question of an idiot."

"An idiot--?"

"Well, the idiot that I'VE been, in all sorts of ways--so often, of late, have I asked it. You're excusable, since you ask it but now. The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face."

"Then what in the world is it?"

"Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him--the very pa.s.sion of her brave little piety. That's the way it has worked," Mrs. a.s.singham explained "and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a way as possible.

But it has been working from a rum start. From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced--!"

With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.

"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That WAS a rum start."

But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense, for a moment, intolerable. "Yes--there I am! I was really at the bottom of it," she declared; "I don't know what possessed me--but I planned for him, I goaded him on." With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. "Or, rather, I DO know what possessed me--for wasn't he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn't he, quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn't he, quite charmingly, show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie," she thus lucidly continued, "couldn't, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past--to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping THEM off. One perceived this," she went on--"out of the abundance of one's affection and one's sympathy."

It all blessedly came back to her--when it wasn't all, for the fiftieth time, obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. "One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always IS, to think one sees people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one's excuse here," she insisted, "was that these people clearly DIDN'T see them for themselves--didn't see them at all. It struck one for very pity--that they were making a mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They didn't know HOW to live--and somehow one couldn't, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it. That's what I pay for"--and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. "I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my d.a.m.nable, my unnecessary interest.

Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte--Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who COULD keep off ravening women--without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr.

Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something, of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean--it looks at me," she veritably moaned, "out of your face! But all I can say is that it didn't; the reason largely being--once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan--that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn't quite make out either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting."

"I see--I see." She had paused, meeting all the while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. "One quite understands, my dear."

It only, however, kept her there sombre. "I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest"--and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more possessed her: "you've only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see," she said with an ineffable headshake, "that I don't stand up! I'm down, down, down," she declared; "yet" she as quickly added--"there's just one little thing that helps to save my life." And she kept him waiting but an instant. "They might easily--they would perhaps even certainly--have done something worse."

He thought. "Worse than that Charlotte--?"

"Ah, don't tell me," she cried, "that there COULD have been nothing worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary."

He was almost simultaneous. "Extraordinary!"

"She observes the forms," said f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham.

He hesitated. "With the Prince--?"

"FOR the Prince. And with the others," she went on. "With Mr.

Verver--wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms"--she had to do even THEM justice--"are two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them."

But he jerked back. "Ah, my dear, I wouldn't say it for the world!"

"Say," she none the less pursued, "he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for."

"You mean then he doesn't care for Charlotte--?" This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: "No!"

"Then what on earth are they up to?" Still, however, she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time, further, to risk, soothingly, another question. "Are the 'forms' you speak of--that are two-thirds of conduct--what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?"

"Yes--absolutely. THEIR forms."

"'Theirs'--?"

"Maggie's and Mr. Verver's--those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the Prince. Those," she developed, "that, so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones."