'I've often wondered,' Maggie mused, 'what Charlotte really understood. But it's one of the things she has never told me.'
'Then as it's one of the things she has never told me either, we shall probably never know it; and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things,' said Mrs. Assingham, 'that we shall never know.'
Maggie took it in with a long reflection. 'Never.'
'But there are others,' her friend went on, 'that stare us in the face and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.'
It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way; but she rallied to this with a rush. 'Extraordinary.'
'Magnificent,' said Fanny Assingham.
Her companion held tight to it. 'Magnificent.'
'Then he'll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he'll do to the end. He didn't undertake it to break down; in what—quiet, patient, exquisite as he is—did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won't have done it on this occasion.'
'Ah, this occasion!'—and Maggie's wail showed her, of a sudden, thrown back on it. 'Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn't?'
'If he doesn't then, so much the better. Leave him alone.'
'Do you mean give him up?'
'Leave HER,' Fanny Assingham went on. 'Leave her TO him.'
Maggie looked at her darkly. 'Do you mean leave him to HER? After this?'
'After everything. Aren't they, for that matter, intimately together now?'
''Intimately'—? How do I know?'
But Fanny kept it up. 'Aren't you and your husband—in spite of everything?'
Maggie's eyes still further, if possible, dilated. 'It remains to be seen!'
'If you're not then, where's your faith?'
'In my husband—?'
Mrs. Assingham but for an instant hesitated. 'In your father. It all comes back to that. Rest on it.'
'On his ignorance?'
Fanny met it again. 'On whatever he may offer you. TAKE that.'
'Take it—?' Maggie stared.
Mrs. Assingham held up her head. 'And be grateful.' On which, for a minute, she let the Princess face her. 'Do you see?'
'I see,' said Maggie at last.
'Then there you are.' But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window, as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs. Assingham's reverted to that complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, was that both of recurrent wonder and recurrent protest. She went over it, looked at it afresh and yielded now to her impulse to feel it in her hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and was surprised, thus, with the weight of it—she had seldom handled so much massive gold. That effect itself somehow prompted her to further freedom and presently to saying: 'I don't believe in this, you know.'
It brought Maggie round to her. 'Don't believe in it? You will when I tell you.'
'Ah, tell me nothing! I won't have it,' said Mrs. Assingham. She kept the cup in her hand, held it there in a manner that gave Maggie's attention to her, she saw the next moment, a quality of excited suspense. This suggested to her, oddly, that she had, with the liberty she was taking, an air of intention, and the impression betrayed by her companion's eyes grew more distinct in a word of warning. 'It's of value, but its value's impaired, I've learned, by a crack.'
'A crack?—in the gold—?'
'It isn't gold.' With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie smiled.
'That's the point.'
'What is it then?'
'It's glass—and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.'
'Glass?—of this weight?'
'Well,' said Maggie, 'it's crystal—and was once, I suppose, precious. But what,' she then asked, 'do you mean to do with it?'
She had come away from her window, one of the three by which the wide room, enjoying an advantageous 'back,' commanded the western sky and caught a glimpse of the evening flush; while Mrs. Assingham, possessed of the bowl, and possessed too of this indication of a flaw, approached another for the benefit of the slowly-fading light. Here, thumbing the singular piece, weighing it, turning it over, and growing suddenly more conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently spoke again. 'A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.'
Maggie, by this time at some distance from her, waited a moment. 'If you mean by my idea the knowledge that has come to me THAT—'
But Fanny, with decision, had already taken her up. 'There's only one knowledge that concerns us—one fact with which we can have anything to do.'
