now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling—this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn't rabid, but he wasn't either, as a man of a proper spirit, to be frightened. 'What is that then—if I accept it—but as strong a reason as I can want for just LEARNING to know you?'
She faced him always—kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same time, in her odd way, as for mercy. 'How can you tell whether if you did you would?'
It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. 'I mean when it's a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late.'
'I think it's a question,' he promptly enough made answer, 'of liking you the more just for your saying these things. You should make something,' he added, 'of my liking you.'
'I make everything. But are you sure of having exhausted all other ways?'
This, of a truth, enlarged his gaze. 'But what other ways?'
'Why, you've more ways of being kind than anyone I ever knew.'
'Take it then,' he answered, 'that I'm simply putting them all together for you.' She looked at him, on this, long again—still as if it shouldn't be said she hadn't given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with admiration. 'You're very, very honourable.'
'It's just what I want to be. I don't see,' she added, 'why you're not right, I don't see why you're not happy, as you are. I can not ask myself, I can not ask YOU,' she went on, 'if you're really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oughtn't we,' she asked, 'to think a little of others? Oughtn't I, at least, in loyalty—at any rate in delicacy—to think of Maggie?' With which, intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained. 'She's everything to you—she has always been. Are you so certain that there's room in your life—?'
'For another daughter?—is that what you mean?' She had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.
He had not, however, disconcerted her. 'For another young woman—very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion,' said Charlotte Stant.
'Can't a man be, all his life then,' he almost fiercely asked, 'anything but a father?' But he went on before she could answer. 'You talk about differences, but they've been already made—as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage—made, I mean, for me. She constantly thinks of it—it allows her no rest. To put her at peace is therefore,' he explained, 'what I'm trying, with you, to do. I can't do it alone, but I can do it with your help. You can make her,' he said, 'positively happy about me.'
'About you?' she thoughtfully echoed. 'But what can I make her about herself?'
'Oh, if she's at ease about me the rest will take care of itself. The case,' he declared, 'is in your hands. You'll effectually put out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me.'
Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face, but it was all the more honourable to her, as he had just called it that she should want to see each of the steps of his conviction. 'If you've been driven to the 'likes' of me, mayn't it show that you've felt truly forsaken?'
'Well, I'm willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that I feel consoled.'
'But HAVE you,' she demanded, 'really felt so?' He hesitated.
'Consoled?'
'Forsaken.'
'No—I haven't. But if it's her idea—!' If it was her idea, in short, that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. 'That is if it's my idea. I happen, you see, to like my idea.'
'Well, it's beautiful and wonderful. But isn't it, possibly,' Charlotte asked, 'not quite enough to marry me for?'
'Why so, my dear child? Isn't a man's idea usually what he does marry for?'
Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps be a large question, or at all events something of an extension of one they were immediately concerned with. 'Doesn't that a good deal depend on the sort of thing it may be?' She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them, might differ; with which, however, giving no more time to it, she sounded another question. 'Don't you appear rather to put it to me that I may accept your offer for Maggie's sake? Somehow'—she turned it over—'I don't so clearly SEE her quite so much finding reassurance, or even quite so much needing it.'
'Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so ready to leave us?'
Ah, Charlotte on the contrary made much! 'She was ready to leave us because she had to be. From the moment the Prince wanted it she could only go with him.'
'Perfectly—so that, if you see your way, she will be able to 'go with him' in future as much as she likes.'
Charlotte appeared to examine for a minute, in Maggie's interest, this privilege—the result of which was a limited concession. 'You've certainly worked it out!'
'Of course I've worked it out—that's exactly what I HAVE done. She hadn't for a long time been so happy about anything as at your being there with me.'
'I was to be with you,' said Charlotte, 'for her security.'
'Well,' Adam Verver rang out, 'this IS her security. You've only, if you can't see it, to ask her.'
''Ask' her?'—the girl echoed it in wonder. 'Certainly—in so many words. Telling her you don't believe me.'
