jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. So she picked out, after consideration, a solitary plum. 'So placed that YOU have to arrange?'
'Certainly I have to arrange.'
'And the Prince also—if the effect for him is the same?'
'Really, I think, not less.'
'And does he arrange,' Mrs. Assingham asked, 'to make up HIS arrears?' The question had risen to her lips—it was as if another morsel, on the dish, had tempted her. The sound of it struck her own ear, immediately, as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended; but she quickly saw that she must follow it up, at any risk, with simplicity, and that what was simplest was the ease of boldness. 'Make them up, I mean, by coming to see YOU?'
Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair. She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle. 'He never comes.'
'Oh!' said Fanny Assingham: with which she felt a little stupid. 'There it is. He might so well, you know, otherwise.'
''Otherwise'?'—and Fanny was still vague.
It passed, this time, over her companion, whose eyes, wandering, to a distance, found themselves held. The Prince was at hand again; the Ambassador was still at his side; they were stopped a moment by a uniformed personage, a little old man, of apparently the highest military character, bristling with medals and orders. This gave Charlotte time to go on. 'He has not been for three months.' And then as with her friend's last word in her ear: ''Otherwise'—yes. He arranges otherwise. And in my position,' she added, 'I might too. It's too absurd we shouldn't meet.'
'You've met, I gather,' said Fanny Assingham, 'to-night.'
'Yes—as far as that goes. But what I mean is that I might—placed for it as we both are—go to see HIM.'
'And do you?' Fanny asked with almost mistaken solemnity.
The perception of this excess made Charlotte, whether for gravity or for irony, hang fire a minute. 'I HAVE been. But that's nothing,' she said, 'in itself, and I tell you of it only to show you how our situation works. It essentially becomes one, a situation, for both of us. The Prince's, however, is his own affair—I meant but to speak of mine.'
'Your situation's perfect,' Mrs. Assingham presently declared.
'I don't say it isn't. Taken, in fact, all round, I think it is. And I don't, as I tell you, complain of it. The only thing is that I have to act as it demands of me.'
'To 'act'?' said Mrs. Assingham with an irrepressible quaver.
'Isn't it acting, my dear, to accept it? I do accept it. What do you want me to do less?'
'I want you to believe that you're a very fortunate person.'
'Do you call that LESS?' Charlotte asked with a smile. 'From the point of view of my freedom I call it more. Let it take, my position, any name you like.'
'Don't let it, at any rate'—and Mrs. Assingham's impatience prevailed at last over her presence of mind—'don't let it make you think too much of your freedom.'
'I don't know what you call too much—for how can I not see it as it is? You'd see your own quickly enough if the Colonel gave you the same liberty—and I haven't to tell you, with your so much greater knowledge of everything, what it is that gives such liberty most. For yourself personally of course,' Charlotte went on, 'you only know the state of neither needing it nor missing it. Your husband doesn't treat you as of less importance to him than some other woman.'
'Ah, don't talk to me of other women!' Fanny now overtly panted. 'Do you call Mr. Verver's perfectly natural interest in his daughter—?'
'The greatest affection of which he is capable?' Charlotte took it up in all readiness. 'I do distinctly—and in spite of my having done all I could think of—to make him capable of a greater. I've done, earnestly, everything I could—I've made it, month after month, my study. But I haven't succeeded—it has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However,' she pursued, 'I've hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned.' And then as she met in her friend's face the absence of any such remembrance: 'He did tell me that he wanted me just BECAUSE I could be useful about her.' With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. 'So you see I AM!'
It was on Fanny Assingham's lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn't see; she came in fact within an ace of saying: 'You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work —since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?' But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was 'more in it' than any admission she had made represented—and she had held herself familiar with admissions: so that, not to seem to understand where she couldn't accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn't approve, and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend's consistency. The only thing was that, as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. 'I can't conceive, my dear, what you're talking about!'
Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour, for the first time, perceptibly heightened. She looked, for the minute, as her companion had looked—as if twenty protests, blocking each other's way, had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow. 'You give me up then?'
'Give you up—?'
'You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend's loyalty? If you do you're not just, Fanny; you're even, I think,' she went on, 'rather cruel; and it's least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.' She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet
