He found himself therefore saying, with gaiety, even to Fanny Assingham, for their common, concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place: “What WOULD our cari sposi have made of it here? what would they, you know, really?”— which overflow would have been reckless if, already, and surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying: “Ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for you?”— but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and cheer. He had his view, as well — or at least a partial one — of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver’s last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being — as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself — the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s — these matters and others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst, be picturesque — for she habitually spoke of herself as “local” to Sloane Street whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement, in her, of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn’t really watching him — ground for which would have been too terribly grave — she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: SO she might, precisely, mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take — the Prince could see it all: it wasn’t a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn’t even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips, that she now knew her — he didn’t then say “Ah, see what you’ve done: isn’t it rather your own fault?” He behaved differently altogether: eminently distinguished himself — for she told him she had never seen him so universally distinguished — he yet distinguished her in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for “bridge” and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his “niceness” to her — she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes — had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration.
“She understands,” he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs. Verver —“she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it. She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can’t say in so many words ‘Don’t think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.’ I don’t get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it. But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that she’s — well,” the Prince wound up, “what you may call practically all right.” Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn’t call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit’s end was she, for once, clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on, be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall then was empty, before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemaids were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end, where they might imitate, with art, the unpremeditated. Above all, here, for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman’s tone had even now a certain dryness. “It’s very good of her, my dear, to trust us. But what else can she do?”
“Why, whatever people do when they don’t trust. Let one see they don’t.”
“But let whom see?”
“Well, let ME, say, to begin with.”
“And should you mind that?”
He had a slight show of surprise. “Shouldn’t you?”
“Her letting you see? No,” said Charlotte; “the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don’t look out, may let HER see.” To which she added: “You may let her see, you know, that you’re afraid.”
“I’m only afraid of you, a little, at moments,” he presently returned. “But I shan’t let Fanny see that.”
It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Assingham’s vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done. “What in the world can she do against us? There’s not a word that she can breathe. She’s helpless; she can’t speak; she would be herself the first to be dished by it.” And then as he seemed slow to follow: “It all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything, from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage.”
The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. “Mayn’t she also be said, a good deal, to have made yours? That was intended, I think, wasn’t it? for a kind of rectification.”
Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still. “I don’t mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I’m not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I’m speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up today. She can’t go to them and say ‘It’s very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.’”
He took it in still, with his long look at her. “All the more that she wasn’t. She was right. Everything’s right,” he went on, “and everything will stay so.”
“Then that’s all I say.”
But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. “We’re happy, and they’re happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?”
“Ah, my dear,” said Charlotte, “it’s not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she’s FIXED, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It’s you who have seemed haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.” And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile. “We ARE prepared — for anything, for everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She’s condemned to consistency; she’s doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore,” Mrs. Verver gently laughed, “she has the chance of her life!”
“So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere?— may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?”
The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. “You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel, at any rate, that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It’s enough for me that she’ll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.” And Charlotte’s face, with these words — to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them — fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption — so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? Sh............