“I don’t quite see, my dear,” Colonel Assingham said to his wife the
night of Charlotte’s arrival, “I don’t quite see, I’m bound to say,
why you take it, even at the worst, so ferociously hard. It isn’t your
fault, after all, is it? I’ll be hanged, at any rate, if it’s mine.”
The hour was late, and the young lady who had disembarked at Southampton
that morning to come up by the “steamer special,” and who had then
settled herself at an hotel only to re-settle herself a couple of hours
later at a private house, was by this time, they might hope, peacefully
resting from her exploits. There had been two men at dinner, rather
battered brothers-in-arms, of his own period, casually picked up by her
host the day before, and when the gentlemen, after the meal, rejoined
the ladies in the drawing-room, Charlotte, pleading fatigue, had already
excused herself. The beguiled warriors, however, had stayed till after
eleven—Mrs. Assingham, though finally quite without illusions, as
she said, about the military character, was always beguiling to old
soldiers; and as the Colonel had come in, before dinner, only in time
to dress, he had not till this moment really been summoned to meet
his companion over the situation that, as he was now to learn, their
visitor’s advent had created for them. It was actually more than
midnight, the servants had been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels
had ceased to come in through a window still open to the August air, and
Robert Assingham had been steadily learning, all the while, what it
thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from him presented
themselves, for the moment, as the essence of his spirit and his
attitude. He disengaged, he would be damned if he didn’t—they were
both phrases he repeatedly used—his responsibility. The simplest, the
sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant
language. His wife had once told him, in relation to his violence of
speech; that such excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired
General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and
winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little
fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husband’s exaggerated
emphasis was his box of toy soldiers, his military game. It harmlessly
gratified in him, for his declining years, the military instinct; bad
words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could
represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious
charges of cavalry. It was natural, it was delightful—the romance, and
for her as well, of camp life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It
was fighting to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.
Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his wealth of
expression, he had not yet found the image that described her favourite
game; all he could do was practically to leave it to her, emulating
her own philosophy. He had again and again sat up late to discuss those
situations in which her finer consciousness abounded, but he had never
failed to deny that anything in life, anything of hers, could be a
situation for himself. She might be in fifty at once if she liked—and
it was what women did like, at their ease, after all; there always
being, when they had too much of any, some man, as they were well
aware, to get them out. He wouldn’t at any price, have one, of any sort
whatever, of his own, or even be in one along with her. He watched her,
accordingly, in her favourite element, very much as he had sometimes
watched, at the Aquarium, the celebrated lady who, in a slight, though
tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did tricks in the tank of
water which looked so cold and uncomfortable to the non-amphibious. He
listened to his companion to-night, while he smoked his last pipe,
he watched her through her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a
shilling. But it was true that, this being the case, he desired the
value of his money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so
bent on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was going to happen,
and what, at the worst, could the poor girl do, even granting she
wanted to do anything? What, at the worst, for that matter, could she be
conceived to have in her head?
“If she had told me the moment she got here,” Mrs. Assingham replied, “I
shouldn’t have my difficulty in finding out. But she wasn’t so obliging,
and I see no sign at all of her becoming so. What’s certain is that
she didn’t come for nothing. She wants”—she worked it out at her
leisure—“to see the Prince again. THAT isn’t what troubles me. I mean
that such a fact, as a fact, isn’t. But what I ask myself is, What does
she want it FOR?”
“What’s the good of asking yourself if you know you don’t know?” The
Colonel sat back at his own ease, with an ankle resting on the other
knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of an extremely
slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat integument of fine-spun
black silk and patent leather. It seemed to confess, this member, to
consciousness of military discipline, everything about it being as
polished and perfect, as straight and tight and trim, as a soldier on
parade. It went so far as to imply that someone or other would have
“got” something or other, confinement to barracks or suppression of
pay, if it hadn’t been just as it was. Bob Assingham was distinguished
altogether by a leanness of person, a leanness quite distinct from
physical laxity, which might have been determined, on the part of
superior powers, by views of transport and accommodation, and which in
fact verged on the abnormal. He “did” himself as well as his friends
mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial, with abdominal
cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a consequent looseness
of apparel that, combined with a choice of queer light shades and of
strange straw-like textures, of the aspect of Chinese mats, provocative
of wonder at his sources of supply, suggested the habit of tropic
islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on
wide verandahs. His smooth round head, with the particular shade of
its white hair, was like a silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the
bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The hollows of
his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes within them, were like
little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew everything that could
be known about life, which he regarded as, for far the greater part, a
matter of pecuniary arrangement. His wife accused him of a want, alike,
of moral and of intellectual reaction, or rather indeed of a complete
incapacity for either. He never went even so far as to understand what
she meant, and it didn’t at all matter, since he could be in spite
of the limitation a perfectly social creature. The infirmities, the
predicaments of men neither surprised nor shocked him, and indeed—which
was perhaps his only real loss in a thrifty career—scarce even amused;
he took them for granted without horror, classifying them after their
kind and calculating results and chances. He might, in old bewildering
climates, in old campaigns of cruelty and license, have had such
revelations and known such amazements that he had nothing more to
learn. But he was wholly content, in spite of his fondness, in domestic
discussion, for the superlative degree; and his kindness, in the oddest
way, seemed to have nothing to do with his experience. He could deal
with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near them.
This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose
meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited, for their general economy,
the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a
pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least
of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps
too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect
penetration. His connection with it was really a master-piece of
editing. This was in fact, to come back, very much the process he might
have been proposing to apply to Mrs. Assingham’s view of what was
now before them; that is to their connection with Charlotte Stant’s
possibilities. They wouldn’t lavish on them all their little fortune
of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn’t spend their cherished
savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte, moreover, who was a
smooth and compact inmate, and whom he felt as, with her instincts that
made against waste, much more of his own sort than his wife. He could
talk with her about Fanny almost better than he could talk with Fanny
about Charlotte. However, he made at present the best of the latter
necessity, even to the pressing of the question he has been noted as
having last uttered. “If you can’t think what to be afraid of, wait till
you can think. Then you’ll do it much better. Or otherwise, if that’s
waiting too long, find out from HER. Don’t try to find out from ME. Ask
her herself.”
Mrs. Assingham denied, as we know, that her husband had a play of mind;
so that she could, on her side, treat these remarks only as if they
had been senseless physical gestures or nervous facial movements. She
overlooked them as from habit and kindness; yet there was no one to whom
she talked so persistently of such intimate things. “It’s her friendship
with Maggie that’s the immense complication. Because THAT,” she audibly
mused, “is so natural.”
“Then why can’t she have come out for it?”
“She came out,” Mrs. Assingham continued to meditate, “because she hates
America. There was no place for her there—she didn’t fit in. She wasn’t
in sympathy—no more were the people she saw. Then it’s hideously dear;
she can’t, on her means, begin to live there. Not at all as she can, in
a way, here.”
“In the way, you mean, of living with US?”
“Of living with anyone. She can’t live by visits alone—and she doesn’t
want to. She’s too good for it even if she could. But she will—she
MUST, sooner or later—stay with THEM. Maggie will want her—Maggie will
make her. Besides, she’ll want to herself.”
“Then why won’t that do,” the Colonel asked, “for you to think it’s what
she has come for?”
“How will it do, HOW?”—she went on as without hearing him.
“That’s what one keeps feeling.”
“Why shouldn’t it do beautifully?”
“That anything of the past,” she brooded, “should come back NOW? How
will it do, how will it do?”
“It will do, I daresay, without your wringing your hands over it. When,
my dear,” the Colonel pursued as he smoked, “have you ever seen anything
of yours—anything that you’ve done—NOT do?”
“Ah, I didn’t do this!” It brought her answer straight. “I didn’t bring
her back.”
“Did you expect her to stay over there all her days to oblige you?”
“Not a bit—for I shouldn’t have minded her coming after their
marriage. It’s her coming, this way, before.” To which she added with
inconsequence: “I’m too sorry for her—of course she can’t enjoy it. But
I don’t see what perversity rides her. She needn’t have looked it all
so in the face—as she doesn’t do it, I suppose, simply for discipline.
It’s almost—that’s the bore of it—discipline to ME.”
“Perhaps then,” said Bob Assingham, “that’s what has been her idea. Take
it, for God’s sake, as discipline to you and have done with it. It will
do,” he added, “for discipline to me as well.”
She was far, however, from having done with it; it was a situation with
such different sides, as she said, and to none of which one could, in
justice, be blind. “It isn’t in the least, you know, for instance, that
I believe she’s bad. Never, never,” Mrs. Assingham declared. “I don’t
think that of her.”
“Then why isn’t that enough?”
Nothing was enough, Mrs. Assingham signified, but that she should
develop her thought. “She doesn’t deliberately intend, she doesn’t
consciously wish, the least complication. It’s perfectly true that she
thinks Maggie a dear—as who doesn’t? She’s incapable of any PLAN to
hurt a hair of her head. Yet here she is—and there THEY are,” she wound
up.
Her husband again, for a little, smoked in silence. “What in the world,
between them, ever took place?”
“Between Charlotte and the Prince? Why, nothing—except their having to
recognise that nothing COULD. That was their little romance—it was even
their little tragedy.”
“But what the deuce did they DO?”
“Do? They fell in love with each other—but, seeing it wasn’t possible,
gave each other up.”
“Then where was the romance?”
“Why, in their frustration, in their having the courage to look the
facts in the face.”
“What facts?” the Colonel went on.
“Well, to begin with, that of their neither of them having the means
to marry. If she had had even a little—a little, I mean, for two—I
believe he would bravely have done it.” After which, as her husband but
emitted an odd vague sound, she corrected herself. “I mean if he himself
had had only a little—or a little more than a little, a little for a
prince. They would have done what they could”—she did them justice”—if
there had been a way. But there wasn’t a way, and Charlotte, quite to
her honour, I consider, understood it. He HAD to have money—it was a
question of life and death. It wouldn’t have been a bit amusing, either,
to marry him as a pauper—I mean leaving him one. That was what she
had—as HE had—the reason to see.”
“And their reason is what you call their romance?”
She looked at him a moment. “What do you want more?”
“Didn’t HE,” the Colonel inquired, “want anything more? Or didn’t, for
that matter, poor Charlotte herself?”
She kept her eyes on him; there was a manner in it that half answered.
“They were thoroughly in love. She might have been his—” She checked
herself; she even for a minute lost herself. “She might have been
anything she liked—except his wife.”
“But she wasn’t,” said the Colonel very smokingly.
“She wasn’t,” Mrs. Assingham echoed.
The echo, not loud but deep, filled for a little the room. He seemed to
listen to it die away; then he began again. “How are you sure?”
She waited before saying, but when she spoke it was definite. “There
wasn’t time.”
He had a small laugh for her reason; he might have expected some other.
“Does it take so much time?”
She herself, however, remained serious. “It takes more than they had.”
He was detached, but he wondered. “What was the matter with their time?”
After which, as, remembering it all, living it over and piecing it
together, she only considered, “You mean that you came in with your
idea?” he demanded.
It brought her quickly to the point, and as if also in a measure to
answer herself. “Not a bit of it—THEN. But you surely recall,” she went
on, “the way, a year ago, everything took place. They had parted before
he had ever heard of Maggie.”
“Why hadn’t he heard of her from Charlotte herself?”
“Because she had never spoken of her.”
“Is that also,” the Colonel inquired, “what she has told you?”
“I’m not speaking,” his wife returned, “of what she has told me. That’s
one thing. I’m speaking of what I know by myself. That’s another.”
“You feel, in other words, that she lies to you?” Bob Assingham more
sociably asked.
She neglected the question, treating it as gross. “She never so much, at
the time, as named Maggie.”
It was so positive that it appeared to strike him. “It’s he then who has
told you?”
She after a moment admitted it. “It’s he.”
“And he doesn’t lie?”
“No—to do him justice. I believe he absolutely doesn’t. If I hadn’t
believed it,” Mrs. Assingham declared, for her general justification, “I
would have had nothing to do with him—that is in this connection. He’s
a gentleman—I mean ALL as much of one as he ought to be. And he had
nothing to gain. That helps,” she added, “even a gentleman. It was I
who named Maggie to him—a year from last May. He had never heard of her
before.”
“Then it’s grave,” said the Colonel.
She hesitated. “Do you mean grave for me?”
“Oh, that everything’s grave for ‘you’ is what we take for granted and
are fundamentally talking about. It’s grave—it WAS—for Charlotte. And
it’s grave for Maggie. That is it WAS—when he did see her. Or when she
did see HIM.”
“You don’t torment me as much as you would like,” she presently went on,
“because you think of nothing that I haven’t a thousand times thought
of, and because I think of everything that you never will. It would
all,” she recognised, “have been grave if it hadn’t all been right. You
can’t make out,” she contended, “that we got to Rome before the end of
February.”
He more than agreed. “There’s nothing in life, my dear, that I CAN make
out.”
Well, there was nothing in life, apparently, that she, at real need,
couldn’t. “Charlotte, who had been there, that year, from early, quite
from November, left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the 10th of
April. She was to have stayed on—she was to have stayed, naturally,
more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the
Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at
last really coming. They were coming—that is Maggie was—largely to
see her, and above all to be with her THERE. It was all altered—by
Charlotte’s going to Florence. She went from one day to the other—you
forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd, at the
time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty
was that, though I knew a little, I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know
her relation with him had been, as you say, a ‘near’ thing—that is I
didn’t know HOW near. The poor girl’s departure was a flight—she went
to save herself.”
He had listened more than he showed—as came out in his tone. “To save
herself?”
“Well, also, really, I think, to save HIM too. I saw it afterwards—I
see it all now. He would have been sorry—he didn’t want to hurt her.”
“Oh, I daresay,” the Colonel laughed. “They generally don’t!”
“At all events,” his wife pursued, “she escaped—they both did; for they
had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was
so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had
taken them, it is true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They
had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they
had met more than was known—though it was a good deal known. More,
certainly,” she said, “than I then imagined—though I don’t know what
difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought
him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more
than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he
might have done—things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe
in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I
haven’t”—and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after
adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures—“so I haven’t, I
say to myself, been a fool.”
“Well, are you trying to make out that I’ve said you have? All their
case wants, at any rate,” Bob Assingham declared, “is that you should
leave it well alone. It’s theirs now; they’ve bought it, over the
counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours.”
“Of which case,” she asked, “are you speaking?”
He smoked a minute: then with a groan: “Lord, are there so many?”
“There’s Maggie’s and the Prince’s, and there’s the Prince’s and
Charlotte’s.”
“Oh yes; and then,” the Colonel scoffed, “there’s Charlotte’s and the
Prince’s.”
“There’s Maggie’s and Charlotte’s,” she went on—“and there’s also
Maggie’s and mine. I think too that there’s Charlotte’s and mine. Yes,”
she mused, “Charlotte’s and mine is certainly a case. In short, you see,
there are plenty. But I mean,” she said, “to keep my head.”
“Are we to settle them all,” he inquired, “to-night?”
“I should lose it if things had happened otherwise—if I had acted
with any folly.” She had gone on in her earnestness, unheeding of his
question. “I shouldn’t be able to bear that now. But my good conscience
is my strength; no one can accuse me. The Ververs came on to Rome
alone—Charlotte, after their days with her in Florence, had decided
about America. Maggie, I daresay, had helped her; she must have made her
a present, and a handsome one, so that many things were easy. Charlotte
left them, came to England, ‘joined’ somebody or other, sailed for New
York. I have still her letter from Milan, telling me; I didn’t know at
the moment all that was behind it, but I felt in it nevertheless the
undertaking of a new life. Certainly, in any case, it cleared THAT
air—I mean the dear old Roman, in which we were steeped. It left the
field free—it gave me a free hand. There was no question for me of
anybody else when I brought the two others together. More than that,
there was no question for them. So you see,” she concluded, “where that
puts me.” She got up, on the words, very much as if they were the blue
daylight towards which, through a darksome tunnel, she had been pushing
her way, and the elation in her voice, combined with her recovered
alertness, might have signified the sharp whistle of the train that
shoots at last into the open. She turned about the room; she looked out
a moment into the August night; she stopped, here and there, before the
flowers in bowls and vases. Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved
what was needing proof, as if the issue of her operation had been,
almost unexpectedly, a success. Old arithmetic had perhaps been
fallacious, but the new settled the question. Her husband, oddly,
however, kept his place without apparently measuring these results.
As he had been amused at her intensity, so he was not uplifted by her
relief; his interest might in fact have been more enlisted than he
allowed. “Do you mean,” he presently asked, “that he had already forgot
about Charlotte?”
She faced round as if he had touched a spring. “He WANTED to,
naturally—and it was much the best thing he could do.” She was in
possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. “He
was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what
Maggie then seemed to us.”
“She’s very nice; but she always seems to me, more than anything else,
the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that’s what
she especially seemed to him, you of course place the thing in your
light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn’t, I grant you, have been
so difficult.”
This pulled her up but for an instant. “I never said he didn’t from the
first—I never said that he doesn’t more and more—like Maggie’s money.”
“I never said I shouldn’t have liked it myself,” Bob Assingham returned.
He made no movement; he smoked another minute. “How much did Maggie
know?”
“How much?” She seemed to consider—as if it were between quarts and
gallons—how best to express the quantity. “She knew what Charlotte, in
Florence, had told her.”
“And what had Charlotte told her?”
“Very little.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Why, this—that she couldn’t tell her.” And she explained a little what
she meant. “There are things, my dear—haven’t you felt it yourself,
coarse as you are?—that no one could tell Maggie. There are things
that, upon my word, I shouldn’t care to attempt to tell her now.”
The Colonel smoked on it. “She’d be so scandalised?”
“She’d be so frightened. She’d be, in her strange little way, so hurt.
She wasn’t born to know evil. She must never know it.” Bob Assingham had
a queer grim laugh; the sound of which, in fact, fixed his wife before
him. “We’re taking grand ways to prevent it.”
But she stood there to protest. “We’re not taking any ways. The ways are
all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage
that day in Villa Borghese—the second or third of her days in Rome,
when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr. Verver, and the
Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea.
They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the
rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I
recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man’s
greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a streetcorner as we
passed, that one of the Prince’s baptismal names, the one always used
for him among his relations, was Amerigo: which (as you probably don’t
know, however, even after a lifetime of ME), was the name, four hundred
years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea,
in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in
becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the
thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless
breasts.”
The Colonel’s grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his
wife’s not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land
of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even
at the present moment not directly lighted by an inquiry that managed to
be curious without being apologetic. “But where does the connection come
in?”
His wife was prompt. “By the women—that is by some obliging woman,
of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe
discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to
as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great—great
enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator,
crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among
them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My
point is, at any rate, that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince
was, from the start, helped with the dear Ververs by his wearing it.
The connection became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she
filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague. ‘By that sign,’
I quite said to myself, ‘he’ll conquer’—with his good fortune, of
course, of having the other necessary signs too. It really,” said Mrs.
Assingham, “was, practically, the fine side of the wedge. Which struck
me as also,” she wound up, “a lovely note for the candour of the
Ververs.”
The Colonel took in the tale, but his comment was prosaic. “He knew,
Amerigo, what he was about. And I don’t mean the OLD one.”
“I know what you mean!” his wife bravely threw off.
“The old one”—he pointed his effect “isn’t the only discoverer in the
family.”
“Oh, as much as you like! If he discovered America—or got himself
honoured as if he had—his successors were, in due time, to discover the
Americans. And it was one of them in particular, doubtless, who was to
discover how patriotic we are.”
“Wouldn’t this be the same one,” the Colonel asked, “who really
discovered what you call the connection?”
She gave him a look. “The connection’s a true thing—the connection’s
perfectly historic, Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind.
Don’t you understand,” she asked, “that the history of such people is
known, root and branch, at every moment of its course?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said Bob Assingham.
“Go to the British Museum,” his companion continued with spirit.
“And what am I to do there?”
“There’s a whole immense room, or recess, or department, or whatever,
filled with books written about his family alone. You can see for
yourself.”
“Have you seen for YOUR self?”
She faltered but an instant. “Certainly—I went one day with Maggie. We
looked him up, so to say. They were most civil.” And she fell again into
the current her husband had slightly ruffled. “The effect was produced,
the charm began to work, at all events, in Rome, from that hour of the
Prince’s drive with us. My only course, afterwards, had to be to make
the best of it. It was certainly good enough for that,” Mrs. Assingham
hastened to add, “and I didn’t in the least see my duty in making the
worst. In the same situation, to-day; I wouldn’t act differently. I
entered into the case as it then appeared to me—and as, for the matter
of that, it still does. I LIKED it, I thought all sorts of good of it,
and nothing can even now,” she said with some intensity, “make me think
anything else.”
“Nothing can ever make you think anything you don’t want to,” the
Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. “You’ve got a
precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from
moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What
happened,” he went on, “was that you fell violently in love with the
Prince yourself, and that as you couldn’t get me out of the way you had
to take some roundabout course. You couldn’t marry him, any more than
Charlotte could—that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody
else—it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to
your little friend, to whom there were no objections.”
“Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive
ones—and all excellent, all charming.” She spoke with an absence of
all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and
this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost
her nothing. “It IS always the Prince; and it IS always, thank heaven,
marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be.
That I could help, a year ago, most assuredly made me happy, and it
continues to make me happy.”
“Then why aren’t you quiet?”
“I AM quiet,” said Fanny Assingham.
He looked at her, with his colourless candour, still in his place; she
moved about again, a little, emphasising by her unrest her declaration
of her tranquillity. He was as silent, at first, as if he had taken her
answer, but he was not to keep it long. “What do you make of it that, by
your own show, Charlotte couldn’t tell her all? What do you make of it
that the Prince didn’t tell her anything? Say one understands that there
are things she can’t be told—since, as you put it, she is so easily
scared and shocked.” He produced these objections slowly, giving her
time, by his pauses, to stop roaming and come back to him. But she
was roaming still when he concluded his inquiry. “If there hadn’t been
anything there shouldn’t have been between the pair before Charlotte
bolted—in order, precisely, as you say, that there SHOULDN’T be: why in
the world was what there HAD been too bad to be spoken of?”
Mrs. Assingham, after this question, continued still to circulate—not
directly meeting it even when at last she stopped.
“I thought you wanted me to be quiet.”
“So I do—and I’m trying to make you so much so that you won’t worry
more. Can’t you be quiet on THAT?”
She thought a moment—then seemed to try. “To relate that she had to
‘bolt’ for the reasons we speak of, even though the bolting had done for
her what she wished—THAT I can perfectly feel Charlotte’s not wanting
to do.”
“Ah then, if it HAS done for her what she wished-!” But the Colonel’s
conclusion hung by the “if” which his wife didn’t take up. So it hung
but the longer when he presently spoke again. “All one wonders, in that
case, is why then she has come back to him.”
“Say she hasn’t come back to him. Not really to HIM.”
“I’ll say anything you like. But that won’t do me the same good as your
saying it.”
“Nothing, my dear, will do you good,” Mrs. Assingham returned. “You
don’t care for anything in itself; you care for nothing but to be
grossly amused because I don’t keep washing my hands—!”
“I thought your whole argument was that everything is so right that this
is precisely what you do.”
But his wife, as it was a point she had often made, could go on as
she had gone on before. “You’re perfectly indifferent, really; you’re
perfectly immoral. You’ve taken part in the sack of cities, and I’m sure
you’ve done dreadful things yourself. But I DON’T trouble my head, if
you like. ‘So now there!’” she laughed.
He accepted her laugh, but he kept his way. “Well, I back poor
Charlotte.”
“‘Back’ her?”
“To know what she wants.”
“Ah then, so do I. She does know what she wants.” And Mrs. Assingham
produced this quantity, at last, on the girl’s behalf, as the ripe
result of her late wanderings and musings. She had groped through
their talk, for the thread, and now she had got it. “She wants to be
magnificent.”
“She is,” said the Colonel almost cynically.
“She wants”—his wife now had it fast “to be thoroughly superior, and
she’s capable of that.”
“Of wanting to?”
“Of carrying out her idea.”
“And what IS her idea?”
“To see Maggie through.”
Bob Assingham wondered. “Through what?”
“Through everything. She KNOWS the Prince.”
“And Maggie doesn’t. No, dear thing”—Mrs. Assingham had to recognise
it—“she doesn’t.”
“So that Charlotte has come out to give her lessons?”
She continued, Fanny Assingham, to work out her thought. “She has done
this great thing for him. That is, a year ago, she practically did it.
She practically, at any rate, helped him to do it himself—and helped me
to help him. She kept off, she stayed away, she left him free; and what,
moreover, were her silences to Maggie but a direct aid to him? If she
had spoken in Florence; if she had told her own poor story; if she had,
come back at any time—till within a few weeks ago; if she hadn’t gone
to New York and hadn’t held out there: if she hadn’t done these things
all that has happened since would certainly have been different.
Therefore she’s in a position to be consistent now. She knows the
Prince,” Mrs. Assingham repeated. It involved even again her former
recognition. “And Maggie, dear thing, doesn’t.”
She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but
the deeper drop therefore to her husband’s flat common sense. “In other
words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she’s in danger,
there IS danger.”
“There WON’T be—with Charlotte’s understanding of it. That’s where she
has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact
to be sublime. She is, she will be”—the good lady by this time glowed.
“So she sees it—to become, for her best friend, an element of POSITIVE
safety.”
Bob Assingham looked at it hard. “Which of them do you call her best
friend?”
She gave a toss of impatience. “I’ll leave you to discover!” But the
grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. “It’s for US,
therefore, to be hers.”
“‘Hers’?”
“You and I. It’s for us to be Charlotte’s. It’s for us, on our side, to
see HER through.”
“Through her sublimity?”
“Through her noble, lonely life. Only—that’s essential—it mustn’t be
lonely. It will be all right if she marries.”
“So we’re to marry her?”
“We’re to marry her. It will be,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “the great
thing I can do.” She made it out more and more. “It will make up.”
“Make up for what?” As she said nothing, however, his desire for
lucidity renewed itself. “If everything’s so all right what is there to
make up for?”
“Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a
mistake.”
“You’ll make up for it by making another?” And then as she again took
her time: “I thought your whole point is just that you’re sure.”
“One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always
possibilities.”
“Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?”
It made her again look at him. “Where would you have been, my dear, if I
hadn’t meddled with YOU?”
“Ah, that wasn’t meddling—I was your own. I was your own,” said the
Colonel, “from the moment I didn’t object.”
“Well, these people won’t object. They are my own too—in the sense that
I’m awfully fond of them. Also in the sense,” she continued, “that I
think they’re not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round,
exists—it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to
speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with
it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as
possible—that, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will
cover,” she said with conviction, “all the ground.” And then as his own
conviction appeared to continue as little to match: “The ground, I mean,
of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty and I
shan’t rest till my duty’s performed.” She had arrived by this time at
something like exaltation. “I shall give, for the next year or two if
necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can.”
He took it at last as it came. “You hold there’s no limit to what you
‘can’?”
“I don’t say there’s no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are
good chances—enough of them for hope. Why shouldn’t there be when a
girl is, after all, all that she is?”
“By after ‘all’ you mean after she’s in love with somebody else?”
The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be
fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. “She’s not too much in love not
herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.”
“Has she told you so?”
“Not yet. It’s too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don’t
require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.”
“And what truth?”
“The truth of everything I say.”
“Prove it to whom?”
“Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me—to work
for her. What it will prove,” Mrs. Assingham presently went on, “will be
that she’s cured. That she accepts the situation.”
He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. “The situation of
doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?”
His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was
merely vulgar. “The one thing she can do that will really make new
tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and
right. The thing that will best give her her chance to be magnificent.”
He slowly emitted his smoke. “And best give you, by the same token,
yours to be magnificent with her?”
“I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can.”
Bob Assingham got up. “And you call ME immoral?”
She hesitated. “I’ll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed
to a certain point IS, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality
but high intelligence?” This he was unable to tell her; which left her
more definitely to conclude. “Besides, it’s all, at the worst, great
fun.”
“Oh, if you simply put it at THAT—!”
His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even
thus he couldn’t catch her by it. “Oh, I don’t mean,” she said from the
threshold, “the fun that you mean. Good-night.” In answer to which, as
he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd, short groan, almost a
grunt. He HAD apparently meant some particular kind.
V
“Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.” So
Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park.
“I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may
think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I
find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else.
For this,” she repeated as, under the influence of her tone, the Prince
had already come to a pause.
“For ‘this’?” He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were
vague to him—or were, rather, a quantity that couldn’t, at the most, be
much.
It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it. “To have
one hour alone with you.” It had rained heavily in the night, and though
the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August
morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was
cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened,
and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of
odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about
her, with expression, from the first of their coming in, quite as if for
a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart
of London, of a rich, low-browed, weatherwashed English type. It was as
if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it,
as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as
this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere
vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly,
an American—as indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for all
sorts of things: so long as you hadn’t, blessedly or not, to remain
in America. The Prince had, by half-past ten—as also by definite
appointment—called in Cadogan Place for Mrs. Assingham’s visitor, and
then, after brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street
and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding
to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably
consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in
Mrs. Assingham’s drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days
had done nothing to invalidate—everything, much rather, to place in a
light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn’t have fitted that anyone
should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter, to raise
one, from the moment Mrs. Assingham, informed and apparently
not disapproving, didn’t intervene? This the young man had asked
himself—with a very sufficient sense of what would have made him
ridiculous. He wasn’t going to begin—that at least was certain—by
showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover,
it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so
propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this
rapid interval.
The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own
wedding-guests and by Maggie’s scarce less absorbed entertainment of her
friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she
had not, as wouldn’t have been convenient, invited altogether as yet to
migrate, but who had been present, with other persons, his contingent,
at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts—he had never in
his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating—whenever he
had looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a minute,
seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he had not seen
even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even Maggie, nothing was
more natural than that he shouldn’t have seen Charlotte. The exceptional
minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland
Place staircase had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind him—so
ready she assumed him to be—of what they were to do. Time pressed if
they were to do it at all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations
had brought wonders—how did they still have, where did they still find,
such treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet
even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn’t be put off.
She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie, he must
remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the minute so far as
to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then to risk bringing his
reason out. The risk was because he might hurt her—hurt her pride, if
she had that particular sort. But she might as well be hurt one way as
another; and, besides, that particular sort of pride was just what she
hadn’t. So his slight resistance, while they lingered, had been just
easy enough not to be impossible.
“I hate to encourage you—and for such a purpose, after all—to spend
your money.”
She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at
him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her
palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine
ironwork, eighteenth-century English. “Because you think I must have
so little? I’ve enough, at any rate—enough for us to take our hour.
Enough,” she had smiled, “is as good as a feast! And then,” she had
said, “it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with
treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining.
What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to
be the offering of the poor—something, precisely, that—no rich person
COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it,
she would therefore never have.” Charlotte had spoken as if after so
much thought. “Only, as it can’t be fine, it ought to be funny—and
that’s the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is
amusing in itself.”
He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. “‘Funny’?” “Oh,
I don’t mean a comic toy—I mean some little thing with a charm. But
absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That’s what I call
funny,” she had explained. “You used,” she had also added, “to help me
to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have
them all still, I needn’t say—the little bargains I there owed you.
There are bargains in London in August.”
“Ah, but I don’t understand your English buying, and I confess I find
it dull.” So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had
objected. “I understood my poor dear Romans.”
“It was they who understood you—that was your pull,” she had laughed.
“Our amusement here is just that they don’t understand us. We can make
it amusing. You’ll see.”
If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. “The
amusement surely will be to find our present.”
“Certainly—as I say.”
“Well, if they don’t come down—?”
“Then we’ll come up. There’s always something to be done. Besides,
Prince,” she had gone on, “I’m not, if you come to that, absolutely a
pauper. I’m too poor for some things,” she had said—yet, strange as
she was, lightly enough; “but I’m not too poor for others.” And she had
paused again at the top. “I’ve been saving up.”
He had really challenged it. “In America?”
“Yes, even there—with my motive. And we oughtn’t, you know,” she had
wound up, “to leave it beyond to-morrow.”
That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed—he feeling
all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He
might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather
than magnify. Besides which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He
WAS making her—she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in
him, didn’t at all do. That was accordingly, in fine, how they had come
to where they were: he was engaged, as hard as possible, in the policy
of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making a point—and
as if it were almost the whole point—that Maggie of course was not to
have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she
shouldn’t suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her—as
Charlotte on her side would—that they had been anywhere at all together
or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute
secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she
appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn’t betray her.
There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an
appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one
thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs. Assingham’s and another to
arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old
mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately
told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between
them in Cadogan Place—though not mentioning those of Mrs. Assingham’s
absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had
then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked his
assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery—what had made
him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough
for her to notice it—was the sense of the resemblance of the little
plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite
disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like
beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The
strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a
fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items
of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte
read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She
had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a “Do you
want then to go and tell her?” that had somehow made them ridiculous.
It had made him, promptly, fall back on minimizing it—that is on
minimizing “fuss.” Apparent scruples were, obviously, fuss, and he had
on the spot clutched, in the light of this truth, at the happy principle
that would meet every case.
This principle was simply to be, with the girl, always simple—and with
the very last simplicity. That would cover everything. It had covered,
then and there, certainly, his immediate submission to the sight of what
was clearest. This was, really, that what she asked was little compared
to what she gave. What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it
was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced—renounced
everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for
her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of
their keeping their appointment to themselves. That, in exchange for
“everything,” everything she gave up, was verily but a trifle. He let
himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened
indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take,
that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while
they were still in the Park. The application in fact presently required
that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in
obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality
quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger
trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened
grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from
the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked
across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine
upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position—her
temporary position—still more clear, and it was for this purpose,
obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down.
He stood for a little before her, as if to mark the importance of not
wasting time, the importance she herself had previously insisted on; but
after she had said a few words it was impossible for him not to resort
again to good-nature. He marked as he could, by this concession, that if
he had finally met her first proposal for what would be “amusing” in
it, so any idea she might have would contribute to that effect. He
had consequently—in all consistency—to treat it as amusing that she
reaffirmed, and reaffirmed again, the truth that was HER truth.
“I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of
you—anything but this. I want to have said it—that’s all; I want not
to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we
are now and as we used to be, for one small hour—or say for two—that’s
what I have had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it
BEFORE—before what you’re going to do. So, all the while, you see,” she
went on with her eyes on him, “it was a question for me if I should
be able to manage it in time. If I couldn’t have come now I probably
shouldn’t have come at all—perhaps even ever. Now that I’m here I shall
stay, but there were moments, over there, when I despaired. It wasn’t
easy—there were reasons; but it was either this or nothing. So I didn’t
struggle, you see, in vain. AFTER—oh, I didn’t want that! I don’t
mean,” she smiled, “that it wouldn’t have been delightful to see you
even then—to see you at any time; but I would never have come for it.
This is different. This is what I wanted. This is what I’ve got. This is
what I shall always have. This is what I should have missed, of course,”
she pursued, “if you had chosen to make me miss it. If you had thought
me horrid, had refused to come, I should, naturally, have been immensely
‘sold.’ I had to take the risk. Well, you’re all I could have hoped.
That’s what I was to have said. I didn’t want simply to get my time with
you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you”—she kept it up, slowly,
softly, with a small tremor of voice, but without the least failure of
sense or sequence—“I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is,
to hear. I don’t care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask
nothing of you I don’t—I mayn’t—ask even so much as that. What you may
think of me—that doesn’t in the least matter. What I want is that it
shall always be with you—so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid
of it—that I DID. I won’t say that you did—you may make as little of
that as you like. But that I was here with you where we are and as
we are—I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away—and
perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That’s all.”
She paused as if her demonstration was complete—yet, for the moment,
without moving; as if in fact to give it a few minutes to sink in;
into the listening air, into the watching space, into the conscious
hospitality of nature, so far as nature was, all Londonised, all
vulgarised, with them there; or even, for that matter, into her own open
ears, rather than into the attention of her passive and prudent friend.
His attention had done all that attention could do; his handsome,
slightly anxious, yet still more definitely “amused” face sufficiently
played its part. He clutched, however, at what he could best clutch
at—the fact that she let him off, definitely let him off. She let him
off, it seemed, even from so much as answering; so that while he smiled
back at her in return for her information he felt his lips remain closed
to the successive vaguenesses of rejoinder, of objection, that rose for
him from within. Charlotte herself spoke again at last—“You may want to
know what I get by it. But that’s my own affair.” He really didn’t want
to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as
if he didn’t; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he
had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to
make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might
pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to
say. Movement and progress, after this, with more impersonal talk, were
naturally a relief; so that he was not again, during their excursion, at
a loss for the right word. The air had been, as it were, cleared; they
had their errand itself to discuss, and the opportunities of London,
the sense of the wonderful place, the pleasures of prowling there, the
question of shops, of possibilities, of particular objects, noticed by
each in previous prowls. Each professed surprise at the extent of the
other’s knowledge; the Prince in especial wondered at his friend’s
possession of her London. He had rather prized his own possession, the
guidance he could really often give a cabman; it was a whim of his own,
a part of his Anglomania, and congruous with that feature, which had,
after all, so much more surface than depth. When his companion, with the
memory of other visits and other rambles, spoke of places he hadn’t
seen and things he didn’t know, he actually felt again—as half the
effect—just a shade humiliated. He might even have felt a trifle
annoyed—if it hadn’t been, on this spot, for his being, even more,
interested. It was a fresh light on Charlotte and on her curious
world-quality, of which, in Rome, he had had his due sense, but
which clearly would show larger on the big London stage. Rome was, in
comparison, a village, a family-party, a little old-world spinnet for
the fingers of one hand. By the time they reached the Marble Arch it was
almost as if she were showing him a new side, and that, in fact, gave
amusement a new and a firmer basis. The right tone would be easy for
putting himself in her hands. Should they disagree a little—frankly
and fairly—about directions and chances, values and authenticities, the
situation would be quite gloriously saved. They were none the less,
as happened, much of one mind on the article of their keeping clear of
resorts with which Maggie would be acquainted. Charlotte recalled it
as a matter of course, named it in time as a condition—they would keep
away from any place to which he had already been with Maggie.
This made indeed a scant difference, for though he had during the last
month done few things so much as attend his future wife on her making
of purchases, the antiquarii, as he called them with Charlotte, had not
been the great affair. Except in Bond Street, really, Maggie had had
no use for them: her situation indeed, in connection with that order of
traffic, was full of consequences produced by her father’s. Mr. Verver,
one of the great collectors of the world, hadn’t left his daughter to
prowl for herself; he had little to do with shops, and was mostly, as
a purchaser, approached privately and from afar. Great people, all over
Europe, sought introductions to him; high personages, incredibly high,
and more of them than would ever be known, solemnly sworn as everyone
was, in such cases, to discretion, high personages made up to him as
the one man on the short authentic list likely to give the price. It had
therefore been easy to settle, as they walked, that the tracks of
the Ververs, daughter’s as well as father’s, were to be avoided; the
importance only was that their talk about it led for a moment to
the first words they had as yet exchanged on the subject of Maggie.
Charlotte, still in the Park, proceeded to them—for it was she who
began—with a serenity of appreciation that was odd, certainly, as a
sequel to her words of ten minutes before. This was another note on
her—what he would have called another light—for her companion, who,
though without giving a sign, admired, for what it was, the simplicity
of her transition, a transition that took no trouble either to trace or
to explain itself. She paused again an instant, on the grass, to make
it; she stopped before him with a sudden “Anything of course, dear as
she is, will do for her. I mean if I were to give her a pin-cushion from
the Baker-Street Bazaar.”
“That’s exactly what _I_ meant”—the Prince laughed out this allusion to
their snatch of talk in Portland Place. “It’s just what I suggested.”
She took, however, no notice of the reminder; she went on in her own
way. “But it isn’t a reason. In that case one would never do anything
for her. I mean,” Charlotte explained, “if one took advantage of her
character.”
“Of her character?”
“We mustn’t take advantage of her character,” the girl, again unheeding,
pursued. “One mustn’t, if not for HER, at least for one’s self. She
saves one such trouble.”
She had spoken thoughtfully, with her eyes on her friend’s; she might
have been talking, preoccupied and practical, of someone with whom he
was comparatively unconnected. “She certainly GIVES one no trouble,”
said the Prince. And then as if this were perhaps ambiguous or
inadequate: “She’s not selfish—God forgive her!—enough.”
“That’s what I mean,” Charlotte instantly said. “She’s not selfish
enough. There’s nothing, absolutely, that one NEED do for her. She’s
so modest,” she developed—“she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love
her—or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.”
The Prince frowned a little—as a tribute, after all, to seriousness.
“She lets what—?”
“Anything—anything that you might do and that you don’t. She lets
everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself
that she asks efforts—so far as she ever HAS to ask them. She hasn’t,
much. She does everything herself. And that’s terrible.”
The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn’t commit
himself. “Terrible?”
“Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for
one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned,
to stand it. And nobody,” Charlotte continued in the same manner, “is
decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion,
or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is
without taking great care. Certainly,” she said, “such people as you and
I are not.”
The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. “Not good enough to stand
it?”
“Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I
think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.”
Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. “Oh, I don’t
know. May not one’s affection for her do something more for one’s
decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, HER
‘decency’—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?”
“Ah, of course it must be all in that.”
But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. “What
it comes to—one can see what you mean—is the way she believes in one.
That is if she believes at all.”
“Yes, that’s what it comes to,” said Charlotte Stant.
“And why,” he asked, almost soothingly, “should it be terrible?” He
couldn’t, at the worst, see that.
“Because it’s always so—the idea of having to pity people.”
“Not when there’s also, with it, the idea of helping them.”
“Yes, but if we can’t help them?”
“We CAN—we always can. That is,” he competently added, “if we care for
them. And that’s what we’re talking about.”
“Yes”—she on the whole assented. “It comes back then to our absolutely
refusing to be spoiled.”
“Certainly. But everything,” the Prince laughed as they went on—“all
your ‘decency,’ I mean—comes back to that.”
She walked beside him a moment. “It’s just what _I_ meant,” she then
reasonably said.