"Very small ones. Which is not, however, with the expense of
railways and hotels, a reason for her running to and fro."
"On the contrary. But she doesn't like her country."
"Hers, my dear man?--it's little enough 'hers.'" The attribution,
for the moment, amused his hostess. "She has rebounded now--but
she has had little enough else to do with it."
"Oh, I say hers," the Prince pleasantly explained, "very much as,
at this time of day, I might say mine. I quite feel, I assure
you, as if the great place already more or less belonged to ME."
"That's your good fortune and your point of view. You own--or you
soon practically WILL own--so much of it. Charlotte owns almost
nothing in the world, she tells me, but two colossal trunks-only
one of which I have given her leave to introduce into this house.
She'll depreciate to you," Mrs. Assingham added, "your property."
He thought of these things, he thought of every thing; but he had
always his resource at hand of turning all to the easy. "Has she
come with designs upon me?" And then in a moment, as if even this
were almost too grave, he sounded the note that had least to do
with himself. "Est-elle toujours aussi belle?" That was the
furthest point, somehow, to which Charlotte Stant could be
relegated.
Mrs. Assingham treated it freely. "Just the same. The person in
the world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to
appreciation. It's all in the way she affects you. One admires
her if one doesn't happen not to. So, as well, one criticises
her."
"Ah, that's not fair!" said the Prince.
"To criticise her? Then there you are! You're answered."
"I'm answered." He took it, humorously, as his lesson--sank his
previous self-consciousness, with excellent effect, in grateful
docility. "I only meant that there are perhaps better things to
be done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once you
begin THAT, with anyone--!" He was vague and kind.
"I quite agree that it's better to keep out of it as long as one
can. But when one MUST do it--"
"Yes?" he asked as she paused. "Then know what you mean."
"I see. Perhaps," he smiled, "_I_ don't know what I mean."
"Well, it's what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should
know." Mrs. Assingham, however, made no more of this, having,
before anything else, apparently, a scruple about the tone she
had just used. "I quite understand, of course, that, given her
great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be
present. She has acted impulsively--but she has acted
generously."
"She has acted beautifully," said the Prince.
"I say 'generously' because I mean she hasn't, in any way,
counted the cost. She'll have it to count, in a manner, now," his
hostess continued. "But that doesn't matter."