"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?"