"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."