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?"