"Well, she did it originally--she began the vicious circle. For
that--though you make round eyes at my associating her with
'vice'--is simply what it has been. It's their mutual
consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf;
and they're really so embroiled but because, in their way,
they've been so improbably GOOD."
"In their way--yes!" the Colonel grinned.
"Which was, above all, Maggie's way." No flicker of his ribaldry
was anything to her now. "Maggie had in the first place to make
up to her father for her having suffered herself to become--poor
little dear, as she believed--so intensely married. Then she had
to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they
might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to
Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by
allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call
it, of Charlotte to cheer his path--by instalments, as it were--
in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all
right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same
time, however," Mrs. Assingham further explained, "by so much as
she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr.
Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something
again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see,
with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation
created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic,
little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that
his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own
bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or
neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to
show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire--this
wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter
she had always been--involved in some degree, and just for the
present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite
hold," Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a
person can mostly feel but one passion--one TENDER passion, that
is--at a time. Only, that doesn't hold good for our primary and
instinctive attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's
feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and
yet not prevent other intensities--as you will recognise, my
dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore
my mother, whom you didn't adore, for years after I had begun to
adore you. Well, Maggie"--she kept it up--"is in the same
situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank
heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having
in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should
have had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples
and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind--
her feverish little sense of justice, as I say--had brought the
two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn't have
done. And now she knows something or other has happened--yet
hasn't heretofore known what. She has only piled up her remedy,
poor child--something that she has earnestly but confusedly seen
as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of
the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and that
would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her
only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent
her father's wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so
certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him
unconscious that, peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their
situation is, there's anything in it all uncomfortable or
disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has
to keep touching it up to make it, each day, each month, look
natural and normal to him; so that--God forgive me the
comparison!--she's like an old woman who has taken to 'painting'
and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater
audacity, with a greater impudence even, the older she grows."
And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown
off. "I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent--learning
to be so to gloss things over. She could--she even will, yet, I
believe--learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately,
diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it's
all rouge--!" She paused, staring at the vision.
It imparted itself even to Bob. "Then the fun would begin?" As it
but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of
his inquiry. "You mean that in that case she WILL, charming
creature, be lost?"
She was silent a moment more. "As I've told you before, she won't
be lost if her father's saved. She'll see that as salvation
enough."