"Rather--she's a little heroine. But it's his innocence, above
all," Mrs. Assingham added, "that will pull them through."
Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver's innocence.
"It's awfully quaint."
"Of course it's awfully quaint! That it's awfully quaint, that
the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old
quaintness--by which I don't mean yours and mine, but that of my
own sweet countrypeople, from whom I've so deplorably
degenerated--that," Mrs. Assingham declared, "was originally the
head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in
them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still," she rather
ruefully subjoined, "before they've done with me!"
This might be, but it wasn't what most stood in the Colonel's
way. "You believe so in Mr. Verver's innocence after two years of
Charlotte?"
She stared. "But the whole point is just that two years of
Charlotte are what he hasn't really--or what you may call
undividedly--had."
"Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has 'really or
undividedly,' had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn't
had," the Colonel conceded, "to account for the innocence that in
her, too, so leaves us in admiration."
So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. "It takes a
great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all
events, is that--strange though this be--her effort for her
father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded. She has made him,
she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their
relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there,
protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged--the
Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding--he has safely and
serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for
those he had sublimely projected. He hadn't worked them out in
detail--any more than I had, heaven pity me!--and the queerness
has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was
to have married Charlotte. And they both," she neatly wound up,
'help.'"
"'Both'--?"
"I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to
him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not
less. And her part is very large. Charlotte," Fanny declared,
"works like a horse."
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute
across it. "And what does the Prince work like?"
She fixed him in return. "Like a Prince!" Whereupon, breaking
short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly--
decorated back--in which, in odd places, controlling the
complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the
turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit
that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.
He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression
of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the
drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight
places of life--as life had shrunk for him now--the most luminous
of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat,
the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided
over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the
billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the
clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief--how
at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained
and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above,
where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he
found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish
in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer
--there was another plum in the pie. "What did you mean some
minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?"
"The Prince's? By his not 'really' caring?" She recalled, after a
little, benevolently enough. "I mean that men don't, when it has
all been too easy. That's how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman
is treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he
works," she added; "but you might better perhaps have asked me
how he plays."