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THE GOLDEN BOWL 369

and yet, yes, amazingly, she had been able to look at terror and disgust only to know that she must put away from her the bitter­sweet of their freshness. The sight, from the window, of the group so constituted, told her why, told her how, named to her, as with hard lips, named straight at her, so that she must take it full in the face, that other possible relation to the whole fact which alone would bear upon her irresistibly. It was extraordinary, they positively brought home to her that to feel about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of. She had never, from the first hour of her state of acquired conviction, given them up so little as now; though she was, no doubt, as the consequence of a step taken a few minutes later, to invoke the conception of doing that, if might be, even less. She had resumed her walk - stopping here and there, while she rested on the cool smooth stone balustrade, to draw it out; in the course of which, after a little, she passed again the lights of the empty drawing-room and paused again for what she saw and felt there.

It was not at once, however, that this became quite concrete; that was the effect of her presently making out that Charlotte was in the room, launched and erect there, in the middle, and looking about her; that she had evidently just come round to it, from her card-table, by one of the passages - with the expectation, to all appearance, of joining her stepdaughter. She had pulled up at seeing the great room empty - Maggie not having passed out, on leaving the group, in a manner to be observed. So definite a quest of her, with the bridge-party interrupted or altered for it, was an impression that fairly assailed the Princess, and to which something of attitude and aspect, of the air of arrested pursuit and purpose, in Charlotte, together with the suggestion of her next vague movements, quickly added its meaning. This meaning was that she had decided, that she had been infinitely conscious of Maggie's presence before, that she knew that she would at last find her alone, and that she wanted her, for some reason, enough to have presumably called on Bob Assingham for aid. He had taken her chair and let her go, and the arrangement was for Maggie a signal proof of her earnestness; of the energy, in fact, that, though superficially commonplace in a situation in which people weren't supposed to be watching each other, was what affected our young woman, on the spot, as a breaking of bars. The splendid shining supple creature was out of the cage, was at large; and the question now almost grotesquely rose of whether she mightn't by


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some art, just where she was and before she could go further, be hemmed in and secured. It would have been for a moment, in this case, a matter of quickly closing the windows and giving the alarm -with poor Maggie's sense that, though she couldn't know what she wanted of her, it was enough for trepidation that, at these firm hands, anything should be: to say nothing of the sequel of a flight taken again along the terrace, even under the shame of the confessed feebleness of such evasions on the part of an outraged wife. It was to this feebleness, none the less, that the outraged wife had presently resorted; the most that could be said for her being, as she felt while she finally stopped short, at a distance, that she could at any rate resist her abjection sufficiently not to sneak into the house by another way and safely reach her room. She had literally caught herself in the act of dodging and ducking, and it told her there, vividly, in a single word, what she had all along been most afraid of. She had been afraid of the particular passage with Charlotte that would determine her father's wife to take him into her confidence as she couldn't possibly as yet have done, to prepare for him a statement of her wrong, to lay before him the infamy of what she was apparently suspected of. This, should she have made up her mind to do it, would rest on a calculation the thought of which evoked, strangely, other possibilities and visions. It would show her as sufficiently believing in her grasp of her husband to be able to assure herself that, with his daughter thrown on the defensive, with Maggie's cause and Maggie's word, in fine, against her own, it wasn't Maggie's that would most certainly carry the day. Such a glimpse of her conceivable idea, which would be founded on reasons all her own, reasons of experience and assurance, impenetrable to others, but intimately familiar to herself-such a glimpse opened out wide as soon as it had come into view; for if so much as this was still firm ground between the elder pair, if the beauty of appearances had been so consistently preserved, it was only the golden bowl as Maggie herself knew it that had been broken. The breakage stood not for any wrought discomposure among the triumphant tbree - it stood merely for the dire deformity of her attitude toward them. She was unable at the minute, of course, fully to measure the difference thus involved for her, and it remained inevitably an agitating image, the way it might be held over her that if she didn't, of her own prudence, satisfy Charlotte as to the reference, in her mocking spirit, of so much of the unuttered and imutterable, of the constantly and unmistakably implied, her father would be invited without further ceremony to recommend her to do so. But any confidence, any latent operating insolence, that Mrs Verver should,




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thanks to her large native resources, continue to be possessed of and to hold in reserve, glimmered suddenly as a possible working light and seemed to offer, for meeting her, a new basis and something like a new system. Maggie felt, truly, a rare contraction of the heart on making out, the next instant, what the new system would probably have to be - and she had practically done that before perceiving that the thing she feared had already taken place. Charlotte, extending her search, appeared now to define herself vaguely in the distance; of this, after an instant, the Princess was sure, though the darkness was thick, for the projected clearness of the smoking-room windows had presently contributed its help. Her friend came slowly into that circle - having also, for herself, by this time, not indistinguishably discovered that Maggie was on the terrace. Maggie, from the end, saw her stop before one of the windows to look at the group within, and then saw her come nearer and pause again, still with a considerable length of the place between them.

Yes, Charlotte had seen she was watching her from afar, and had stopped now to put her further attention to the test. Her face was fixed on her, through the night; she was the creature who had escaped by force from her cage, yet there was in her whole motion assuredly, even as so dimly discerned, a land of portentous intelli­gent stillness. She had escaped with an intention, but with an intention the more definite that it could so accord with quiet measures. The two women, at all events, only hovered there, for these first minutes, face to face over their" interval and exchanging no sign; the intensity of their mutual look might have pierced the night, and Maggie was at last to start with the scared sense of having thus yielded to doubt, to dread, to hesitation, for a time that, with no other proof needed, would have completely given her away. How long had she stood staring? - a single minute or five? Long enough, in any case, to have felt herself absolutely take from her visitor something that the latter threw upon her, irresistibly, by this effect of silence, by this effect of waiting and watching, by this effect, unmistakably, of timing her indecision and her fear. If then, scared and hanging back, she had, as was so evident, sacrificed all past pretences, it would have been with the instant knowledge of an immense advantage gained that Charlotte finally saw her come on. Maggie came on with her heart in her hands; she came on with the definite prevision, throbbing like the tick of a watch, of a doom impossibly sharp and hard, but to which, after looking at it with her eyes wide open, she had none the less bowed her head. By the time she was at her companion's side, for that matter, by the time


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Charlotte had, without a motion, without a word, simply let her approach and stand there, her head was already on the.block, so that the consciousness that everything had now gone blurred all percep­tion of whether or no the axe had fallen. Oh, the 'advantage,' it was perfectly enough, in truth, with Mrs Verver; for what was Maggie's own sense but that of having been thrown over on her back, with her neck, from the first, half broken and her helpless face staring up? That position only could account for the positive grimace of weakness and pain produced there by Charlotte's dignity.

'I've come to join you -1 thought you would be here.'

'Oh yes, I'm here,' Maggie heard herself return a little flatly.

'It's too close in-doors.'

'Very - but close even here.' Charlotte was still and grave - she had even uttered her remark about the temperature with an expressive weight that verged upon solemnity; so that Maggie, reduced to looking vaguely about at the sky, could only feel her not fail of her purpose. 'The air's heavy as if with thunder - I think there'll be a storm.' She made the suggestion to carry off an awkwardness - which was a part, always, of her companion's gain; but the awkwardness didn't diminish in the silence that followed. Charlotte had said nothing in reply; her brow was dark as with a fixed expression, and her high elegance, her handsome head and long, straight neck testified, through the dusk, to their inveterate completeness and noble erectness. It was as if what she had come out to do had already begun, and when, as a consequence, Maggie had said helplessly, 'Don't you want something? won't you have my shawl?' everything might have crumbled away in the comparative poverty of the tribute. Mrs Verver's rejection of it had the brevity of a sign that they hadn't closed in for idle words, just as her dim, serious face, uninterruptedly presented until they moved again, might have represented the success with which she watched all her message penetrate. They presently went back the way she had come, but she stopped Maggie again within range of the smoking-room window and made her stand where the party at cards would be before her. Side by side, for three minutes, they fixed this picture of quiet harmonies, the positive charm of it and, as might have been said, the full significance - which, as was now brought home to Maggie, could be no more, after all, than a matter of interpretation, differing always for a different interpreter. As she herself had hovered in sight of it a quarter of an hour before, it would have been a thing for her to show Charlotte - to show in righteous irony, in reproach too stern for anything but silence. But now it was she who was being shown it, and shown it by


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Charlotte, and she saw quickly enough that, as Charlotte showed it, so she must at present submissively seem to take it.

The others were absorbed and unconscious, either silent over their game or dropping remarks unheard on the terrace; and it was to her father's quiet face, discernibly expressive of nothing that was in his daughter's mind, that our young woman's attention was most directly given. His wife and his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which of them, could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all impulsively, have responded; in which of them would he have felt it most important to destroy - for his clutch at the equilibrium - any germ of uneasiness? Not yet, since his marriage, had Maggie so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte's leave and under Charlotte's direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should look at him were prescribed to her; quite, even, as if she had been defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that the challenge wasn't, as might be said, in his interest and for his protection, but, pressingly, insistently, in Charlotte's, for that of her security at any price. She might verily, by this dumb demonstration, have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie herself, a sum of money that she, properly, was to find. She must remain safe and Maggie must pay -what she was to pay with being her own affair.

Straighter than ever, thus, the Princess again felt it all put upon her, and there was a minute, just a supreme instant, during which there burned in her a wild wish that her father would only look up. It throbbed for these seconds as a yearning appeal to him - she would chance it, that is, if he would but just raise his eyes and catch them, across the larger space, standing in the outer dark together. Then he might be affected by the sight, taking them as they were; he might make some sign - she scarce knew what - that would save her, save her from being the one, this way, to pay all. He might somehow show a preference - distinguishing between them; might, out of pity for her, signal to her that this extremity of her effort for him was more than he asked. That represented Maggie's one little lapse from consistency - the sole small deflection in the whole course of her scheme. It had come to nothing the next minute, for the dear man's eyes had never moved, and Charlotte's hand, promptly passed into her arm, had already, had very firmly drawn her on - quite, for that matter, as from some sudden, some equal perception on her part too of the more ways than one in which their impression could appeal. They retraced their steps along the rest of the terrace, turning the


374 THE GOLDEN BOWL

corner of the house, and presently came abreast of the other windows, those of the pompous drawing-room, still lighted and still empty. Here Charlotte again paused, and it was again as if she were pointing out what Maggie had observed for herself, the very look the place had of being vivid in its stillness, of having, with all its great objects as ordered and balanced as for a formal reception, been appointed for some high transaction, some real affair of state. In presence of this opportunity she faced her companion once more; she traced in her the effect of everything she had already communicated; she signified, with the same success, that the terrace and the sullen night would bear too meagre witness to the completion of her idea. Soon enough then, within the room, under the old lustres of Venice and the eyes of the several great portraits, more or less contemporary with these, that awaited on the walls of Fawns their final far migration - soon enough Maggie found herself staring, and at first all too gaspingly, at the grand total to which each separate demand Mrs Verver had hitherto made upon her, however she had made it, now amounted.

'I've been wanting - and longer than you'd perhaps believe - to put a question to you for which no opportunity has seemed to me yet quite so good as this. It would have been easier perhaps if you had struck me as in the least disposed ever to give me one. I have to take it now, you see, as I find it.' They stood in the centre of the immense room, and Maggie could feel that the scene of life her imagination had made of it twenty minutes before was by this time sufficiently peopled. These few straight words filled it to its uttermost reaches, and nothing was now absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called upon to play in it. Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich train; she rose there beautiful and free, with her whole aspect and action attuned to the firmness of her speech. Maggie had kept the shawl she had taken out with her, and, clutching it tight in her nervousness, drew it round her as if huddling in it for shelter, covering herself with it for humility. She looked out as from under an improvised hood - the sole headgear of some poor woman at somebody's proud door; she waited even like the poor woman; she met her friend's eyes with recognitions she couldn't suppress. She might sound it as she could - 'What question then?' - everything in her, from head to foot, crowded it upon Charlotte that she knew. She knew too well - that she was showing; so that successful vagueness, to save some scrap of her dignity from the imminence of her defeat, was already a lost cause, and the one thing left was if possible, at any cost, even that of stupid inconsequence, to try to look as if she weren't


THE GOLDEN BOWL 375

afraid. If she could but appear at all not afraid she might appear a little not ashamed - that is not ashamed to be afraid, which was the kind of shame that could be fastened on her, it being fear all the while that moved her. Her challenge, at any rate, her wonder, her terror -the blank, blurred surface, whatever it was that she presented -became a mixture that ceased to signify; for to the accumulated advantage by which Charlotte was at present sustained her next words themselves had little to add. 'Have you any ground of complaint of me? Is there any wrong you consider I've done you? I feel at last that I've a right to ask you.'

Their eyes had to meet on it, and to meet long; Maggie's avoided at least the disgrace of looking away. 'What makes you want to ask it?'

'My natural desire to know. You've done that, for so long, little justice.'

Maggie waited a moment. 'For so long? You mean you've thought-?'

'I mean, my dear, that I've seen. I've seen, week after week, that you seemed to be thinking - of something that perplexed or worried you. Is it anything for which I'm in any degree responsible?'

Maggie summoned all her powers. 'What in the world should it be?'

'Ah, that's not for me to imagine, and I should be very sorry to have to try to say! I'm aware of no point whatever at which I may have failed you,' said Charlotte; 'nor of any at which I may have failed anyone in whom I can suppose you sufficiently interested to care. If I've been guilty of some fault, I've committed it all unconsciously, and am only anxious to hear from you honestly about it. But if I've been mistaken as to what I speak of- the difference, more and more marked, as I've thought, in all your manner to me - why, obviously, so much the better. No form of correction received from you could give me greater satisfaction.'

She spoke, it struck her companion, with rising, with extraordinary ease; as if hearing herself say it all, besides seeing the way it was listened to, helped her from point to point. She saw she was right -that this was the tone for her to take and the thing for her to do, the thing as to which she was probably feeling that she had in advance, in her delays and uncertainties, much exaggerated the difficulty. The difficulty was small, and it grew smaller as her adversary continued to shrink; she was not only doing as she wanted, but had by this time effectively done it and hung it up. All of which but deepened Maggie's sense of the sharp and simple need, now, of seeing her through to the end.' "If you've been mistaken, you say - ?' and the Princess but barely faltered. 'You have been mistaken.'



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Charlotte looked at her splendidly hard. 'You're perfectly sure it's all my mistake?'

'All I can say is that you've received a false impression.'

'Ah then - so much the better! From the moment I had received it I knew I must sooner or later speak of it - for that, you see, is, systematically, my way. And now,' Charlotte added, 'you make me glad I've spoken. I thank you very much.'

It was strange how for Maggie too, with this, the difficulty seemed to sink. Her companion's acceptance of her denial was like a general pledge not to keep things any worse for her than they essentially had to be; it positively helped her to build up her falsehood - to which, accordingly, she contributed another block. 'I've affected you evi­dently - quite accidentally - in some way of which I've been all unaware. I've not felt at any time that you've wronged me.'

'How could I come within a mile,' Charlotte inquired, 'of such a possibility?'

Maggie, with her eyes on her more easily now, made no attempt to say; she said, after a little, something more to the present point. 'I accuse you -1 accuse you of nothing.'

'Ah, that's lucky!'

Charlotte had brought this out with the richness, almost, of gaiety; and Maggie, to go on, had to think, with her own intensity, of Amerigo - to think how he, on his side, had had to go through with his lie to her, how it was for his wife he had done so, and how his doing so had given her the clue and set her the example. He must have had his own difficulty about it, and she was not, after all, falling below him. It was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which covered the last inch of the ground. He had given her something to conform to, and she hadn't unintelligently turned on him, 'gone back on' him, as he would have said, by not conforming. They were together thus, he and she, close, close together - whereas Charlotte, though rising there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of the Princess swelled, accordingly, even in her abasement; she had kept in tune with the right, and something, certainly, something that might be like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right - yes, it took this extraordinary form of her humbugging, as she had called it, to the end. It was only a question of not, by a hair's breadth, deflecting into


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the truth. So, supremely, was she braced. 'You must take it from me that your anxiety rests quite on a misconception. You must take it from me that I've never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you.' And, marvellously, she kept it up - not only kept it up, but improved on it. 'You must take it from me that I've never thought of you but as beautiful, wonderful and good. Which is all, I think, that you can possibly ask.'

Charlotte held her a moment longer: she needed - not then to have appeared only tactless - the last word. 'It's much more, my dear, than I dreamed of asking. I only wanted your denial.'

'Well then, you have it.'

'Upon your honour?'

'Upon my honour.'

And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away. Her grip of her shawl had loosened - she had let it fall behind her; but she stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted. With which she saw soon enough what more was to come. She saw it in Charlotte's face, and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury. 'Will you kiss me on it then?'

She couldn't say yes, but she didn't say no; what availed her still, however, was to measure, in her passivity, how much too far Charlotte had come to retreat. But there was something different also, something for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her opportunity - the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards to join the absent members of their party, had reached the open door at the end of the room and stopped short, evidently, in presence of the demonstration that awaited them. Her husband and her father were in front, and Charlotte's embrace of her -which wasn't to be distinguished, for them, either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte - took on with their arrival a high publicity.

Chapter 57

Her father had asked her, three days later, in an interval of calm, how she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty, and by the once formidable Mrs Ranee; and the consequence of this inquiry had been, for the pair, just such another stroll together, away from the rest of


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the party and off into the park, as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends - that of their long talk, on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them, the then purblind discussion of which, at their enjoyed leisure, Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the 'first beginning' of their present situation. The whirligig of time had thus brought round for them again, on their finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for tea on the terrace, the same odd impulse quietly to 'slope' - so Adam Verver himself, as they went, familiarly expressed it - that had acted, in its way, of old; acted for the distant autumn afternoon and for the sharpness of their since so outlived crisis. It might have been funny to them now that the presence of Mrs Ranee and the Lutches - and with symptoms, too, at that time less developed - had once, for their anxiety and their prudence, consti­tuted a crisis; it might have been funny that these ladies could ever have figured, to their imagination, as a symbol of dangers vivid enough to precipitate the need of a remedy. This amount of entertainment and assistance they were indeed disposed to extract from their actual impressions; they had been finding it, for months past, by Maggie's view, a resource and a relief to talk, with an approach to intensity, when they met, of all the people they weren't really thinking of and didn't really care about, the people with whom their existence had begun almost to swarm; and they closed in at present round the spectres of their past, as they permitted themselves to describe the three ladies, with a better imitation of enjoying their theme than they had been able to achieve, certainly, during the stay, for instance, of the Castledeans. The Castledeans were a new joke, comparatively, and they had had - always to Maggie's view - to teach themselves the way of it; whereas the Detroit, the Providence party, rebounding so from Providence, from Detroit was an old and ample one, of which the most could be made and as to which a humorous insistence could be guarded.

Sharp and sudden, moreover, this afternoon, had been their well-nigh confessed desire just to rest together, a little, as from some strain long felt but never named; to rest, as who should say, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, each pair of eyes so yearningly - and indeed what could it be but so wearily? - closed as to render the collapse safe from detection by the other pair. It was positively as if, in short, the inward felicity of their being once more, perhaps only for half an hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them, and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest. They


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were husband and wife - oh, so immensely! - as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that die party on the terrace, augmented, as in the past, by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly, for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why, into the bargain, for that matter - this came to Maggie - couldn't they always live, so far as they lived together, in a boat? She felt in her face, with the question, the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only know each other, henceforth, in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening, in the same place, he had been as unmarried as possible - which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then, that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble; with the quiet calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment. They had, after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other - that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth - to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of possibilities.

Who could tell, as yet, what, thanks to it, they wouldn't have done before the end?

They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that, toward six o'clock of a July afternoon, hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational - one scarce knew what to call it- outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses. Our couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and Maggie was to take up, after a drop, a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connec­tion was not at first apparent. 'Were you amused at me just now -when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me,' she asked with some earnestness - 'well, fatuous?'

' "Fatuous" - ?' he seemed at a loss.

'I mean sublime in our happiness - as if looking down from a height. Or, rather, sublime in our general position - that's what I mean.' She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience -something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the 'books' of the spirit. 'Because I don't at all want,' she explained, 'to be blinded, or made "sniffy", by



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any sense of a social situation.' Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him ,- to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive. But she waited a little - as if made nervous, precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge. 'Don't you remember,' she went on, 'how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn't so very sure we ourselves had the thing itself?'

He did his best to do so. 'Had, you mean, a social situation?'

'Yes - after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that, at the rate we were going, we should never have one.'

'Which was what put us on Charlotte?' Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.

Maggie had another pause - taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been, at their critical moment, 'put on' Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. 'Well,' she continued, 'I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more "placed," or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn't have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn't obligingly leave me more exalted by having, themselves, smaller ideas. For those,' she said, 'were the feelings we used to have.'

'Oh yes,' he responded philosophically - 'I remember the feelings we used to have.'

Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little, in tender retrospect - as if they had been also respectable. 'It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position. But it was worse to be sublime about it - as I was so afraid, as I'm in fact still afraid of being - when it wasn't even there to support one.' And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it - which was doubtless too often even now her danger - almost sententious. 'One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others - of what they may feel deprived of. However,' she added, 'Kitty and Dotty couldn't imagine we were deprived of anything. And now, and now - !' But she stopped as for indulgence to their wonder and envy.


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L


'And now they see, still more, that we can have got everything, and kept everything, and yet not be proud.'

'No, we're not proud,' she answered after a moment. 'I'm not sure that we're quite proud enough.' Yet she changed the next instant that subject too. She could only do so, however, by harking back - as if it had been a fascination. She might have been wishing, under this renewed, this still more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the stream of time and dipping again, for the softness of the water, into the contracted basin of the past. 'We talked about it -we talked about it; you don't remember so well as I. You too didn't know - and it was beautiful of you; like Kitty and Dotty you too thought we had a position, and were surprised when / thought we ought to have told them we weren't doing for them what they supposed. In fact,' Maggie pursued, 'we're not doing it now. We're not, you see, really introducing tbem. I mean not to the people they want.'

'Then what do you call the people with whom they're now having tea?'

It made her quite spring round. 'That's just what you asked me the other time - one of the days there was somebody. And I told you I didn't call anybody anything.'

'I remember - that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn't "count"; that Fanny Assingham knew they didn't.' She had awakened, his daughter, the echo; and on the bench there, as before, he nodded his head amusedly, he kept nervously shaking his foot. 'Yes, they were only good enough - the people who came - for us. I remember,' he said again: 'that was the way it all happened.'

'That was the way - that was the way. And you asked me,' Maggie added, 'if I didn't think we ought to tell them. Tell Mrs Ranee, in particular, I mean, that we had been entertaining her up to then under false pretences.'

'Precisely - but you said she wouldn't have understood.'

'To which you replied that in that case you were like her. You didn't understand.'

'No, no - but I remember how, about our having, in our benighted innocence, no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation.'

'Well then,' said Maggie with every appearance of delight, 'I'll crush you again. I told you that you by yourself had one - there was no doubt of that. You were different from me - you had the same one you always had.'

'And then I asked you,' her father concurred, 'why in that case you hadn't the same.'

'Then indeed you did.' He had brought her face round to him


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before, and this held it, covering him with its kindled brightness, the result of the attested truth of their being able thus, in talk, to live again together. 'What I replied was that I had lost my position by my marriage. That one -1 know how I saw it - would never come back. I had done something to it - I didn't quite know what; given it away, somehow, and yet not, as then appeared, really got my return. I had been assured - always by dear Fanny - that I could get it, only I must wake up. So I was trying, you see, to wake up - trying very hard.'

'Yes - and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me. But you made much,' he said, 'of your difficulty.' To which he added: 'It's the only case I remember, Mag, of you ever making anything of a difficulty.'

She kept her eyes on him a moment. 'That I was so happy as I was?'

'That you were so happy as you were.'

'Well, you admitted' - Maggie kept it up - 'that that was a good difficulty. You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful.'

He thought a moment. 'Yes -1 may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me.' But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile. 'What do you want to put on me now?'

'Only that we used to wonder - that we were wondering then - if our life wasn't perhaps a little selfish.'

This also for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospec­tively fixed. 'Because Fanny Assingham thought so?'

'Oh no; she never thought, she couldn't think, if she would, anything of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools,' Maggie developed; 'she doesn't seem to think so much about their being wrong - wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked. She doesn't,' the Princess further adventured, 'quite so much mind their being wicked.'

'I see -1 see.' And yet it might have been for his daughter that he didn't so very vividly see. 'Then she only thought us fools?'

'Oh no -1 don't say that. I'm speaking of our being selfish.'

'And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?'

'Oh, I don't say she condones -!' A scruple in Maggie raised its crest. 'Besides, I'm speaking of what was.'

Her father showed, however, after a little, that he had not been reached by this discrimination; his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled. 'Look here, Mag,' he said reflectively - 'I ain't selfish. I'll be blowed if I'm selfish.'

Well, Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce. 'Then, father, I am.'


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'Oh shucks!' said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back. 'I'll believe it,' he presently added, 'when Amerigo complains of you.'

'Ah, it's just he who's my selfishness. I'm selfish, so to speak, for him. I mean,' she continued, 'that he's my motive - in everything.'

Well, her father could, from experience, fancy what she meant. 'But hasn't a girl a right to be selfish about her husband?'

'What I don't mean,' she observed without answering, 'is that I'm jealous of him. But that's his merit - it's not mine.'

Her father again seemed amused at her. 'You could be - otherwise?'

'Oh, how can I talk,' she asked, 'of "otherwise"? It isn't, luckily for me, otherwise. If everything were different' - she further presented her thought - 'of course everything would be.' And then again, as if that were but half: 'My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous - or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all - why then you're beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.'

Mr Verver listened as if he had nothing, on these high lines, to oppose. 'And that's the way you love?'

For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered: 'It wasn't to talk about that. I do feel, however, beyond everything - and as a consequence of that, I dare say,' she added with a turn to gaiety, 'seem often not to know quite where I am.'

The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly, or sinking otherwise than in play, was impossible - something of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he, in his day, had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving. He sat awhile as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time; yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed. Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, hadn't, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condition was keeping him, at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. That


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couldn't be fixed upon him as missing; since if it wasn't personally floating, if it wasn't even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way - for tasting the balm. It could pass, further, for knowing - for knowing that without him nothing might have been: which would have been missing least of all. 'I guess I've never been jealous,' he finally remarked. And it said more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was intending; for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she couldn't speak.

But she at last tried for one of them. 'Oh, it's you, father, who are what I call beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down.'

He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy commun­ion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity. He might have been seeing things to say, and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back. So he settled on the merely obvious. 'Well then, we make a pair. We're all right.'

'Oh, we're all right!' A declaration launched not only with all her discriminating emphasis, but confirmed by her rising with decision and standing there as if the object of their small excursion required accordingly no further pursuit. At this juncture, however - with the act of their crossing the bar, to get, as might be, into port - there occurred the only approach to a betrayal of their having had to beat against the wind. Her father kept his place, and it was as if she had got over first and were pausing for her consort to follow. If they were all right, they were all right; yet he seemed to hesitate and wait for some word beyond. His eyes met her own, suggestively, and it was only after she had contented herself with simply smiling at him, smiling ever so fixedly, that he spoke, for the remaining importance of it, from the bench; where he leaned back, raising his face to her, his legs thrust out a trifle wearily and his hands grasping either side of the seat. They had beaten against the wind, and she was still fresh; they had beaten against the wind, and he, as at the best the more battered vessel, perhaps just vaguely drooped. But the effect of their silence was that she appeared to beckon him on, and he might have been fairly alongside of her when, at the end of another minute, he found their word. 'The only thing is that, as for ever putting up again with your pretending that you're selfish - !'

At this she helped him out with it. 'You won't take it from me?" '

'I won't take it from you.'

'Well, of course you won't, for that's your way. It doesn't matter, and it only proves -! But it doesn't matter, either, what it proves. I'm at this very moment,' she declared, 'frozen stiff with selfishness.'


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He faced her awhile longer in the same way; it was, strangely, as if, by this sudden arrest, by their having, in their acceptance of the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically given up pretend­ing - it was as if they were 'in' for it, for something they had been ineffably avoiding, but the dread of which was itself, in a manner, a seduction, just as any confession of the dread was by so much an allusion. Then she seemed to see him let himself go. 'When a person's of the nature you speak of there are always other persons to suffer. But you've just been describing to me what you'd take, if you had once a good chance, from your husband.'

'Oh, I'm not talking about my husband!'

'Then whom are you talking about?'

Both the retort and the rejoinder had come quicker than anything previously exchanged, and they were followed, on Maggie's part, by a momentary drop. But she was not to fall away, and while her companion kept his eyes on her, while she wondered if he weren't expecting her to name his wife then, with high hypocrisy, as paying for his daughter's bliss, she produced something that she felt to be much better. 'I'm talking about you.'

'Do you mean I've been your victim?'

'Of course you've been my victim. What have you done, ever done, that hasn't been for me?'

'Many things; more than I can tell you - things you've only to think of for yourself. What do you make of all that I've done for myself?'

' "Yourself - ?' She brightened out with derision.

'What do you make of what I've done for American City?'

It took her but a moment to say. 'I'm not talking of you as a public character - I'm talking of you on your personal side.'

'Well, American City - if "personalities" can do it - has given me a pretty personal side. What do you make,' he went on, 'of what I've done for my reputation?'

'Your reputation there? You've given it up to them, the awful people, for less than nothing; you've given it up to them to tear to pieces, to make their horrible vulgar jokes against you with.'

'Ah, my dear, I don't care for their horrible vulgar jokes,' Adam Verver almost artlessly urged.

'Then there, exactly, you are!' she triumphed. 'Everything that touches you, everything that surrounds you, goes on - by your splendid indifference and your incredible permission - at your expense.'

Just as he had been sitting he looked at her an instant longer; then he slowly rose, while his hands stole into his pockets, and stood there


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before her. 'Of course, my dear,you go on at my expense: it has never been my idea,' he smiled, 'that you should work for your living. I wouldn't have liked to see it.' With which, for a little again, they remained face to face. 'Say therefore I have had the feelings of a father. How have they made me a victim?'

'Because I sacrifice you.'

'But to what in the world?'

At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as in a vice, her impression of his now, with his strained smile, which touched her to deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest. This was the moment, in die whole process of their mutual vigilance, in which it decidedly most hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch. It shook between them, this transparency, with their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard. She held her breath, for she knew by his eyes, the light at the heart of which he couldn't blind, that he was, by his intention, making sure - sure whether or no her certainty was like his. The intensity of his dependence on it at that moment - this itself was what absolutely convinced her so that, as if perched up before him on her vertiginous point and in the very glare of his observation, she balanced for thirty seconds, she almost rocked: she might have been for die time, in all her conscious person, the very form of the equilibrium they were, in their different ways, equally trying to save. And they were saving it - yes, they were, or at least she was: that was still the workable issue, she could say, as she felt her dizziness drop. She held herself hard; the diing was to be done, once for all, by her acting, now, where she stood. So much was crowded into so short a space that she knew already she was keeping her head. She had kept it by the warning of his eyes; she shouldn't lose it again; she knew how and why, and if she had turned cold this was precisely what helped her. He had said to himself, 'She'll break down and name Amerigo; she'll say it's to him she's sacrificing me; and it's by what that will give me - with so many other things too - that my suspicion will be clinched.' He was watching her lips, spying for die symptoms of the sound; whereby diese symptoms had only to fail and he would have got nothing that she didn't measure out to him as she gave it. She had presently in fact so recovered herself that she seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than he have made her name her husband. It was there before her that if she should so much as force him just not consciously to avoid saying, 'Charlotte,


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Charlotte,' he would have given himself away. But to be sure of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing instant what they were both doing. He was doing what he had steadily been coming to; he was practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice - he had read his way so into her best possibility; and where had she already, for weeks and days past, planted her feet if not on her acceptance of the offer? Cold indeed, colder and colder she turned, as she felt herself suffer this close personal vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken. That was her very certitude, the intensity of his pressure; for if something dreadful hadn't happened there wouldn't, for either of them, be these dreadful things to do. She had meanwhile, as well, the immense advantage that she could have' named Charlotte without exposing herself- as, for that matter, she was the next minute showing him.

'Why, I sacrifice you, simply, to everything and to everyone. I take the consequences of your marriage as perfectly natural.'

He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his eyeglass. 'What do you call, my dear, the consequences?'

'Your life as your marriage has made it.'

'Well, hasn't it made it exactly what we wanted?'

She just hesitated, then felt herself steady - oh, beyond what she had dreamed. 'Exactly what / wanted - yes.'

His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he might, with his intenser fixed smile, have been knowing she was, for herself, rightly inspired. 'What do you make then of what I wanted?'

'I don't make anything, any more than of what you've got. That's exactly the point. I don't put myself out to do so -1 never have; I take from you all I can get, all you've provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can. There you are -the rest is your own affair. I don't even pretend to concern myself- !'

'To concern yourself- ?' He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

'With what may have really become of you. It's as if we had agreed from the first not to go into that - such an arrangement being of course charming for me. You can't say, you know, that I haven't stuck to it.'

He didn't say so then - even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath. He said instead: 'Oh, my dear- oh, oh!'

But it made no difference, know as she might what a past - still so recent and yet so distant - it alluded to; she repeated her denial, warning him off, on her side, from spoiling the truth of her



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contention. 'I never went into anything, and you see I don't; I've continued to adore you - but what's that, from a decent daughter to such a father? what but a question of convenient arrangement, our having two houses, three houses, instead of one (you would have arranged for fifty if I had wished!) and my making it easy for you to see the child? You don't claim, I suppose, that my natural course, once you had set up for yourself, would have been to ship you back to American City?'

These were direct inquiries, they quite rang out, in the soft, wooded air; so that Adam Verver, for a minute, appeared to meet them with reflection. She saw reflection, however, quickly enough show him what to do with them. 'Do you know, Mag, what you make me wish when you talk that way?'

And he waited again, while she further got from him the sense of something that had been behind, deeply in the shade, coming cautiously to the front and just feeling its way before presenting itself. 'You regularly make me wish-that I had shipped back to American City. When you go on as you do - ' But he really had to hold himself to say it.

'Well, when I go on - ?'

'Why, you make me quite want to ship back myself. You make me quite feel as if American City would be the best place for us.'

It made her all too finely vibrate. 'For "us" - ?'

'For me and Charlotte. Do you know that if we should ship, it would serve you quite right?' With which he smiled - oh he smiled! 'And if you say much more we will ship.'

Ah, then it was that the cup of her conviction, full to the brim, overflowed at a touch! There was his idea, the clearness of which for an instant almost dazzled her. It was a blur of light, in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked, by contrast, in blackness, saw her waver in the field of vision, saw her removed, transported, doomed. And he had named Charlotte, named her again, and she had made him - which was all she had needed more: it was as if she had held a blank letter to the fire and the writing had come out still larger than she hoped. The recognition of it took her some seconds, but she might when she spoke have been folding up these precious lines and restoring them to her pocket. 'Well, I shall be as much as ever then the cause of what you do. I haven't the least doubt of your being up to that if you should think I might get anything out of it; even the little pleasure,' she laughed, 'of having said, as you call it, "more." Let my enjoyment of this therefore, at any price, continue to represent for you what / call sacrificing you.'


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She had drawn a long breath; she had made him do it all for her, and had lighted the way to it without his naming her husband. That silence had been as distinct as the sharp, the inevitable sound, and something now, in him, followed it up, a sudden air as of confessing at last rally to where she was and of begging the particular question. 'Don't you think then I can take care of myself ?' 'Ah, it's exactly what I've gone upon. If it wasn't for that - !' But she broke off, and they remained only another moment face to face. 'I'll let you know, my dear, the day I feel you've begun to sacrifice me.' ' "Begun"?' she extravagantly echoed.

'Well, it will be, for me, the day you've ceased to believe in me.' With which, his glasses still'fixed on her, his hands in his pockets, his hat pushed back, his legs a little apart, he seemed to plant or to square himself for a kind of assurance it had occurred to him he might as well treat her to, in default of other things, before they changed their subject. It had the effect, for her, of a reminder - a reminder of all he was, of all he had done, of all, above and beyond his being her perfect little father, she might take him as representing, take him as having, quite eminently, in the eyes of two hemispheres, been capable of, and as therefore wishing, not - was it? - illegiti­mately, to call her attention to. The 'successful,' beneficent person, the beautiful, bountiful, original, dauntlessly wilful great citizen, the consummate collector and infallible high authority he had been and still was - these things struck her, on the spot, as making up for him, in a wonderful way, a character she must take into account in dealing with him either for pity or for envy. He positively, under the impression, seemed to loom larger than life for her, so that she saw him during these moments in a light of recognition which had had its brightness for her at many an hour of the past, but which had never been so intense and so almost admonitory. His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscruta­ble, incalculable energy; and this quality perhaps it might be - all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable, traceable effort - that placed him in her eyes as no precious work of art probably had ever been placed in his own. There was a long moment, absolutely, during which her impression rose and rose, even as that of the typical charmed gazer, in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated. Extraordinary, in particular, was the number of the different ways in which he thus affected her as


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showing. He was strong - that was the great thing. He was sure - sure for himself, always, whatever his idea; the expression of that in him had somehow never appeared more identical with his proved taste for the rare and the true. But what stood out beyond everything was that he was always, marvellously, young - which couldn't but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination. Before she knew it she was lifted aloft by the consciousness that he was simply a great and deep and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness was not to be distinguished, a whit, from loving him with pride. It came to her, all strangely, as a sudden, an immense relief. The sense that he wasn't a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness - made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted union, to smile almost without pain. It was like a new confidence, and after another instant she knew even still better why. Wasn't it because now, also, on his side, he was thinking of her as his daughter, was trying her, during these mute seconds, as the child of his blood? Oh then, if she wasn't with her little conscious passion, the child of any weakness, what was she but strong enough too? It swelled in her, fairly; it raised her higher, higher: she wasn't in that case a failure either - hadn't been, but the contrary; his strength was her strength, her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together. This was all in the answer she finally made him.

'I believe in you more than anyone.'

'Than anyone at all?'

She hesitated, for all it might mean; but there was - oh a thousand times! - no doubt of it. 'Than anyone at all.' She kept nothing of it back now, met his eyes over it, let him have the whole of it; after which she went on: 'And that's the way, I think, you believe in me.'

He looked at her a minute longer, but his tone at last was right. 'About the way - yes.'

'Well then - ?' She spoke as for the end and for other matters - for anything, everything, else there might be. They would never return to it.

'Well then - !' His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that august and almost stern, produced, for its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears.


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391


Chapter 5 8

Maggie was to feel, after this passage, how they had both been helped through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught, a few nights before, in the familiar embrace of her father's wife. His return to the saloon had chanced to coincide exactly with this demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by the Assinghams, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the billiard-room with him. She had been conscious enough at the time of what such an impression, received by the others, might, in that extended state, do for her case; and none the less that, as no one had appeared to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on perceptibly the special shade of consecration conferred by unanimities of silence. The effect, she might have considered, had been almost awkward - the promptitude of her separation from Charlotte, as if they had been discovered in some absurdity, on her becoming aware of spectators. The specta­tors, on the other hand - that was the appearance - mightn't have supposed them, in the existing relation, addicted to mutual endear­ments; and yet, hesitating with a fine scruple between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt that almost any spoken or laughed comment could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding, beyond any permitted measure, intelligent. They had evidently looked, the two young wives, like a pair of women 'making up' effusively, as women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply, on her father's part, on Amerigo's, and on Fanny Assingham's, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference. There had been something, there had been but too much, in the incident, for each observer; yet there was nothing anyone could have said without seeming essen­tially to say: 'See, see, the dear things - their quarrel's blissfully over!' 'Our quarrel? What quarrel?' the dear things themselves would necessarily, in that case, have demanded; and the wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of ex.ercise. No one had been equal to the flight of producing, off-hand, a Active reason for any estrangement - to take, that is, the place of the true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air; and everyone, accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was



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pretending, immediately after, to have remarked nothing that anyone else hadn't.

Maggie's own measure had remained, all the same, full of the reflection caught from the total inference; which had acted, virtually, by enabling everyone present - and oh, Charlotte not least! - to draw a long breath. The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced -reinforced even immensely - the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter. Supremely, however, while this glass was held up to her, had Maggie's sense turned to the quality of the success constituted, on the spot, for Charlotte. Most of all, if she was guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in a flash, seen daylight for herself- most of all had she tasted, by communication, of the high profit involved for her companion. She felt, in all her pulses, Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolute


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