The Golden Bowl Volume 2: Chapter 39

Chapter 39

The resemblance had not been present to her on first coming out
into the hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon--only the
second Sunday, of all the summer, when the party of six, the
party of seven including the Principino, had practically been
without accessions or invasions; but within sight of Charlotte,
seated far away, very much where she had expected to find her,
the Princess fell to wondering if her friend wouldn't be affected
quite as she herself had been, that night on the terrace, under
Mrs. Verver's perceptive pursuit. The relation, to-day, had
turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come, through
patches of lingering noon, quite as she had watched Charlotte
menace her through the starless dark; and there was a moment,
that of her waiting a little as they thus met across the
distance, when the interval was bridged by a recognition not less
soundless, and to all appearance not less charged with strange
meanings, than that of the other occasion. The point, however,
was that they had changed places; Maggie had from her window,
seen her stepmother leave the house--at so unlikely an hour,
three o'clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or
grove--and had thereupon felt her impulse determined with the
same sharpness that had made the spring of her companion's three
weeks before. It was the hottest day of the season, and the
shaded siesta, for people all at their ease, would certainly
rather have been prescribed; but our young woman had perhaps not
yet felt it so fully brought home that such refinements of
repose, among them, constituted the empty chair at the feast.
This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great
bedimmed dining-room, the cool, ceremonious semblance of
luncheon, had just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had
been represented but by the plea of a bad headache, not reported
to the rest of the company by her husband, but offered directly
to Mr. Verver himself, on their having assembled, by her maid,
deputed for the effect and solemnly producing it.

Maggie had sat down, with the others, to viands artfully iced, to
the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked
reserves of reference in many directions--poor Fanny Assingham
herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into
which she had withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might
almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the
scene--relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father
Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and overworked London
friend and adviser, who had taken, for a week or two, the light
neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie's
munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties
of the house. HE conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell--
conversed mainly with the indefinite, wandering smile of the
entertainers, and the Princess's power to feel him on the whole a
blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward
in her consciousness of having, from the first of her trouble,
really found her way without his guidance. She asked herself at
times if he suspected how more than subtly, how perversely, she
had dispensed with him, and she balanced between visions of all
he must privately have guessed and certitudes that he had guessed
nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been so urbanely
filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his
instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had
sufficiently served him--made him aware of the thin ice,
figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension, round
about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin
to virtue. Some day in some happier season, she would confess to
him that she hadn't confessed, though taking so much on her
conscience; but just now she was carrying in her weak, stiffened
hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a
vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath of a
better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help
itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath
this afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression.
Something grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had,
God knew, her choice of suppositions: her heart stood still when
she wondered above all if the cord mightn't at last have snapped
between her husband and her father. She shut her eyes for dismay
at the possibility of such a passage--there moved before them the
procession of ugly forms it might have taken. "Find out for
yourself!" she had thrown to Amerigo, for her last word, on the
question of who else "knew," that night of the breaking of the
Bowl; and she flattered herself that she hadn't since then helped
him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she had
given him, all these weeks, to be busy with, and she had again
and again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his
uncertainty ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity.
She had handed him over to an ignorance that couldn't even try to
become indifferent and that yet wouldn't project itself, either,
into the cleared air of conviction. In proportion as he was
generous it had bitten into his spirit, and more than once she
had said to herself that to break the spell she had cast upon him
and that the polished old ivory of her father's inattackable
surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit some mistake
or some violence, smash some windowpane for air, fail even of one
of his blest inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he
would have put himself in the wrong--blighting by a single false
step the perfection of his outward show.

These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell
prattled; with other shadows as well, those that hung over
Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal
suspicions--to the idea, in particular, of a change, such a
change as she didn't dare to face, in the relations of the two
men. Or there were yet other possibilities, as it seemed to
Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things of
evil when one's nerves had at last done for one all that nerves
could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was
like the predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land
who has no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves,
have supposed almost anything of any one; anything, almost, of
poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly
appreciating her father's wine; anything, verily, yes, of the
good priest, as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and
twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest looked hard
at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert--he eyed
them, half-obliquely, as if THEY might have met him to-day, for
conversation, better than any one present. But the Princess had
her fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a
passage, before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and
Charlotte--some approach he would have attempted with her, that
very morning perhaps, to the circumstance of an apparent
detachment, recently noted in her, from any practice of devotion.
He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference--taken
it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and pointed,
naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was not
through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed
contrition--he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that
false repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her
at her all so deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps
compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might
have seemed a path of roses. The acceptance, strangely, would
have left her nothing to do--she could have remained, had she
liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed
against her, as it might have been called, left her everything,
and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence. She had to
confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the
justice and felicity of her exemption--so that wouldn't there
have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell's,
depths of practical derision of her success?

The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the
time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse--with Maggie's
version of Mrs. Verver sharp to the point of representing her
pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision. She met
the good priest's eyes before they separated, and priests were
really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she
believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her, in
abysmal softness: "Go to Mrs. Verver, my child--YOU go: you'll
find that you can help her." This didn't come, however; nothing
came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach
and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand
employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon. Nothing came but the
receding backs of each of the others--her father's slightly bent
shoulders, in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the
force of habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been
present. Her husband indeed was present to feel anything there
might be to feel--which was perhaps exactly why this personage
was moved promptly to emulate so definite an example of
"sloping." He had his occupations--books to arrange perhaps even
at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all the
conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie, was, in the
event, left alone for a minute with Mrs. Assingham, who, after
waiting for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a
demonstration. The stage of "talking over" had long passed for
them; when they communicated now it was on quite ultimate facts;
but Fanny desired to testify to the existence, on her part, of an
attention that nothing escaped. She was like the kind lady who,
happening to linger at the circus while the rest of the
spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the
overworked little trapezist girl--the acrobatic support
presumably of embarrassed and exacting parents--and gives her, as
an obscure and meritorious artist, assurance of benevolent
interest. What was clearest, always, in our young woman's
imaginings, was the sense of being herself left, for any
occasion, in the breach. She was essentially there to bear the
burden, in the last resort, of surrounding omissions and
evasions, and it was eminently to that office she had been to-day
abandoned--with this one alleviation, as appeared, of Mrs.
Assingham's keeping up with her. Mrs. Assingham suggested that
she too was still on the ramparts--though her gallantry proved
indeed after a moment to consist not a little of her curiosity.
She had looked about and seen their companions beyond earshot.

"Don't you really want us to go--?"

Maggie found a faint smile. "Do you really want to--?"

It made her friend colour. "Well then--no. But we WOULD, you
know, at a look from you. We'd pack up and be off--as a
sacrifice."

"Ah, make no sacrifice," said Maggie. "See me through."

"That's it--that's all I want. I should be too base--! Besides,"
Fanny went on, "you're too splendid."

"Splendid?"

"Splendid. Also, you know, you ARE all but 'through.' You've done
it," said Mrs. Assingham. But Maggie only half took it from her.

"What does it strike you that I've done?"

"What you wanted. They're going."

Maggie continued to look at her. "Is that what I wanted?"

"Oh, it wasn't for you to say. That was his business."

"My father's?" Maggie asked after an hesitation.

"Your father's. He has chosen--and now she knows. She sees it all
before her--and she can't speak, or resist, or move a little
finger. That's what's the matter with HER," said Fanny Assingham.

It made a picture, somehow, for the Princess, as they stood
there--the picture that the words of others, whatever they might
be, always made for her, even when her vision was already
charged, better than any words of her own. She saw, round about
her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of
nature--saw Charlotte, somewhere in it, virtually at bay, and yet
denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off
somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her
fate. "Has she told you?" she then asked.

Her companion smiled superior. "_I_ don't need to be told--
either! I see something, thank God, every day." And then as
Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance: "I see
the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State
after State--which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.
I see THEM at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end--
and I see them never come back. But NEVER--simply. I see the
extraordinary 'interesting' place--which I've never been to, you
know, and you have--and the exact degree in which she will be
expected to be interested."

"She WILL be," Maggie presently replied. "Expected?"

"Interested."

For a little, after this, their eyes met on it; at the end of
which Fanny said: "She'll be--yes--what she'll HAVE to be. And it
will be--won't it? for ever and ever." She spoke as abounding in
her friend's sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her.

These were large words and large visions--all the more that now,
really, they spread and spread. In the midst of them, however,
Mrs. Assingham had soon enough continued. "When I talk of
'knowing,' indeed, I don't mean it as you would have a right to
do. You know because you see--and I don't see HIM. I don't make
him out," she almost crudely confessed.

Maggie again hesitated. "You mean you don't make out Amerigo?"

But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to
one's intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of
everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach
of her allusion, and how what she next said gave her meaning a
richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had
taken that, without delay, from her eyes--with a discretion,
still, that fell short but by an inch. "You know how he feels."

Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake. "I know
nothing."

"You know how YOU feel."

But again she denied it. "I know nothing. If I did--!"

"Well, if you did?" Fanny asked as she faltered.

She had had enough, however. "I should die," she said as she
turned away.

She went to her room, through the quiet house; she roamed there a
moment, picking up, pointlessly, a different fan, and then took
her way to the shaded apartments in which, at this hour, the
Principino would be enjoying his nap. She passed through the
first empty room, the day nursery, and paused at an open door.
The inner room, large, dim and cool, was equally calm; her boy's
ample, antique, historical, royal crib, consecrated, reputedly,
by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent, and a gift, early in his
career, from his grandfather, ruled the scene from the centre, in
the stillness of which she could almost hear the child's soft
breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside
him; her father sat there with as little motion--with head thrown
back and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine
foot that was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the
other knee, with the unfathomable heart folded in the constant
flawless freshness of the white waistcoat that could always
receive in its armholes the firm prehensile thumbs. Mrs. Noble
had majestically melted, and the whole place signed her temporary
abdication; yet the actual situation was regular, and Maggie
lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the top of which
was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her father
really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet.
Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she
to take this--his forebearance from any question--only as a sign
again that everything was left to her? She at all events, for a
minute, watched his immobility--then, as if once more renewing
her total submission, returned, without a sound, to her own
quarters.

A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it was not, for her part,
the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as
she could have slept that morning, days before, when she had
watched the first dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this
side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the
casement folded back and the charm she always found in her
seemingly perched position--as if her outlook, from above the
high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on a rock.
When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the
woods--all of which drowsed below her, at this hour, in the
immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of
flowers looked dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their
tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves.
Nothing therefore would have appeared to stir in the brilliant
void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, had not
caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act
of descending a flight of steps. It passed down from the terrace,
receding, at a distance, from sight, and carried, naturally, so
as to conceal the head and back of its bearer; but Maggie had
quickly recognised the white dress and the particular motion of
this adventurer--had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had
chosen the glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens, and
that she could be betaking herself only to some unvisited quarter
deep in them, or beyond them, that she had already marked as a
superior refuge. The Princess kept her for a few minutes in
sight, watched her long enough to feel her, by the mere betrayal
of her pace and direction, driven in a kind of flight, and then
understood, for herself, why the act of sitting still had become
impossible to either of them. There came to her, confusedly, some
echo of an ancient fable--some vision of Io goaded by the gadfly
or of Ariadne roaming the lone sea-strand. It brought with it all
the sense of her own intention and desire; she too might have
been, for the hour, some far-off harassed heroine--only with a
part to play for which she knew, exactly, no inspiring precedent.
She knew but that, all the while--all the while of her sitting
there among the others without her--she had wanted to go straight
to this detached member of the party and make somehow, for her
support, the last demonstration. A pretext was all that was
needful, and Maggie after another instant had found one.
She had caught a glimpse, before Mrs. Verver disappeared, of her
carrying a book--made out, half lost in the folds of her white
dress, the dark cover of a volume that was to explain her purpose
in case of her being met with surprise, and the mate of which,
precisely, now lay on Maggie's table. The book was an old novel
that the Princess had a couple of days before mentioned having
brought down from Portland Place in the charming original form of
its three volumes. Charlotte had hailed, with a specious glitter
of interest, the opportunity to read it, and our young woman had,
thereupon, on the morrow, directed her maid to carry it to Mrs.
Verver's apartments. She was afterwards to observe that this
messenger, unintelligent or inadvertent, had removed but one of
the volumes, which happened not to be the first. Still possessed,
accordingly, of the first while Charlotte, going out,
fantastically, at such an hour, to cultivate romance in an
arbour, was helplessly armed with the second, Maggie prepared on
the spot to sally forth with succour. The right volume, with a
parasol, was all she required--in addition, that is, to the
bravery of her general idea. She passed again through the house,
unchallenged, and emerged upon the terrace, which she followed,
hugging the shade, with that consciousness of turning the tables
on her friend which we have already noted. But so far as she
went, after descending into the open and beginning to explore the
grounds, Mrs. Verver had gone still further--with the increase of
the oddity, moreover, of her having exchanged the protection of
her room for these exposed and shining spaces. It was not,
fortunately, however, at last, that by persisting in pursuit one
didn't arrive at regions of admirable shade: this was the asylum,
presumably, that the poor wandering woman had had in view--
several wide alleys, in particular, of great length, densely
overarched with the climbing rose and the honeysuckle and
converging, in separate green vistas, at a sort of umbrageous
temple, an ancient rotunda, pillared and statued, niched and
roofed, yet with its uncorrected antiquity, like that of
everything else at Fawns, conscious hitherto of no violence from
the present and no menace from the future. Charlotte had paused
there, in her frenzy, or what ever it was to be called; the place
was a conceivable retreat, and she was staring before her, from
the seat to which she appeared to have sunk, all unwittingly, as
Maggie stopped at the beginning of one of the perspectives.

It was a repetition more than ever then of the evening on the
terrace; the distance was too great to assure her she had been
immediately seen, but the Princess waited, with her intention, as
Charlotte on the other occasion had waited--allowing, oh
allowing, for the difference of the intention! Maggie was full of
the sense of THAT--so full that it made her impatient; whereupon
she moved forward a little, placing herself in range of the eyes
that had been looking off elsewhere, but that she had suddenly
called to recognition. Charlotte had evidently not dreamed of
being followed, and instinctively, with her pale stare, she
stiffened herself for protest. Maggie could make that out--as
well as, further, however, that her second impression of her
friend's approach had an instant effect on her attitude. The
Princess came nearer, gravely and in silence, but fairly paused
again, to give her time for whatever she would. Whatever she
would, whatever she could, was what Maggie wanted--wanting above
all to make it as easy for her as the case permitted. That was
not what Charlotte had wanted the other night, but this never
mattered--the great thing was to allow her, was fairly to produce
in her, the sense of highly choosing. At first, clearly, she had
been frightened; she had not been pursued, it had quickly struck
her, without some design on the part of her pursuer, and what
might she not be thinking of in addition but the way she had,
when herself the pursuer, made her stepdaughter take in her
spirit and her purpose? It had sunk into Maggie at the time, that
hard insistence, and Mrs. Verver had felt it and seen it and
heard it sink; which wonderful remembrance of pressure
successfully applied had naturally, till now, remained with her.
But her stare was like a projected fear that the buried treasure,
so dishonestly come by, for which her companion's still
countenance, at the hour and afterwards, had consented to serve
as the deep soil, might have worked up again to the surface, to
be thrown back upon her hands. Yes, it was positive that during
one of these minutes the Princess had the vision of her
particular alarm. "It's her lie, it's her lie that has mortally
disagreed with her; she can keep down no longer her rebellion at
it, and she has come to retract it, to disown it and denounce
it--to give me full in my face the truth instead." This, for a
concentrated instant, Maggie felt her helplessly gasp--but only
to let it bring home the indignity, the pity of her state. She
herself could but tentatively hover, place in view the book she
carried, look as little dangerous, look as abjectly mild, as
possible; remind herself really of people she had read about in
stories of the wild west, people who threw up their hands, on
certain occasions, as a sign they weren't carrying revolvers. She
could almost have smiled at last, troubled as she yet knew
herself, to show how richly she was harmless; she held up her
volume, which was so weak a weapon, and while she continued, for
consideration, to keep her distance, she explained with as
quenched a quaver as possible. "I saw you come out--saw you from
my window, and couldn't bear to think you should find yourself
here without the beginning of your book. THIS is the beginning;
you've got the wrong volume, and I've brought you out the right."

She remained after she had spoken; it was like holding a parley
with a possible adversary, and her intense, her exalted little
smile asked for formal leave. "May I come nearer now?" she seemed
to say--as to which, however, the next minute, she saw
Charlotte's reply lose itself in a strange process, a thing of
several sharp stages, which she could stand there and trace. The
dread, after a minute, had dropped from her face; though,
discernibly enough, she still couldn't believe in her having, in
so strange a fashion, been deliberately made up to. If she had
been made up to, at least, it was with an idea--the idea that had
struck her at first as necessarily dangerous. That it wasn't,
insistently wasn't, this shone from Maggie with a force finally
not to be resisted; and on that perception, on the immense relief
so constituted, everything had by the end of three minutes
extraordinarily changed. Maggie had come out to her, really,
because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation that was like
a knife in her heart; and in the very sight of her
uncontrollable, her blinded physical quest of a peace not to be
grasped, something of Mrs. Assingham's picture of her as thrown,
for a grim future, beyond the great sea and the great continent
had at first found fulfilment. She had got away, in this
fashion--burning behind her, almost, the ships of disguise--to
let her horror of what was before her play up without witnesses;
and even after Maggie's approach had presented an innocent front
it was still not to be mistaken that she bristled with the signs
of her extremity. It was not to be said for them, either, that
they were draped at this hour in any of her usual graces;
unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess
in spite of the dissimulation that, with the return of
comparative confidence, was so promptly to operate. How tragic,
in essence, the very change made vivid, the instant stiffening of
the spring of pride--this for possible defence if not for
possible aggression. Pride indeed, the next moment, had become
the mantle caught up for protection and perversity; she flung it
round her as a denial of any loss of her freedom. To be doomed
was, in her situation, to have extravagantly incurred a doom, so
that to confess to wretchedness was, by the same stroke, to
confess to falsity. She wouldn't confess, she didn't--a thousand
times no; she only cast about her, and quite frankly and
fiercely, for something else that would give colour to her having
burst her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she
invoked it, and the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she
could only help her to it. She presently got up--which seemed to
mean "Oh, stay if you like!" and when she had moved about awhile
at random, looking away, looking at anything, at everything but
her visitor; when she had spoken of the temperature and declared
that she revelled in it; when she had uttered her thanks for the
book, which, a little incoherently, with her second volume, she
perhaps found less clever than she expected; when she had let
Maggie approach sufficiently closer to lay, untouched, the
tribute in question on a bench and take up obligingly its
superfluous mate: when she had done these things she sat down in
another place, more or less visibly in possession of her part.
Our young woman was to have passed, in all her adventure, no
stranger moments; for she not only now saw her companion fairly
agree to take her then for the poor little person she was finding
it so easy to appear, but fell, in a secret, responsive ecstasy,
to wondering if there were not some supreme abjection with which
she might be inspired. Vague, but increasingly brighter, this
possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung there adequately
plain to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to
(as they said) grovel; and that, truly, made the stage large. It
had absolutely, within the time, taken on the dazzling merit of
being large for each of them alike.

"I'm glad to see you alone--there's something I've been wanting
to say to you. I'm tired," said Mrs. Verver, "I'm tired--!"

"Tired--?" It had dropped the next thing; it couldn't all come at
once; but Maggie had already guessed what it was, and the flush
of recognition was in her face.

"Tired of this life--the one we've been leading. You like it, I
know, but I've dreamed another dream." She held up her head now;
her lighted eyes more triumphantly rested; she was finding, she
was following her way. Maggie, by the same influence, sat in
sight of it; there was something she was SAVING, some quantity of
which she herself was judge; and it was for a long moment, even
with the sacrifice the Princess had come to make, a good deal
like watching her, from the solid shore, plunge into uncertain,
into possibly treacherous depths. "I see something else," she
went on; "I've an idea that greatly appeals to me--I've had it
for a long time. It has come over me that we're wrong. Our real
life isn't here."

Maggie held her breath. "'Ours'--?"

"My husband's and mine. I'm not speaking for you."

"Oh!" said Maggie, only praying not to be, not even to appear,
stupid.

"I'm speaking for ourselves. I'm speaking," Charlotte brought
out, "for HIM."

"I see. For my father."

"For your father. For whom else?" They looked at each other hard
now, but Maggie's face took refuge in the intensity of her
interest. She was not at all even so stupid as to treat her
companion's question as requiring an answer; a discretion that
her controlled stillness had after an instant justified. "I
must risk your thinking me selfish--for of course you know what
it involves. Let me admit it--I AM selfish. I place my husband
first."

"Well," said Maggie smiling and smiling, "since that's where I
place mine--!"

"You mean you'll have no quarrel with me? So much the better
then; for," Charlotte went on with a higher and higher flight,
"my plan is completely formed."

Maggie waited--her glimmer had deepened; her chance somehow was
at hand. The only danger was her spoiling it; she felt herself
skirting an abyss. "What then, may I ask IS your plan?"

It hung fire but ten seconds; it came out sharp. "To take him
home--to his real position. And not to wait."

"Do you mean--a--this season?"

"I mean immediately. And--I may as well tell you now--I mean for
my own time. I want," Charlotte said, "to have him at last a
little to myself; I want, strange as it may seem to you"--and she
gave it all its weight "to KEEP the man I've married. And to do
so, I see, I must act."

Maggie, with the effort still to follow the right line, felt
herself colour to the eyes. "Immediately?" she thoughtfully
echoed.

"As soon as we can get off. The removal of everything is, after
all, but a detail. That can always be done; with money, as he
spends it, everything can. What I ask for," Charlotte declared,
"is the definite break. And I wish it now." With which her head,
like her voice rose higher. "Oh," she added, "I know my
difficulty!"

Far down below the level of attention, in she could scarce have
said what sacred depths, Maggie's inspiration had come, and it
had trembled the next moment into sound. "Do you mean I'M your
difficulty?"

"You and he together--since it's always with you that I've had to
see him. But it's a difficulty that I'm facing, if you wish to
know; that I've already faced; that I propose to myself to
surmount. The struggle with it--none too pleasant--hasn't been
for me, as you may imagine, in itself charming; I've felt in it
at times, if I must tell you all, too great and too strange, an
ugliness. Yet I believe it may succeed."

She had risen, with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved, for the
emphasis of it, a few steps away; while Maggie, motionless at
first, but sat and looked at her. "You want to take my father
FROM me?"

The sharp, successful, almost primitive wail in it made Charlotte
turn, and this movement attested for the Princess the felicity of
her deceit. Something in her throbbed as it had throbbed the
night she stood in the drawing-room and denied that she had
suffered. She was ready to lie again if her companion would but
give her the opening. Then she should know she had done all.
Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare her face with her
note of resentment; and Maggie, feeling this, met it with the
signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of
defeat. "I want really to possess him," said Mrs. Verver. "I
happen also to feel that he's worth it."

Maggie rose as if to receive her. "Oh--worth it!" she wonderfully
threw off.

The tone, she instantly saw, again had its effect: Charlotte
flamed aloft--might truly have been believing in her passionate
parade. "You've thought YOU'VE known what he's worth?"

"Indeed then, my dear, I believe I have--as I believe I still
do."

She had given it, Maggie, straight back, and again it had not
missed. Charlotte, for another moment, only looked at her; then
broke into the words--Maggie had known they would come--of which
she had pressed the spring. "How I see that you loathed our
marriage!"

"Do you ASK me?" Maggie after an instant demanded.

Charlotte had looked about her, picked up the parasol she had
laid on a bench, possessed herself mechanically of one of the
volumes of the relegated novel and then, more consciously, flung
it down again: she was in presence, visibly, of her last word.
She opened her sunshade with a click; she twirled it on her
shoulder in her pride. "'Ask' you? Do I need? How I see," she
broke out, "that you've worked against me!"

"Oh, oh, oh!" the Princess exclaimed.

Her companion, leaving her, had reached one of the archways, but
on this turned round with a flare. "You haven't worked against
me?"

Maggie took it and for a moment kept it; held it, with closed
eyes, as if it had been some captured fluttering bird pressed by
both hands to her breast. Then she opened her eyes to speak.
"What does it matter--if I've failed?"

"You recognise then that you've failed?" asked Charlotte from the
threshold.

Maggie waited; she looked, as her companion had done a moment
before, at the two books on the seat; she put them together and
laid them down; then she made up her mind. "I've failed!" she
sounded out before Charlotte, having given her time, walked away.
She watched her, splendid and erect, float down the long vista;
then she sank upon a seat. Yes, she had done all.

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