第83章 Chapter 1(4)

"Certainly, dear. Only when you ask me as if I might n't perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to Mrs. Assingham had a wait, then, blinking a little, she took her risk.

"You did n't think that if it was (256) a question of any one's returning to him in his trouble it would be better you yourself should have gone?"

Well, Charlotte's answer to this enquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the REAL truth. "If we could n't be perfectly frank and dear with each other it would be ever so much better, would n't it? that we should n't talk about anything at all; which however would be dreadful--and we certainly at any rate have n't yet come to it. You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because, don't you see? you can't upset me."

"I'm sure, my dear Charlotte," Fanny Assingham laughed, "I don't want to upset you."

"Indeed, love, you simply COULD N'T even if you thought it necessary--that's all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I 'm, by no merit of my own, just fixed--fixed as fast as a pin stuck up to its head in a cushion. I'm placed--I can't imagine any one MORE placed. There I AM!"

Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. "I dare say--but your statement of your position, however you see it, is n't an answer to my enquiry. I confess it seems to me at the same time," Mrs. Assingham added, "to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being 'frank.'

How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay and if she's willing to (257) leave you and her husband to show here without her, are n't the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable?"

"If they're not," Charlotte replied, "it's only from their being in a way too evident. They're not grounds for me--they were n't when I accepted Adam's preference that I should come to-night without him: just as I accept absolutely, as a fixed rule, ALL his preferences. But that of course does n't alter the fact that my husband's daughter rather than his wife should have felt SHE could after all be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour--seeing especially that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field." With which she produced, as it were, her explanation.

"I've simply to see the truth of the matter--see that Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such," she went on, "that this becomes immediately, don't you understand? a thing I have to count with. "

Mrs. Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. "If you mean such a thing as that she does n't adore the Prince--!"

"I don't say she does n't adore him. What I say is that she does n't think of him. One of those conditions does n't always at all stages involve the other. This is just HOW she adores him," Charlotte said. "And what reason is there in the world, after all, why he and I should n't, as you say, show together? We've shown together, my dear," she smiled, "before."

Her friend, for a little, only looked at her--speaking (258) then with abruptness. "You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such GOOD people."

The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had the next instant caused further to brighten. "Does one ever put into words anything so fatuously rash? It's a thing that must be said, in prudence, FOR one--by somebody who's so good as to take the responsibility: the more that it gives one always a chance to show one's best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly, you'll never have the distress, or whatever, of hearing me complain."

"Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!"--and the elder woman's spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy.

To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. "With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up--still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him. She missed his company--a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can--a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments--which has all the same everything in its favour," Charlotte hastened to declare--"makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house. To make sure she does n't fail of it she's always arranging for it--which she did n't have to do while they lived together. (259) But she likes to arrange,"

Charlotte steadily proceeded; it peculiarly suits her; and the result of our separate households is really, for them, more contact and more intimacy.

To-night for instance has been practically an arrangement. She likes him best alone. And it's the way," said our young woman "in which he best likes HER. It's what I mean therefore by being 'placed.' And the great thing is, as they say, to 'know' one's place. Does n't it all strike you," she wound up, "as rather placing the Prince too?"