Before she knew it at any rate her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind--her feverish little sense of justice, as I say--had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct could n't have done. And now she knows something or other has happened--yet has n't heretofore known what She has only piled up her remedy, poor child--some thing that she has earnestly but confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself and that would really have needed since then so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father's wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that, peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there's anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that--God forgive me the comparison!--she's like an old woman who has taken to 'painting' and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity, with a greater impudence even, the older she grows." And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. "I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent--learning to be so to gloss things over. (397) She could--she even will, yet, I believe--learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it's all rouge--!" She paused, staring at the vision.
It imparted itself even to Bob. "THEN the fun would begin?" As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his enquiry.
"You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?"
She was silent a moment more. "As I've told you before, she won't be lost if her father's saved. She'll see that as salvation enough."
The Colonel took it in. "Then she's a little heroine."
"Rather--she's a little heroine. But it's his innocence, above all,"
Mrs. Assingham added, "that will pull them through."
Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver's innocence. "It's awfully quaint."
"Of course it's awfully quaint! That it's awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness--by which I don't mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet country-people, from whom I've so deplorably degenerated--that," Mrs. Assingham declared, "was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still," she rather ruefully subjoined, "before they've done with me!"
This might be, but it was n't what most stood in the Colonel's way.
"You believe so in Mr. Verver's innocence after two years of Charlotte?"
(398) She stared. "But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he has n't really--or what you may call undividedly--had."
"Any more than Maggie by your theory, eh, has 'really or undividedly,' had four of the Prince? It takes all she has n't had," the Colonel conceded, "to account for the innocence that in her too so leaves us in admiration."
So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. "It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What's definite at all events is that--strange though this be--her effort for her father has up to now sufficiently succeeded.
She has made him, she MAKES him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged--the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding--he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected.
He had n't worked them out in detail--any more than I had, heaven pity me!--and the queerness has been exactly in the detail. This, for him, is what it WAS to have married Charlotte. And they both," she neatly wound up, "help."
"'Both'--?"
"I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte," Fanny declared, "works like a horse."
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it.
"And what does the Prince work like?"
(399) She fixed him in return. "Like a Prince!" Whereupon, breaking short off to ascend to her room, she presented her highly-decorated back--in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.
