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By Root 7100 0

know, some one who knew Mrs Assingham and also knew Sir John. Charlotte had left it to her friend’s competence to throw the two others immediately together and to find a way for entertaining her in closer quarters. This was the little history of the vision in her that was now rapidly helping her to recognise a precious chance, the chance that mightn’t again soon be so good for the vivid making of a point. Her point was before her; it was sharp, bright, true; above all it was her own. She had reached it quite by herself; no one, not even Amerigo – Amerigo least of all, who would have nothing to do with it – had given her aid. To make it now with force for Fanny Assingham’s benefit would see her further, in the direction in which the light had dawned, than any other spring she should doubtless yet awhile be able to press. The direction was that of her greater freedom – which was all in the world she had in mind. Her opportunity had accordingly, after a few minutes of Mrs Assingham’s almost imprudently interested expression of face, positively acquired such a price for her that she may for ourselves, while the intensity lasted, rather resemble a person holding out a small mirror at arm’s length and consulting it with a special turn of the head. It was in a word with this value of her chance that she was intelligently playing when she said in answer to Fanny’s last question: ‘Don’t you remember what you told me, on the occasion of something or other, the other day? That you believe there’s nothing I’m afraid of? So, my dear, don’t ask me!’

‘Mayn’t I ask you,’ Mrs Assingham returned, ‘how the case stands with your poor husband?’

‘Certainly, dear. Only when you ask me as if I mightn’t perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to think.’

Mrs Assingham had a wait, then, blinking a little, she took her risk. ‘You didn’t think that if it was 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 couldn’t be perfectly frank and dear with each other it would be ever so much better, wouldn’t it? that we shouldn’t talk about anything at all; which however would be dreadful – and we certainly at any rate haven’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 couldn’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, isn’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 leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren’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 weren’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 doesn’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