depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her from hour to hour for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being – as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour at tea to proclaim herself – the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis,2 that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s – these matters and others would be all now as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always at the worst be picturesque – for she habitually spoke of herself as ‘local’ to Sloane Street: whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement in her of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn’t really watching him – ground for which would have been too terribly grave – she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: so she might, precisely, mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take – the Prince could see it all: it wasn’t a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn’t even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips, that she now knew her – he didn’t then say ‘Ah see what you’ve done: isn’t it rather your own fault?’ He behaved differently altogether: eminently distinguished himself – for she told him she had never seen him so universally distinguished – he yet distinguished her in her obscurity or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for ‘bridge’ and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his ‘niceness’ to her – she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes – had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration.
‘She understands,’ he said as a comment on all this to Mrs Verver – ‘she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it. She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can’t say in so many words “Don’t think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.” I don’t get quite that from her, any more than I ask for it. But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that she’s – well,’ the Prince wound up, ‘what you may call practically all right.’ Charlotte in fact however, to help out his confidence, didn’t call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She let him two or three times over spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit’s end was she for once clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already a couple of times arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone