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By Root 7255 0

in his companion a slight impatience. ‘You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel at any rate that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It’s enough for me that she’ll always be of necessity much more afraid for herself, really, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.’ And Charlotte’s face, with these words – to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them – fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption – so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed the next instant have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakeable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her at the same time to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn’t heretofore by a hair’s breadth deviated. ‘If it didn’t sound so vulgar I should say that we’re – fatally, as it were – safe. Pardon the low expression – since it’s what we happen to be. We’re so because they are. And they’re so because they can’t be anything else from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. That’s the way she’s inevitably with us,’ said Charlotte over her smile. ‘We hang essentially together.’

Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. ‘Yes, I see. We hang essentially together.’

His friend had a shrug – a shrug that had a grace. ‘Cosa volete?’3 The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. ‘Ah beyond doubt it’s a case.’

He stood looking at her. ‘It’s a case. There can’t,’ he said, ‘have been many.’

‘Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,’ she smiled, ‘I confess I should like to think. Only ours.’

‘Only ours – most probably. Speriamo.’4 To which, as after hushed connexions, he presently added: ‘Poor Fanny!’ But Charlotte had already with a start and a warning hand turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. Something in the sight however appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air. ‘Poor, poor Fanny!’

It was to prove on the morrow quite consistent with the spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham breaking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of the social side of the process of returning to whence he had come with due presence of mind. It was impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with the Assinghams; it was impossible for the same reasons that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right tone for disposing of his elder friend’s suggestion, as assumption in fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs Verver had been precisely a part of Mrs Assingham’s mildness, and nothing could better have characterised her sense for social shades than her easy perception