• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7084 0

from the first. What I was to have got from my friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for him – well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to myself, for me shrewdly to consider.’ And she easily lost herself each time in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture. ‘It would have been seen, it would have been heard of before, the case of the woman a man doesn’t want, or of whom he’s tired, or for whom he has no use but such uses, and who’s capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all. Cela s’est vu,2 my dear; and stranger things still – as I needn’t tell you! Very good then,’ she wound up; ‘there’s a perfectly possible conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, no imagination’s so lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are blasés,3 are brought up from the first to prowling and mauling. It does give us, you’ll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily, however, in what I finally do think.’

He was well enough aware by this time of what she finally did think, but he wasn’t without a sense again also for his amusement by the way. It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly because he knows what is next to happen. ‘What of course will pull them up if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume is the profit you can have found in furthering Mrs Verver’s marriage. You weren’t at least in love with Charlotte.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Assingham, at this, always brought out, ‘my hand in that is easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to him.’

‘To Mr Verver?’

‘To the Prince – by preventing her in that way from taking, as he was in danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he wouldn’t be able to open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law. I’ve brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man.’

‘Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?’

‘Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress.’ She brought it out grandly – it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly, for her husband’s, its effect. ‘The facilities in the case, thanks to the particular conditions, being so quite ideal.’

‘Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little – from your own point of view – as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of two beautiful women.’

‘Down even to that – to the monstrosity of my folly. But not,’ Mrs Assingham added, ‘ “two” of anything. One beautiful woman – and one beautiful fortune. That’s what a creature of pure virtue exposes herself to when she suffers her pure virtue, suffers her sympathy, her disinterestedness, her exquisite sense for the lives of others, to carry her too far. Voilà.’4

‘I see. It’s the way the Ververs have you.’

‘It’s the way the Ververs “have” me. It’s in other words the way they would be able to make such a show to each other of having me – if Maggie weren’t so divine.’

‘She lets you off?’ He never failed to insist on all this to the very end; which was how he had become so versed in what she finally thought.

‘She lets me off. So that now, horrified and contrite at what I’ve done, I may work to help her out. And Mr Verver,’ she was fond of adding, ‘lets me off too.’

‘Then you do believe he knows?’

It determined in her always there, with a significant pause, a deep immersion in her thought. ‘I believe he’d let me off if he did know – so that I might work to help him out. Or rather, really,’ she went on, ‘that I might work to help Maggie. That would be his motive, that would be his condition, in forgiving me; just as hers for me in fact, her motive and her condition, are my acting to spare