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By Root 7018 0

personage was moved promptly to emulate so definite an example of ‘sloping’. He had his occupations – books to arrange perhaps even at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all the conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie was in the event left alone for a minute with Mrs Assingham, who, after waiting for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage of ‘talking over’ had long passed for them; when they communicated now it was on quite ultimate facts; but Fanny desired to testify to the existence, on her part, of an attention that nothing escaped. She was like the kind lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the overworked little trapezist girl – the acrobatic support presumably of embarrassed and exacting parents – and gives her, as an obscure and meritorious artist, assurance of charitable interest. What was clearest always in our young woman’s imaginings was the sense of being herself left for any occasion in the breach. She was essentially there to bear the burden, in the last resort, of surrounding omissions and evasions, and it was eminently to that office she had been to-day abandoned – with this one alleviation, as appeared, of Mrs Assingham’s keeping up with her. Mrs Assingham suggested that she too was still on the ramparts – though her gallantry proved indeed after a moment to consist not a little of her curiosity. She had looked about and seen their companions beyond earshot.

‘Don’t you really want us to go –?’

Maggie found a faint smile. ‘Do you really want to –?’

It made her friend colour. ‘Well then – no. But we would, you know, at a look from you. We’d pack up and be off – as a sacrifice.’

‘Ah make no sacrifice,’ said Maggie. ‘See me through.’

‘That’s it – that’s all I want. I should be too base –! Besides,’ Fanny went on, ‘you’re too splendid.’

‘Splendid?’

‘Splendid. Also, you know, you are all but “through”. You’ve done it,’ said Mrs Assingham.

But Maggie only took it from her. ‘What does it strike you I’ve done?’

‘What you wanted. They’re going.’

Maggie continued to look at her. ‘Is that what I wanted?’

‘Oh it wasn’t for you to say. That was his affair.’

‘My father’s?’ Maggie asked after an hesitation.

‘Your father’s. He has chosen – and now she knows. She sees it all before her – and she can’t speak or resist or move a little finger. That’s what’s the matter with her,’ said Fanny Assingham.

It made a picture somehow for the Princess as they stood there – the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own. She saw round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature – saw Charlotte somewhere in it virtually at bay and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate. ‘Has she told you?’ she then asked.

Her companion smiled superior. ‘I don’t need to be told – either! I see something, thank God, every day.’ And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance: ‘I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State – which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end – and I see them never come back. But never – simply. I see the extraordinary “interesting” place – which I’ve never been to, you know, and you have – and the exact degree in which she’ll be expected to be interested.’

‘She will be,’ Maggie presently replied.

‘Expected?’

‘Interested.’

For a little after this their eyes met on it; at the end of which Fanny said: ‘She’ll be – yes – what she’ll have to be. And it will be – won’t it? – for ever and ever.’ She spoke as abounding in her friend’s sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her. These were large words and large visions – all the more that now really they spread and spread. In the midst of them however Mrs Assingham had soon