fairly liked to recover the sight – little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all entertained for a stiffish series of days. She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was happening – happening, that is, as a result of her influence. ‘Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,’ Mrs Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie – the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend – an odd little taste, as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing, so to speak, what could be said about her: almost as if her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs Assingham, it struck him, applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young friend – so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie’s as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions of his having paternally lumped the two children together in the recommendation that they shouldn’t make too much noise nor eat too much jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte’s prompt influence she hadn’t been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent visitors. ‘I felt in fact privately so sorry for them that I kept my impression to myself while they were here – wishing not to put the rest of you on the scent; neither Maggie, nor the Prince, nor yourself, nor even Charlotte herself, if you didn’t happen to notice. Since you didn’t, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I’m not – I followed it all. One saw the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the Borgias1 may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison’s only a little awkward, for I don’t in the least mean that Charlotte was consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them – but she didn’t know it.’
‘Ah she didn’t know it?’ Mr Verver had asked with interest.
‘Well, I think she didn’t’ – Mrs Assingham had to admit that she hadn’t pressingly sounded her. ‘I don’t pretend to be sure in every connexion of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t certainly like to make people suffer – not, in general, as is the case with so many of us, even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with her. She likes, that is – as all pleasant people do – to be liked.’
‘Ah she likes to be liked?’ her companion had gone on.
‘She did at the same time, no doubt, want to help us – to put us at our ease. That is she wanted to put you – and to put Maggie about you. So far as that went she had a plan. But it was only after – it was not before, I really believe – that she saw how effectively she could work.’
Again, as Mr Verver felt, he must have taken it up. ‘Ah she wanted to help us? – wanted to help me?’
‘Why,’ Mrs Assingham asked after an instant, ‘should it surprise you?’
He just thought. ‘Oh it doesn’t!’
‘She saw of course as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we all were. She didn’t need each of us to go by appointment to her room at night, or to take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No doubt even she was rather impatient.’
‘Of the poor things?’ Mr Verver had here enquired while he waited.
‘Well, of your not yourselves being so – and of your not in particular. I haven’t the least doubt in the world par exemple,2 that she thinks you too meek.’
‘Oh she thinks me too meek?’
‘And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in. All she had to do after all was to be nice to you.’
‘To – a – me?’ said Adam Verver.
He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. ‘To you and to every one. She had only to be what she is – and