But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense for a moment intolerable. "Yes--there I am! I was really at the bottom of it," she declared; "I don't know what possessed me--but I planned for him, I goaded him on." With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. "Or rather I DO know what possessed me--for was n't he beset with ravening women, right and left, and did n't he quite pathetically appeal for protection, did n't he quite charmingly show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie," she thus lucidly continued, "could n't, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past--to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping THEM off. One perceived this," she went on--"out of the abundance of one's affection and one's sympathy." It all blessedly came back to her--when it was n't all for the fiftieth time obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. "One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always IS, to think one sees people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one's excuse here," she insisted, "was that these people clearly DID N'T see them for themselves--did n't see them at all. It struck one for very pity--that they were making a mess of such charming material;
(389) that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They did n't know HOW to live--and somehow one could n't, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it. That's what I pay for"--and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. "I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte--Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives when not beautifully and a trifle mysteriously flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure just as, for any possible good to the world, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me in the watches of the night that Charlotte was a person who COULD keep off ravening women--without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something of course that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean--it looks at me," she veritably moaned, "out of your face!
But all I can say is that it did n't; the reason largely being--once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan--that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I did n't quite make out either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting."
"I see--I see." She had paused, meeting all the (390) while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. "One quite understands, my dear."
Yet it only kept her there sombre. "I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again perfectly in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest"--and the grimness of her lucidity suddenly once more possessed her: "you've only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see," she said with an ineffable headshake, "that I don't stand up! I'm down, down, down," she declared;
"yet"--she as quickly added--"there's just one little thing that helps to save my life." And she kept him waiting but an instant. "They might easily--they would perhaps even certainly--have done something worse."
He thought. "Worse than that Charlotte--?"
"Ah don't tell me," she cried, "that there COULD have been nothing worse.
There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary."
He was almost simultaneous. "Extraordinary!"
"She observes the forms," said Fanny Assingham.
"With the Prince--?"
"For the Prince. And with the others," she went on. "With Mr. Verver--wonderfully.
But above all with Maggie. And the forms"--she had to do even THEM justice--"are two thirds of conduct. (391) Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them."
But he jerked back. "Ah my dear, I would n't say it for the world!"
'Say," she none the less pursued, "he had married a woman the Prince would REALLY have cared for."
"You mean then he does n't care for Charlotte--?"
This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said:
"No!"
"Then what on earth are they up to?" Still however she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time to risk soothingly another question. "Are the 'forms' you speak of--that are two thirds of conduct--what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?"
"Yes--absolutely. THEIR forms."
"'Theirs'--?"
"Maggie's and Mr. Verver's--those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the Prince.
Those," she developed, "that so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones."
He considered--but only now at last really to relapse into woe. "Your 'perversity,' my dear, is exactly what I don't understand. The state of things existing has n't grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now (392) is at least the consequence of what they've DONE. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?"
Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it. "Yes--they are. To be so abjectly innocent--that IS to be victims of fate."
"And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent--?