"It's too delightful to be back!" she said at last; and it was all she definitely gave him--being moreover nothing but what any one else might have said. Yet with two or three other things that, on his response, followed it, it quite pointed the path, while the tone of it, and her whole attitude, were as far removed as need have been from the truth of her situation.
The abjection that was present to him as of the essence quite failed to peep out, and he soon enough saw that if she was arranging she could be trusted to arrange. Good--it was all he asked; and all the more that he could admire and like her for it. The particular appearance she would, as they said, go in for was that of having no account whatever to give him--it would be in fact that of having none to give anybody--of reasons or of motives, of comings or of goings. She was a charming young woman who had met him before, but she was also a charming young woman with a life (52) of her own. She would take it high--up, up, up, ever so high.
Well then he would do the same; no height would be too great for them, not even the dizziest conceivable to a young person so subtle. The dizziest seemed indeed attained when after another moment she came as near as she was to come to an apology for her abruptness.
"I've been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I wanted to see her happy--and it does n't strike me I find you too shy to tell me I SHALL."
"Of course she's happy, thank God! Only it's almost terrible, you know, the happiness of young good generous creatures. It rather frightens one.
But the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints," said the Prince, "have her in their keeping."
"Certainly they have. She's the dearest of the dear. But I need n't tell you," the girl added.
"Ah," he returned with gravity, "I feel that I've still much to learn about her." To which he subjoined: "She'll rejoice awfully in your being with us.""
"Oh you don't need me!" Charlotte smiled. "It's her hour. It's a great hour. One has seen often enough, with girls, what it is. But that," she said, "is exactly why. Why I've wanted, I mean, not to miss it."
He bent on her a kind comprehending face. "You must n't miss anything."
He had got it, the pitch, and he could keep it now, for all he had needed was to have it given him. The pitch was the happiness of his wife that was to be--the sight of that happiness as a joy for an old friend. It was, yes, magnificent, and not the (53) less so for its coming to him suddenly as sincere, as nobly exalted. Something in Charlotte's eyes seemed to tell him this, seemed to plead with him in advance as to what he was to find in it. He was eager--and he tried to show her that too--to find what she liked; mindful as he easily could be of what the friendship had been for Maggie. It had been armed with the wings of young imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed--always counting out her intense devotion to her father--the liveliest emotion she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired by himself. She had n't, to his knowledge, invited the object of it to their wedding, had n't thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple of hours, an arduous and expensive journey. But she had kept her connected and informed, from week to week, in spite of preparations and absorptions. "Oh I've been writing to Charlotte--I wish you knew her better ": he could still hear, from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he could still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous element in Maggie's wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her. Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why should n't Charlotte respond--and be quite FREE to respond--to such fidelities with something more than mere formal good manners? The relations of women with each other were of the strangest, it was true, and he probably would n't have trusted here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding throughout on the ground of the immense difference--difficult indeed as it might have been to disembroil in this young person HER race-quality. Nothing in her definitely (54) placed her; she was a rare, a special product. Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means, that is her want of ramifications and other advantages, contributed to enrich her somehow with an odd precious neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached yet so aware, a sort of small social capital. It was the only one she had--it was the only one a lonely gregarious girl COULD have, since few surely had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of some gift of nature to which you could scarce give a definite name.
It was n't a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops or lighted brands--it was n't at least entirely that, for he had known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make interesting.