r 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 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 inquired 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, 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 to
be it all round. If she's charming, how can she help it? So it was, and
so only, that she 'acted'-as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it
come over them--the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a
woman other, and SO other, than themselves, COULD be charming. One saw
them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and
decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it's she who's
the real thing."

"Ah, it's she who's the real thing?" As HE had not hitherto taken it
home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so, doubtless, he
had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal. "I see,
I see"--he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without
wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was. "And
what would it be--a--definitely that you understand by that?"

She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. "Why, exactly what
those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to
make them recognise that they never will."

"Oh--of course never?"

It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and
deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal
existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing
classed and stamped as "real"--just as he had been able to think of it
as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter's marriage. The
note of reality, in so mu