nly from their being, in
a way, too evident. They're not grounds for me--they weren't when I
accepted Adam's preference that I should come to-night without him: just
as I accept, absolutely, as a fixed rule, ALL his preferences. But that
doesn't alter the fact, of course, that my husband's daughter, rather
than his wife, should have felt SHE could, after all, be the one to
stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour--seeing,
especially, that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field."
With which she produced, as it were, her explanation. "I've simply to
see the truth of the matter--see that Maggie thinks more, on the whole,
of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such," she went on,
"that this becomes immediately, don't you understand? a thing I have to
count with."

Mrs. Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show
it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. "If you mean
such a thing as that she doesn't adore the Prince--!"

"I don't say she doesn't adore him. What I say is that she doesn't think
of him. One of those conditions doesn't always, at all stages, involve
the other. This is just HOW she adores him," Charlotte said. "And what
reason is there, in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn't, as
you say, show together? We've shown together, my dear," she smiled,
"before."

Her friend, for a little, only looked at her--speaking then with
abruptness. "You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such GOOD
people."

The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face,
however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had caused,
the next instant, further to brighten. "Does one ever put into words
anything so fatuously rash? It's a thing that must be said, in prudence,
FOR one--by somebody who's so good as to take the responsibility: the
more that it gives one always a chance to show one's best manners by
not contradicting it. Certainly, you'll never have the distress, or
whatever, of hearing me complain."

"Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!" and the elder woman's
spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by
their pursuit of privacy.

To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. "With all our absence
after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular
by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses
to make up--still the need of show