"when it's so plain a part of one's contract? I've got so
much, by my marriage"--for she had never for a moment concealed from him
how "much" she had felt it and was finding it "that I should deserve
no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the
contrary all one can, are just one's decency and one's honour and one's
virtue. These things, henceforth, if you're interested to know, are my
rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images
set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I'm not a brute," she had wound
up, "you shall see me as I AM!" Which was therefore as he had seen
her--dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one
occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office.
Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all the while,
contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her
husband's daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something
more than this--it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the
possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in--on the crudest
expression of it--to do the "worldly" for them, and she had done it with
such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even
more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it,
moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which
minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie,
in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less
naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of
the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte
in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it
Maggie's. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great
mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn't, no doubt,
quite equally provide for--that would be, to balance, just in a manner
Charlotte's very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could
be got adequately to recognise it.

Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually
recognising it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are
actually engaged, completed in the Prince's breast these others, these
images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of
his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in
order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently--