an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter
still. "I don't mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it
had to be, and I'm not speaking of how she may have been concerned for
you and me. I'm speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR
lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day. She can't go
to them and say 'It's very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but
I was frivolously mistaken.'"

He took it in still, with his long look at her. "All the more that she
wasn't. She was right. Everything's right," he went on, "and everything
will stay so."

"Then that's all I say."

But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous
lucidity. "We're happy, and they're happy. What more does the position
admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?"

"Ah, my dear," said Charlotte, "it's not I who say that she need want
anything. I only say that she's FIXED, that she must stand exactly where
everything has, by her own act, placed her. It's you who have seemed
haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative,
something or other we must be prepared for." And she had, with her high
reasoning, a strange cold smile. "We ARE prepared--for anything, for
everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She's
condemned to consistency; she's doomed, poor thing, to a genial
optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her
nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore," Mrs.
Verver gently laughed, "she has the chance of her life!"

"So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be
sincere?--may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?"

The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could
trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience.
"You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I
feel, at any rate, that I've nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or
with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It's
enough for me that she'll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for
herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to
have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren't." And
Charlotte's face, with these words--to the mitigation of the slightly
hard ring there might otherwise have been in them--fairly lightened,
softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet