feel, than she had ever been before, let
him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. "I always pay for
it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.
Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on
Charlotte--Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives,
when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them,
and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as,
for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It
began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was
a person who COULD keep off ravening women--without being one herself,
either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr.
Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something,
of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I
mean--it looks at me," she veritably moaned, "out of your face! But all
I can say is that it didn't; the reason largely being--once I had fallen
in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan--that I seemed to feel
sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn't quite make out
either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of
her accepting."

"I see--I see." She had paused, meeting all the while his listening
look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that
the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with
cooling breath. "One quite understands, my dear."

It only, however, kept her there sombre. "I naturally see, love, what
you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes. You see
that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes,
dearest"--and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more
possessed her: "you've only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason
for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see," she
said with an ineffable headshake, "that I don't stand up! I'm down,
down, down," she declared; "yet" she as quickly added--"there's just one
little thing that helps to save my life." And she kept him waiting but
an instant. "They might easily--they would perhaps even certainly--have
done something worse."

He thought. "Worse than that Charlotte--?"

"Ah, don't tell me," she cried, "that there COULD have been nothing
worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in
her way, is extraordinary."

He