heroine."

"Rather--she's a little heroine. But it's his innocence, above all,"
Mrs. Assingham added, "that will pull them through."

Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver's innocence. "It's
awfully quaint."

"Of course it's awfully quaint! That it's awfully quaint, that the pair
are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness--by which I
don't mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from
whom I've so deplorably degenerated--that," Mrs. Assingham declared,
"was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my
interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still," she
rather ruefully subjoined, "before they've done with me!"

This might be, but it wasn't what most stood in the Colonel's way. "You
believe so in Mr. Verver's innocence after two years of Charlotte?"

She stared. "But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are
what he hasn't really--or what you may call undividedly--had."

"Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has 'really or undividedly,'
had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn't had," the Colonel
conceded, "to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us
in admiration."

So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. "It takes a great
many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is
that--strange though this be--her effort for her father has, up to now,
sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the
tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of
the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were,
exquisitely humbugged--the Principino, in whom he delights, always
aiding--he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his
life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn't worked them
out in detail--any more than I had, heaven pity me!--and the queerness
has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have
married Charlotte. And they both," she neatly wound up, "'help.'"

"'Both'--?"

"I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all
so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part
is very large. Charlotte," Fanny declared, "works like a horse."

So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it.
"And what does the Prince work like?"

She fixed him in return. "Like a Prince!" Whereupon, breaking short off,