ALL--she'll stand by me to the death. She won't give me away. For, you
know, she easily can."

This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob
Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. "Easily?"

"She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that
I was aware, at the time of his marriage--as I had been aware at the
time of her own--of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife
and her husband."

"And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she
is herself in ignorance of your knowledge?"

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a
manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very
much as if she was invited by it to say that about this, exactly, she
proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity,
something quite other: it could give itself a little the air, still, of
a triumph over his coarseness. "By acting, immediately with the blind
resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred
would act; and by so making Mr. Verver, in turn, act with the same
natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred.
They've only to agree about me," the poor lady said; "they've only to
feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured;
they've only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me
to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it's I who have been, and
who continue to be, cheated--cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but
they're not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either
of us the benefit of anything. They'll be within their rights to lump us
all together as a false, cruel, conspiring crew, and, if they can find
the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch."

This, on each occasion, put the matter so at the worst that repetition
even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to
see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its
temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed, invariably, the sense of
making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his
almost turning pale, when their eyes met, at this possibility of their
compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as
under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he
sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond