Book First: The Prince - Part Third - XXIV

"I can't say more," this made his companion reply, "than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best - and her very best, poor duck, is very good - to be quiet and natural. It's when one sees people who always are natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it - then it is that one knows something's the matter. I can't describe my impression - you would have had it for yourself. And the only thing that ever can be the matter with Maggie is that. By 'that' I mean her beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time," Mrs. Assingham wound up, "of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world."

It was impressive, Fanny's vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. "To doubt of fidelity - to doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But she'll put it all," he concluded, "on Charlotte."

Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake. "She won't 'put' it anywhere. She won't do with it anything anyone else would. She'll take it all herself."

"You mean she'll make it out her own fault?"

"Yes - she'll find means, somehow, to arrive at that."

"Ah then," the Colonel dutifully declared, "she's indeed a little brick!"

"Oh," his wife returned, "you'll see, in one way or another, to what tune!" And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation - so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. "She'll see me somehow through!"

"See you - ?"

"Yes, me. I'm the worst. For," said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, "I did it all. I recognise that - I accept it. She won't cast it up at me - she won't cast up anything. So I throw myself upon her - she'll bear me up." She spoke almost volubly - she held him with her sudden sharpness. "She'll carry the whole weight of us."

There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. "You mean she won't mind? I say, love - !" And he not unkindly stared. "Then where's the difficulty?"

"There isn't any!" Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. "Ah, you mean there isn't any for us!"

She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what they had most to consider. "Not," she said with dignity, "if we properly keep our heads." She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis. "Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first real anxiety - after the Foreign Office party?"

"In the carriage - as we came home?" Yes - he could recall it. "Leave them to pull through?"

"Precisely. 'Trust their own wit,' you practically said, 'to save all appearances.' Well, I've trusted it. I have left them to pull through."

He hesitated. "And your point is that they're not doing so?"

"I've left them," she went on, "but now I see how and where. I've been leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to her."

"To the Princess?"

"And that's what I mean," Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. "That's what happened to me with her today," she continued to explain. "It came home to me that that's what I've really been doing."

"Oh, I see."

"I needn't torment myself. She has taken them over."

The Colonel declared that he "saw"; yet it was as if, at this, he a little sightlessly stared. "But what then has happened, from one day to the other, to her? What has opened her eyes?"

"They were never really shut. She misses him."

"Then why hasn't she missed him before?"