at times, the dear things, like children playing at paying visits, playing at “Mr. Thompson” and “Mrs. Fane,” each hoping that the other would really stay to tea.  Charlotte was sure she should find Maggie there on getting home—­ a remark in which Mrs. Verver’s immediate response to her friend’s inquiry had culminated.  She had thus, on the spot, the sense of having given her plenty to think about, and that moreover of liking to see it even better than she had expected.  She had plenty to think about herself, and there was already something in Fanny that made it seem still more.

“You say your husband’s ill?  He felt too ill to come?”

“No, my dear—­I think not.  If he had been too ill I wouldn’t have left him.”

“And yet Maggie was worried?” Mrs. Assingham asked.

“She worries, you know, easily.  She’s afraid of influenza—­of which he has had, at different times, though never with the least gravity, several attacks.”

“But you’re not afraid of it?”

Charlotte had for a moment a pause; it had continued to come to her that really to have her case “out,” as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate difficulties had oftenest referred themselves, would help her, on the whole, more than hinder; and under that feeling all her opportunity, with nothing kept back; with a thing or two perhaps even thrust forward, seemed temptingly to open.  Besides, didn’t Fanny at bottom half expect, absolutely at the bottom half want, things?—­ so that she would be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn’t get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have “gone too far” in her irrepressible interest in other lives.  What had just happened—­it pieced itself together for Charlotte—­was that the Assingham pair, drifting like everyone else, had had somewhere in the gallery, in the rooms, an accidental concussion; had it after the Colonel, over his balustrade, had observed, in the favouring high light, her public junction with the Prince.  His very dryness, in this encounter, had, as always, struck a spark from his wife’s curiosity, and, familiar, on his side, with all that she saw in things, he had thrown her, as a fine little bone to pick, some report of the way one of her young friends was “going on” with another.  He knew perfectly—­such at least was Charlotte’s liberal assumption—­that she wasn’t going on with anyone, but she also knew that, given the circumstances, she was inevitably to be sacrificed, in some form or another, to the humorous intercourse of the inimitable couple.  The Prince meanwhile had also, under coercion, sacrificed her; the Ambassador had come up to him with a message from Royalty, to whom he was led away; after which she had talked for five minutes with Sir John Brinder, who had been of the Ambassador’s company and