To this demonstration her friend gave no heed.  “With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up—­still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him.  She missed his company—­a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her.  So she puts it in when she can—­a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount.  The fact of our distinct establishments—­ which has, all the same, everything in its favour,” Charlotte hastened to declare, “makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house.  To make sure she doesn’t fail of it she’s always arranging for it—­which she didn’t have to do while they lived together.  But she likes to arrange,” Charlotte steadily proceeded; “it peculiarly suits her; and the result of our separate households is really, for them, more contact and more intimacy.  To-night, for instance, has been practically an arrangement.  She likes him best alone.  And it’s the way,” said our young woman, “in which he best likes her.  It’s what I mean therefore by being ‘placed.’  And the great thing is, as they say, to ‘know’ one’s place.  Doesn’t it all strike you,” she wound up, “as rather placing the Prince too?”

Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—­so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech.  But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—­apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—­tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess.  So she picked out, after consideration, a solitary plum.  “So placed that you have to arrange?”

“Certainly I have to arrange.”

“And the Prince also—­if the effect for him is the same?”

“Really, I think, not less.”

“And does he arrange,” Mrs. Assingham asked, “to make up his arrears?” The question had risen to her lips—­it was as if another morsel, on the dish, had tempted her.  The sound of it struck her own ear, immediately, as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended; but she quickly saw that she must follow it up, at any risk, with simplicity, and that what was simplest was the ease of boldness.  “Make them up, I mean, by coming to see you?”

Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair.  She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle.  “He never comes.”

“Oh!” said Fanny Assingham:  with which she felt a little stupid.  “There it is.  He might so well, you know, otherwise.”

“’Otherwise’?”—­and Fanny was still vague.