purpose really to represent their price.  She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure she could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant:  partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, couldn’t suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered.  He was a huge expense assuredly—­but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent.  And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father—­ this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her.  He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth.  His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation.  The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.

“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened.  “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-in-law too.  It’s as if he had saved us both—­which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link.  Don’t you remember”—­he kept it up—­“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation:  “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is.  We were wholly right—­and so was she.  That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success.  We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best.  That was really what we meant, wasn’t it?  Only—­what she has got—­something thoroughly good.  It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better—­once you allow her the way it’s to be taken.  Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different.  Her offset is a certain decent freedom—­ which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented with.  You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it.  She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement.  She would enjoy it, I