“I’ve been wanting—­and longer than you’d perhaps believe—­to put a question to you for which no opportunity has seemed to me yet quite so good as this.  It would have been easier perhaps if you had struck me as in the least disposed ever to give me one.  I have to take it now, you see, as I find it.”  They stood in the centre of the immense room, and Maggie could feel that the scene of life her imagination had made of it twenty minutes before was by this time sufficiently peopled.  These few straight words filled it to its uttermost reaches, and nothing was now absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called upon to play in it.  Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich train; she rose there beautiful and free, with her whole aspect and action attuned to the firmness of her speech.  Maggie had kept the shawl she had taken out with her, and, clutching it tight in her nervousness, drew it round her as if huddling in it for shelter, covering herself with it for humility.  She looked out as from under an improvised hood—­the sole headgear of some poor woman at somebody’s proud door; she waited even like the poor woman; she met her friend’s eyes with recognitions she couldn’t suppress.  She might sound it as she could—­“What question then?”—­everything in her, from head to foot, crowded it upon Charlotte that she knew.  She knew too well—­that she was showing; so that successful vagueness, to save some scrap of her dignity from the imminence of her defeat, was already a lost cause, and the one thing left was if possible, at any cost, even that of stupid inconsequence, to try to look as if she weren’t afraid.  If she could but appear at all not afraid she might appear a little not ashamed—­that is not ashamed to be afraid, which was the kind of shame that could be fastened on her, it being fear all the while that moved her.  Her challenge, at any rate, her wonder, her terror—­the blank, blurred surface, whatever it was that she presented became a mixture that ceased to signify; for to the accumulated advantage by which Charlotte was at present sustained her next words themselves had little to add.

“Have you any ground of complaint of me?  Is there any wrong you consider I’ve done you?  I feel at last that I’ve a right to ask you.”

Their eyes had to meet on it, and to meet long; Maggie’s avoided at least the disgrace of looking away.  “What makes you want to ask it?”

“My natural desire to know.  You’ve done that, for so long, little justice.”

Maggie waited a moment.  “For so long?  You mean you’ve thought—?”

“I mean, my dear, that I’ve seen.  I’ve seen, week after week, that you seemed to be thinking—­of something that perplexed or worried you.  Is it anything for which I’m in any degree responsible?”

Maggie summoned all her powers.  “What in the world should it be?”