of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him—­to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive.  But she waited a little—­as if made nervous, precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said.  They were avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge.  “Don’t you remember,” she went on, “how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn’t so very sure we, ourselves had the thing itself?”

He did his best to do so.  “Had, you mean a social situation?”

“Yes—­after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that, at the rate we were going, we should never have one.”

“Which was what put us on Charlotte?” Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.

Maggie had another pause—­taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been, at their critical moment, “put on” Charlotte.  It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success.  “Well,” she continued, “I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more ‘placed,’ or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn’t have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn’t obligingly leave me more exalted by having, themselves, smaller ideas.  For those,” she said, “were the feelings we used to have.”

“Oh yes,” he responded philosophically—­“I remember the feelings we used to have.”

Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little, in tender retrospect—­as if they had been also respectable.  “It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position.  But it was worse to be sublime about it—­as I was so afraid, as I’m in fact still afraid of being—­when it wasn’t even there to support one.”  And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it—­which was doubtless too often even now her danger—­almost sententious.  “One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others—­of what they may feel deprived of.  However,” she added, “Kitty and Dotty couldn’t imagine we were deprived of anything.  And now, and now—!” But she stopped as for indulgence to their wonder and envy.

“And now they see, still more, that we can have got everything, and kept everything, and yet not be proud.”