“My father’s?” Maggie asked after an hesitation.

“Your father’s.  He has chosen—­and now she knows.  She sees it all before her—­and she can’t speak, or resist, or move a little finger.  That’s what’s the matter with her,” said Fanny Assingham.

It made a picture, somehow, for the Princess, as they stood there—­the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own.  She saw, round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature—­saw Charlotte, somewhere in it, virtually at bay, and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth.  She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate.  “Has she told you?” she then asked.

Her companion smiled superior. “I don’t need to be told—­ either!  I see something, thank God, every day.”  And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance:  “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State—­which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.  I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end—­ and I see them never come back.  But never—­simply.  I see the extraordinary ‘interesting’ place—­which I’ve never been to, you know, and you have—­and the exact degree in which she will be expected to be interested.”

“She will be,” Maggie presently replied.  “Expected?”

“Interested.”

For a little, after this, their eyes met on it; at the end of which Fanny said:  “She’ll be—­yes—­what she’ll have to be.  And it will be—­won’t it? for ever and ever.”  She spoke as abounding in her friend’s sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her.

These were large words and large visions—­all the more that now, really, they spread and spread.  In the midst of them, however, Mrs. Assingham had soon enough continued.  “When I talk of ‘knowing,’ indeed, I don’t mean it as you would have a right to do.  You know because you see—­and I don’t see him.  I don’t make him out,” she almost crudely confessed.

Maggie again hesitated.  “You mean you don’t make out Amerigo?”

But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one’s intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded.  Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion, and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness.  No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had taken that, without delay, from her eyes—­with a discretion, still, that fell short but by an inch.  “You know how he feels.”

Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake.  “I know nothing.”

“You know how you feel.”

But again she denied it.  “I know nothing.  If I did—!”

“Well, if you did?” Fanny asked as she faltered.