something in them; whereby he stared there, beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with.  There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging it at him, on the question of her father’s view of him, her determined “Find out for yourself!” She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source.  Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their companions.  Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation.  What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer to him, her father’s and her own, of an opportunity to separate from Mrs. Verver with the due amount of form—­and all the more that he was, in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on the score of taste.  Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea; for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine of them, wouldn’t be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had always conformed to, had no importance whatever?  If meanwhile, at all events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again.  She was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity.  “They’re doing the wisest thing, you know.  For if they were ever to go—!” And he looked down at her over his cigar.

If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her father’s age, Charlotte’s need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to “live into” their queer future—­it was high time that they should take up their courage.  This was eminent sense, but it didn’t arrest the Princess, who, the next moment, had found a form for her challenge.  “But shan’t you then so much as miss her a little?  She’s wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying.  Not really, not physically,” Maggie went on—­ “she’s so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done with life.  But dying for us—­for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.”