“She understands,” he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs. Verver—­“she understands all she needs to understand.  She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself:  she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it.  She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can’t say in so many words ’Don’t think of me, for I too must make the best of mine:  arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.’  I don’t get quite that from her, any more than I ask for it.  But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers.  So that she’s—­well,” the Prince wound up, “what you may call practically all right.”  Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn’t call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud.  She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit’s end was she, for once, clear or direct in response.  They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on, be among the first to appear in festal array.  The hall then was empty, before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemaids were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end, where they might imitate, with art, the unpremeditated.  Above all, here, for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact.  They had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had slow approximations that counted as long caresses.  The quality of these passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman’s tone had even now a certain dryness.  “It’s very good of her, my dear, to trust us.  But what else can she do?”

“Why, whatever people do when they don’t trust.  Let one see they don’t.”

“But let whom see?”

“Well, let me, say, to begin with.”

“And should you mind that?”

He had a slight show of surprise.  “Shouldn’t you?”

“Her letting you see?  No,” said Charlotte; “the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don’t look out, may let her see.”  To which she added:  “You may let her see, you know, that you’re afraid.”