“I’m only afraid of you, a little, at moments,” he presently returned.  “But I shan’t let Fanny see that.”

It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Assingham’s vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done.  “What in the world can she do against us?  There’s not a word that she can breathe.  She’s helpless; she can’t speak; she would be herself the first to be dished by it.”  And then as he seemed slow to follow:  “It all comes back to her.  It all began with her.  Everything, from the first.  She introduced you to Maggie.  She made your marriage.”

The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on.  “Mayn’t she also be said, a good deal, to have made yours?  That was intended, I think, wasn’t it? for a kind of rectification.”

Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still.  “I don’t mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I’m not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me.  I’m speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, their lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day.  She can’t go to them and say ’It’s very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.’”

He took it in still, with his long look at her.  “All the more that she wasn’t.  She was right.  Everything’s right,” he went on, “and everything will stay so.”

“Then that’s all I say.”

But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity.  “We’re happy, and they’re happy.  What more does the position admit of?  What more need Fanny Assingham want?”

“Ah, my dear,” said Charlotte, “it’s not I who say that she need want anything.  I only say that she’s fixed, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her.  It’s you who have seemed haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.”  And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile.  “We are prepared—­for anything, for everything; and as we are, practically, so she must take us.  She’s condemned to consistency; she’s doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism.  That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature.  She was born to soothe and to smooth.  Now then, therefore,” Mrs. Verver gently laughed, “she has the chance of her life!”

“So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere?—­may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?”