“Afraid of themselves.”

The Colonel wondered.  “Of themselves?  Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”

Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid.  “Yes—­of such blindness too.  But most of all of their own danger.”

He turned it over.  “That danger being the blindness—?”

“That danger being their position.  What their position contains—­ of all the elements—­I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you.  It contains, luckily—­for that’s the mercy—­ everything but blindness:  I mean on their part.  The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”

He stood for a moment; he would have it straight.  “Whose husband’s?”

“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on.  “The blindness is most of all his.  That they feel—­that they see.  But it’s also his wife’s.”

“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention.  And then as she only gloomed:  “The Prince’s?”

“Maggie’s own—­Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for herself.

He had a pause.  “Do you think Maggie so blind?”

“The question isn’t of what I think.  The question’s of the conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte—­who have better opportunities than I for judging.”

The Colonel again wondered.  “Are you so very sure their opportunities are better?”

“Well,” his wife asked, “what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?”

“Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity—­of their extraordinary situation and relation—­as much as they.”

“With the difference, darling,” she returned with some spirit, “that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine.  I see the boat they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself.  To-day, however,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to-day in Eaton Square I did see.”

“Well then, what?”

But she mused over it still.  “Oh, many things.  More, somehow, than ever before.  It was as if, God help me, I was seeing for them—­I mean for the others.  It was as if something had happened—­I don’t know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place—­that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes.”  These eyes indeed of the poor lady’s rested on her companion’s, meanwhile, with the lustre not so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognise.  She desired, obviously, to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact.  They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action:  she must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way.  He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out.  The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns.  The twist seemed remarkable for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon.  “It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them—­”