of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the world, Mr. Verver and Maggie were.  It began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who could keep off ravening women—­without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future.  There was something, of course, that might have stopped me:  you know, you know what I mean—­it looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face!  But all I can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—­once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—­that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn’t quite make out either what other woman, or what other kind of woman, one could think of her accepting.”

“I see—­I see.”  She had paused, meeting all the while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath.  “One quite understands, my dear.”

It only, however, kept her there sombre.  “I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes.  You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance.  Yes, dearest”—­and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more possessed her:  “you’ve only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did.  How, when you do, can I stand up to you?  You see,” she said with an ineffable headshake, “that I don’t stand up!  I’m down, down, down,” she declared; “yet” she as quickly added—­“there’s just one little thing that helps to save my life.”  And she kept him waiting but an instant.  “They might easily—­they would perhaps even certainly—­have done something worse.”

He thought.  “Worse than that Charlotte—?”

“Ah, don’t tell me,” she cried, “that there could have been nothing worse.  There might, as they were, have been many things.  Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary.”

He was almost simultaneous.  “Extraordinary!”

“She observes the forms,” said Fanny Assingham.

He hesitated.  “With the Prince—?”

“For the Prince.  And with the others,” she went on.  “With Mr. Verver—­wonderfully.  But above all with Maggie.  And the forms” —­she had to do even them justice—­“are two-thirds of conduct.  Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them.”

But he jerked back.  “Ah, my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the world!”

“Say,” she none the less pursued, “he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for.”

“You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte—?” This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort.  For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said:  “No!”