The Colonel just hung fire—­but it came.  “Then why the deuce does he—­oh, poor dear man!—­behave as if he were?”

She took a moment to meet it.  “How do you know how he behaves?”

“Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!” Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose.  “Ah, isn’t my whole point that he’s charming to her?”

“Doesn’t it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?”

She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of dignity she brushed it away.  “It’s Mr. Verver who’s really young—­it’s Charlotte who’s really old.  And what I was saying,” she added, “isn’t affected!”

“You were saying”—­he did her the justice—­“that they’re all guileless.”

“That they were.  Guileless, all, at first—­quite extraordinarily.  It’s what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart.  For I repeat,” Fanny went on, “that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr. Verver—­which was serious, as well it might be!—­would save them.”

“I see.”  The Colonel inclined himself.  “And save him.”

“It comes to the same thing!”

“Then save Maggie.”

“That comes,” said Mrs. Assingham, “to something a little different.  For Maggie has done the most.”

He wondered.  “What do you call the most?”

“Well, she did it originally—­she began the vicious circle.  For that—­though you make round eyes at my associating her with ’vice’—­is simply what it has been.  It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably good.”

“In their way—­yes!” the Colonel grinned.

“Which was, above all, Maggie’s way.”  No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now.  “Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become—­poor little dear, as she believed—­so intensely married.  Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect.  And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path—­by instalments, as it were—­ in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side.  By so much, at the same time, however,” Mrs. Assingham further explained, “by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for.  It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic,