It imparted itself even to Bob.  “Then the fun would begin?” As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry.  “You mean that in that case she will, charming creature, be lost?”

She was silent a moment more.  “As I’ve told you before, she won’t be lost if her father’s saved.  She’ll see that as salvation enough.”

The Colonel took it in.  “Then she’s a little heroine.”

“Rather—­she’s a little heroine.  But it’s his innocence, above all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “that will pull them through.”

Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver’s innocence.  “It’s awfully quaint.”

“Of course it’s awfully quaint!  That it’s awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness—­by which I don’t mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from whom I’ve so deplorably degenerated—­that,” Mrs. Assingham declared, “was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them.  And of course I shall feel them quainter still,” she rather ruefully subjoined, “before they’ve done with me!”

This might be, but it wasn’t what most stood in the Colonel’s way.  “You believe so in Mr. Verver’s innocence after two years of Charlotte?”

She stared.  “But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn’t really—­or what you may call undividedly—­had.”

“Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has ’really or undividedly,’ had four of the Prince?  It takes all she hasn’t had,” the Colonel conceded, “to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us in admiration.”

So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass.  “It takes a great many things to account for Maggie.  What is definite, at all events, is that—­strange though this be—­her effort for her father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded.  She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game.  Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged—­the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding—­he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected.  He hadn’t worked them out in detail—­any more than I had, heaven pity me!—­and the queerness has been, exactly, in the detail.  This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte.  And they both,” she neatly wound up, ‘help.’”

“’Both’—?”

“I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less.  And her part is very large.  Charlotte,” Fanny declared, “works like a horse.”

So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it.  “And what does the Prince work like?”

She fixed him in return.  “Like a Prince!” Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly—­ decorated back—­in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.