“Well, I mean too,” he had gone on, “that we haven’t, no doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty.”

“Enough?  Enough for what?”

“Enough not to be selfish.”

“I don’t think you are selfish,” she had returned—­and had managed not to wail it.

“I don’t say that it’s me particularly—­or that it’s you or Charlotte or Amerigo.  But we’re selfish together—­we move as a selfish mass.  You see we want always the same thing,” he had gone on—­“and that holds us, that binds us, together.  We want each other,” he had further explained; “only wanting it, each time, for each other.  That’s what I call the happy spell; but it’s also, a little, possibly, the immorality.”

“’The immorality’?” she had pleasantly echoed.

“Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves—­that is for each other; and I won’t pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal expense you and I, for instance, are happy.  What it comes to, I daresay, is that there’s something haunting—­ as if it were a bit uncanny—­in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege.  Unless indeed,” he had rambled on, “it’s only I to whom, fantastically, it says so much.  That’s all I mean, at any rate—­that it’s sort of soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions.  ’Let us then be up and doing’—­what is it Longfellow says?  That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in—­into our opium den—­to give us a shake.  But the beauty of it is, at the same time, that we are doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for.  We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first.  We have worked it, and what more can you do than that?  It’s a good deal for me,” he had wound up, “to have made Charlotte so happy—­to have so perfectly contented her.  You, from a good way back, were a matter of course—­I mean your being all right; so that I needn’t mind your knowing that my great interest, since then, has rather inevitably been in making sure of the same success, very much to your advantage as well, for Charlotte.  If we’ve worked our life, our idea really, as I say—­ if at any rate I can sit here and say that I’ve worked my share of it—­it has not been what you may call least by our having put Charlotte so at her ease.  That has been soothing, all round; that has curled up as the biggest of the blue fumes, or whatever they are, of the opium.  Don’t you see what a cropper we would have come if she hadn’t settled down as she has?” And he had concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn’t really have thought of.  “You, darling, in that case, I verily believe, would have been the one to hate it most.”

“To hate it—?” Maggie had wondered.

“To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off.  And I daresay I should have hated it for you even more than for myself.”