men out of a hundred.  They’ve only to agree about me,” the poor lady said; “they’ve only to feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured; they’ve only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me to be quite irretrievably dished.  Of course it’s I who have been, and who continue to be, cheated—­cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but they’re not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either of us the benefit of anything.  They’ll be within their rights to lump us all together as a false, cruel, conspiring crew, and, if they can find the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch.”

This, on each occasion, put the matter so at the worst that repetition even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its temporary gloss, hang together.  She enjoyed, invariably, the sense of making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his almost turning pale, when their eyes met, at this possibility of their compromised state and their shared discredit.  The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man.  “Conspiring—­so far as you were concerned—­to what end?”

“Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife—­at Maggie’s expense.  And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr. Verver’s.”

“Of rendering friendly services, yes—­which have produced, as it turns out, complications.  But from the moment you didn’t do it for the complications, why shouldn’t you have rendered them?”

It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connexion, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the “worst,” speak for herself.  Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way.  “Oh, isn’t what I may have meddled ’for’—­so far as it can be proved I did meddle—­open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s?  Mayn’t they see my motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?” She positively liked to keep it up.  “Mayn’t they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to ‘place’ him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money?  Mayn’t it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain between us—­something quite unholy and louche?”

It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo. “‘Louche,’ love—?”

“Why, haven’t you said as much yourself?—­haven’t you put your finger on that awful possibility?”

She had a way now, with his felicities, that made him enjoy being reminded of them.  “In speaking of your having always had such a ’mash’—?”