“Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly at his ease.  A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it only as likely to have been—­but we’re not talking, of course, about impartial looks.  We’re talking of good innocent people deeply worked upon by a horrid discovery, and going much further, in their view of the lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider awake, all round, from the first.  What I was to have got from my friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for him—­well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to myself, for me shrewdly to consider.”  And she easily lost herself, each time, in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture.  “It would have been seen, it would have been heard of, before, the case of the woman a man doesn’t want, or of whom he’s tired, or for whom he has no use but such uses, and who is capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all.  Cela s’est vu, my dear; and stranger things still—­as I needn’t tell you!  Very good then,” she wound up; “there is a perfectly possible conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, there’s no imagination so lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated lambs.  Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are blases, are brought up, from the first, to prowling and mauling.  It does give us, you’ll admit, something to think about.  My relief is luckily, however, in what I finally do think.”

He was well enough aware, by this time, of what she finally did think; but he was not without a sense, again, also for his amusement by the way.  It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly because he knows what is next to happen.  “What of course will pull them up, if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume, is the profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver’s marriage.  You weren’t at least in love with Charlotte.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, “my hand in that is easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to him.”

“To Mr. Verver?”

“To the Prince—­by preventing her in that way from taking, as he was in danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he wouldn’t be able to open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law.  I’ve brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man.”

“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?”

“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress.”  She brought it out grandly—­it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly, for her husband’s, its effect.  “The facilities in the case, thanks to the particular conditions, being so quite ideal.”