“Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little—­ from your own point of view—­as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of two beautiful women.”

“Down even to that—­to the monstrosity of my folly.  But not,” Mrs. Assingham added, “‘two’ of anything.  One beautiful woman—­ and one beautiful fortune.  That’s what a creature of pure virtue exposes herself to when she suffers her pure virtue, suffers her sympathy, her disinterestedness, her exquisite sense for the lives of others, to carry her too far.  Voila.”

“I see.  It’s the way the Ververs have you.”

“It’s the way the Ververs ‘have’ me.  It’s in other words the way they would be able to make such a show to each other of having me—­if Maggie weren’t so divine.”

“She lets you off?” He never failed to insist on all this to the very end; which was how he had become so versed in what she finally thought.

“She lets me off.  So that now, horrified and contrite at what I’ve done, I may work to help her out.  And Mr. Verver,” she was fond of adding, “lets me off too.”

“Then you do believe he knows?”

It determined in her always, there, with a significant pause, a deep immersion in her thought.  “I believe he would let me off if he did know—­so that I might work to help him out.  Or rather, really,” she went on, “that I might work to help Maggie.  That would be his motive, that would be his condition, in forgiving me; just as hers, for me, in fact, her motive and her condition, are my acting to spare her father.  But it’s with Maggie only that I’m directly concerned; nothing, ever—­not a breath, not a look, I’ll guarantee—­shall I have, whatever happens, from Mr. Verver himself.  So it is, therefore, that I shall probably, by the closest possible shave, escape the penalty of my crimes.”

“You mean being held responsible.”

“I mean being held responsible.  My advantage will be that Maggie’s such a trump.”

“Such a trump that, as you say, she’ll stick to you.”

“Stick to me, on our understanding—­stick to me.  For our understanding’s signed and sealed.”  And to brood over it again was ever, for Mrs. Assingham, to break out again with exaltation.  “It’s a grand, high compact.  She has solemnly promised.”

“But in words—?”

“Oh yes, in words enough—­since it’s a matter of words.  To keep up her lie so long as I keep up mine.”

“And what do you call ‘her’ lie?”

“Why, the pretence that she believes me.  Believes they’re innocent.”

“She positively believes then they’re guilty?  She has arrived at that, she’s really content with it, in the absence of proof?” It was here, each time, that Fanny Assingham most faltered; but always at last to get the matter, for her own sense, and with a long sigh, sufficiently straight.  “It isn’t a question of belief or of proof, absent or present; it’s inevitably, with her,