It pulled the Princess up, however, but an instant.  “We’re old, old friends—­we do her good too.  I should always, even at the worst—­speaking for myself—­admire her still more than I used her.”

“I see.  That always does good.”

Maggie hesitated.  “Certainly—­she knows it.  She knows, I mean, how great I think her courage and her cleverness.  She’s not afraid—­not of anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she trembled for her life.  And then she’s interesting—­which plenty of other people with plenty of other merits never are a bit.”  In which fine flicker of vision the truth widened to the Princess’s view.  “I myself of course don’t take liberties, but then I do, always, by nature, tremble for my life.  That’s the way I live.”

“Oh I say, love!” her father vaguely murmured.

“Yes, I live in terror,” she insisted.  “I’m a small creeping thing.”

“You’ll not persuade me that you’re not as good as Charlotte Stant,” he still placidly enough remarked.

“I may be as good, but I’m not so great—­and that’s what we’re talking about.  She has a great imagination.  She has, in every way, a great attitude.  She has above all a great conscience.”  More perhaps than ever in her life before Maggie addressed her father at this moment with a shade of the absolute in her tone.  She had never come so near telling him what he should take it from her to believe.  “She has only twopence in the world—­but that has nothing to do with it.  Or rather indeed”—­she quickly corrected herself—­“it has everything.  For she doesn’t care.  I never saw her do anything but laugh at her poverty.  Her life has been harder than anyone knows.”

It was moreover as if, thus unprecedentedly positive, his child had an effect upon him that Mr. Verver really felt as a new thing.  “Why then haven’t you told me about her before?”

“Well, haven’t we always known—?”

“I should have thought,” he submitted, “that we had already pretty well sized her up.”

“Certainly—­we long ago quite took her for granted.  But things change, with time, and I seem to know that, after this interval, I’m going to like her better than ever.  I’ve lived more myself, I’m older, and one judges better.  Yes, I’m going to see in Charlotte,” said the Princess—­and speaking now as with high and free expectation—­“more than I’ve ever seen.”

“Then I’ll try to do so too.  She was”—­it came back to Mr. Verver more—­“the one of your friends I thought the best for you.”

His companion, however, was so launched in her permitted liberty of appreciation that she for the moment scarce heard him.  She was lost in the case she made out, the vision of the different ways in which Charlotte had distinguished herself.

“She would have liked for instance—­I’m sure she would have liked extremely—­to marry; and nothing in general is more ridiculous, even when it has been pathetic, than a woman who has tried and has not been able.”