“The greatest affection of which he is capable?” Charlotte took it up in all readiness.  “I do distinctly—­and in spite of my having done all I could think of—­to make him capable of a greater.  I’ve done, earnestly, everything I could—­I’ve made it, month after month, my study.  But I haven’t succeeded—­it has been vividly brought home to me to-night.  However,” she pursued, “I’ve hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned.”  And then as she met in her friend’s face the absence of any such remembrance:  “He did tell me that he wanted me just because I could be useful about her.”  With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile.  “So you see I am!”

It was on Fanny Assingham’s lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn’t see; she came in fact within an ace of saying:  “You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work—­since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind.  How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?” But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was “more in it” than any admission she had made represented—­and she had held herself familiar with admissions:  so that, not to seem to understand where she couldn’t accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn’t approve, and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend’s consistency.  The only thing was that, as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess.  It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet.  She brushed away everything.  “I can’t conceive, my dear, what you’re talking about!”

Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour, for the first time, perceptibly heightened.  She looked, for the minute, as her companion had looked—­as if twenty protests, blocking each other’s way, had surged up within her.  But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible.  It was happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow.  “You give me up then?”

“Give you up—?”

“You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend’s loyalty?  If you do you’re not just, Fanny; you’re even, I think,” she went on, “rather cruel; and it’s least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.”  She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases,