“That is to Mrs. Assingham?”

She said nothing for a little—­there were, after all, alternatives.  “Maggie herself of course—­astonishing little Maggie.”

“Is Maggie then astonishing too?”—­and he gloomed out of his window.

His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look.  “I’m not sure that I don’t begin to see more in her than—­ dear little person as I’ve always thought—­I ever supposed there was.  I’m not sure that, putting a good many things together, I’m not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary.”

“You certainly will if you can,” the Colonel resignedly remarked.

Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out.  “In fact—­I do begin to feel it—­Maggie’s the great comfort.  I’m getting hold of it.  It will be she who’ll see us through.  In fact she’ll have to.  And she’ll be able.”

Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband’s general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr. Verver.  “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!”

“If she is, however,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “she’ll be extraordinary enough—­and that’s what I’m thinking of.  But I’m not indeed so very sure,” she added, “of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful.  I mean I’m not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife.”

“I shouldn’t think you would be, love,” the Colonel with some promptness responded.  “Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist—!” His cigar, in short, once more, could alone express it.

“Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?”—­this memory, for the full view, Fanny found herself also invoking.

It made her companion, in truth, slightly gape.  “An incredible little idealist—­Charlotte herself?”

“And she was sincere,” his wife simply proceeded “she was unmistakably sincere.  The question is only how much is left of it.”

“And that—­I see—­happens to be another of the questions you can’t ask her.  You have to do it all,” said Bob Assingham, “as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up—­though who’s to come down on you if you break them I don’t quite see.  Or must you do it in three guesses—­like forfeits on Christmas eve?” To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her, he further added:  “How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?”