“I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.”

“All day?”

“Yes—­all day.  Keeping you company in your solitude.  How can we understand anything,” she went on, “without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you?—­just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me.  The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.”

He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out:  “How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?” And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect:  “They would have done the same for one of yours.”

“Ah, if I could have had one—!  I hoped and I believed,” said Charlotte, “that that would happen.  It would have been better.  It would have made perhaps some difference.  He thought so too, poor duck—­that it might have been.  I’m sure he hoped and intended so.  It’s not, at any rate,” she went on, “my fault.  There it is.”  She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear.  She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete.  “And now I’m too sure.  It will never be.”

He waited for a moment.  “Never?”

“Never.”  They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of distinctness.  “It would probably have been better,” Charlotte added.  “But things turn out—!  And it leaves us”—­she made the point—­“more alone.”

He seemed to wonder.  “It leaves you more alone.”

“Oh,” she again returned, “don’t put it all on me!  Maggie would have given herself to his child, I’m sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours.  It would have taken more than any child of mine,” she explained—­“it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them—­to keep our sposi apart.”  She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but, as he seemed to take it, in spite of this, for important, she then spoke gravely enough.  “It’s as strange as you like, but we’re immensely alone.”  He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her.  He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling.  “What will you say,” she meanwhile asked, “that you’ve been doing?” This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question.  “I mean when she comes in—­for I suppose she will, some time, come in.  It seems to me we must say the same thing.”

Well, he thought again.  “Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven’t.”

“Ah, what haven’t you had?—­what aren’t you having?”