It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. "Yes. That is they WERE--as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince's and Charlotte's were beautiful--of THAT I had my faith. They WERE--I'd go to the stake. Otherwise," she added, "I should have been a wretch. And I've not been a wretch. I've only been a double-dyed donkey."
"Ah then," he asked, "what does our muddle make THEM to have been?"
"Well, too much taken up with considering each other. You may call such a mistake as that by whatever name you please; it at any rate means, all round, their case. It illustrates the misfortune," said Mrs. Assingham gravely, "of being too, too charming."
This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again did his best. "Yes, but to whom?--does n't it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming?"
"To each other in the first place--obviously. And then both of them together to Maggie."
"To Maggie?" he wonderingly echoed.
"To Maggie." She was now crystalline. "By (393) having accepted, from the first, so guilelessly--yes, so guilelessly themselves--her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life."
"Then is n't one supposed, in common humanity, and if one has n't quarrelled with him, and one has the means, and he, on his side, does n't drink or kick up rows--is n't one supposed to keep one's aged parent in one's life?"
"Certainly--when there are n't particular reasons against it. That there may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what's before us. In the first place Mr. Verver is n't aged."
The Colonel just hung fire--but it came. "Then why the deuce does he--oh poor dear man!--behave as if he were?"
She took a moment to meet it. "How do you know how he behaves?"
"Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!"
Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose. "Ah isn't my whole point that he's charming to her?"
"Does n't it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?"
She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of dignity she brushed it away. "It's Mr. Verver who's really young--it's Charlotte who's really old. And what I was saying," she added, "is n't affected--!"
"You were saying"--he did her the justice--"that they're all guileless."
"That they were. Guileless all at first--quite extraordinarily. It's what I mean by their failure to see (394) that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I repeat, Fanny went on, "that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr. Verver--which was serious, as well it might be!--would save them."
"I see." The Colonel inclined himself. "And save HIM."
"It comes to the same thing!"
"Then save Maggie."
"That comes," said Mrs. Assingham, "to something a little different.
For Maggie has done the most."
He wondered. "What do you call the most?"
"Well, she did it originally--she BEGAN the vicious circle. For that--though you make round eyes at my associating her with 'vice'--is simply what it has been. It's their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they're really so embroiled but because, in their way, they've been so improbably GOOD."
"In their way--yes!" the Colonel grinned.
"Which was above all Maggie's way." No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now. "Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become--poor little dear, as she believed--so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of (395) Charlotte to cheer his path--by instalments, as it were--in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however," Mrs. Assingham further explained, "by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you'll easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate even if quite heroic little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting him. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire--this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been--involved in some degree and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting HIM. I quite hold," Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a person can mostly feel but one passion--one TENDER passion, that is--at a time. Only that does n't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities--as you'll recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you did n't adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie"--she kept it up--"is in the same situation (396) as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication above all of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had.