"Well," said Maggie presently, "perhaps that may be all. If I'm unhappy I'm jealous; it must come to the same thing; and with you at least I'm not afraid of the word. If I'm jealous, don't you see? I'm tormented," she went on--"and all the more if I'm helpless. And if I'm both helpless AND tormented I stuff my pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, I keep it there, for the most part, night and day, so as not to be heard too indecently moaning. Only now, with you, at last, I can't keep it longer; I've pulled it out and here I am fairly screaming at you. They're away," she wound up, "so they can't hear; and I'm by a miracle of arrangement not at luncheon with father at home. I live in the midst of miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit are my own; I go about on tiptoe, I watch for every sound, I feel every breath, and yet I try all the while to seem as smooth as old satin dyed rose-colour. Have you ever thought of me," she asked, "as really feeling as I do?"
Her companion, conspicuously, required to be clear. "Jealous, unhappy, tormented--? No," said Mrs. Assingham; "but at the same time--and though you may laugh at me for it!--I'm bound to confess I've never been so awfully sure of what I may call knowing you. Here you are indeed, as you say--such (111) a deep little person! I've never imagined your existence poisoned, and since you wish to know if I consider it need be I've not the least difficulty in speaking on the spot. Nothing decidedly strikes me as more unnecessary."
For a minute after this they remained face to face Maggie had sprung up while her friend sat enthroned, and, after moving to and fro in her intensity, now paused to receive the light she had invoked. It had accumulated, considerably, by this time, round Mrs. Assingham's ample presence, and it made, even to our young woman s own sense, a medium in which she could at last take a deeper breath. "I've affected you, these months--and these last weeks in especial--as quiet and natural and easy?"
But it was a question that took, not imperceptibly, some answering.
"You've never affected me, from the first hour I beheld you, as anything but--in a way all your own--absolutely good and sweet and beautiful. In a way, as I say," Mrs. Assingham almost caressingly repeated, "just all your very own--nobody else's at all. I've never thought of you but as OUTSIDE of ugly things, so ignorant of any falsity or cruelty or vulgarity as never to have to be touched by them or to touch them. I've never mixed you up with them; there would have been time enough for that if they had seemed to be near you. But they have n't--if that s what you want to know."
"You've only believed me contented then because you've believed me stupid?"
Mrs. Assingham had a free smile now for the length of this stride, dissimulated though it might be (112) in a graceful little frisk. "If I had believed you stupid I should n't have thought you interesting, and if I had n't thought you interesting I should n't have noted whether I 'knew' you, as I've called it, or not. What I've always been conscious of is your having concealed about you somewhere no small amount of character; quite as much in fact," Fanny smiled, "as one could suppose a person of your size able to carry. The only thing was," she explained, "that thanks to your never calling one's attention to it, I had n't made out much more about it, and should have been vague above all as to WHERE you carried it or kept it.
Somewhere UNDER, I should simply have said--like that little silver cross you once showed me, blest by the Holy Father, that you always wear, out of sight, next your skin. That relic I've had a glimpse of"--with which she continued to invoke the privilege of humour. "But the precious little innermost, say this time little golden personal nature of you--blest by a greater power I think even than the Pope--THAT you've never consentingly shown me. I'm not sure you've ever consentingly shown it to any one. You've been in general too modest."
Maggie, trying to follow, almost achieved a little fold of her forehead.
"I strike you as modest to-day--modest when I stand here and scream at you?"
"Oh your screaming, I've granted you, is something new. I must fit it on somewhere. The question is, however," Mrs. Assingham further proceeded, "of what the deuce I can fit it on to. Do you mean," she asked, "to the fact of our friends' being, from yesterday to to-morrow, at a place where they may more or (113) less irresponsibly meet?" She spoke with the air of putting it as badly for them as possible. "Are you thinking of their being there alone--of their having consented to be?" And then as she had waited without result for her companion to say: "But is n't it true that--after you had this time again, at the eleventh hour, said you would n't--they would really much rather not have gone?"
"Yes--they would certainly much rather not have gone. But I wanted them to go."
"Then, my dear child, what in the world is the matter?"
"I wanted to see if they WOULD. And they've had to," Maggie added. "It was the only thing."
Her friend appeared to wonder. "From the moment you and your father backed out?"
"Oh I don't mean go for those people. I mean go for us. For father and me," Maggie went on. "Because now they know."
"They 'know'?" Fanny Assingham quavered.
"That I've been for some time past taking more notice. Notice of the queer things in our life."
Maggie saw her companion for an instant on the point of asking her what these queer things might be; but Mrs. Assingham had the next minute brushed by that ambiguous opening and taken, as she evidently felt, a better one.
"And is it for that you did it? I mean gave up the visit."
"It's for that I did it. To leave them to themselves--as they less and less want, or at any rate less and less venture to appear to want, to be left. As they had for so long arranged things," the Princess went on, (114)
"you see they sometimes have to be." And then, as if baffled by the lucidity of this, Mrs. Assingham for a little said nothing: "Now do you think I'm modest?"