ion as if the precautions of her
general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises
for him--to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might
have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all
touchingly to him, arrive. But she waited a little--as if made nervous,
precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were
avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they
fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into
the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when
they had shared together this same refuge. "Don't you remember," she
went on, "how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I
wasn't so very sure we, ourselves had the thing itself?"

He did his best to do so. "Had, you mean a social situation?"

"Yes--after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that, at the rate
we were going, we should never have one."

"Which was what put us on Charlotte?" Oh yes, they had had it over quite
often enough for him easily to remember.

Maggie had another pause--taking it from him that he now could both
affirm and admit without wincing that they had been, at their critical
moment, "put on" Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been
threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their
success. "Well," she continued, "I recall how I felt, about Kitty and
Dotty, that even if we had already then been more 'placed,' or whatever
you may call what we are now, it still wouldn't have been an excuse
for wondering why others couldn't obligingly leave me more exalted
by having, themselves, smaller ideas. For those," she said, "were the
feelings we used to have."

"Oh yes," he responded philosophically--"I remember the feelings we used
to have."

Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little, in tender
retrospect--as if they had been also respectable. "It was bad enough, I
thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you HAD a position. But
it was worse to be sublime about it--as I was so afraid, as I'm in fact
still afraid of being--when it wasn't even there to support one." And
she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself
as having outlived; became for it--which was doubtless too often even
now her danger--almost sententious. "One must always, whether or no,
have some imagination of the states of others--of what they may feel
deprived