of. However," she added, "Kitty and Dotty couldn't imagine we
were deprived of anything. And now, and now--!" But she stopped as for
indulgence to their wonder and envy.

"And now they see, still more, that we can have got everything, and kept
everything, and yet not be proud."

"No, we're not proud," she answered after a moment. "I'm not sure that
we're quite proud enough." Yet she changed the next instant that subject
too. She could only do so, however, by harking back--as if it had been a
fascination. She might have been wishing, under this renewed, this still
more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the
stream of time and dipping again, for the softness of the water, into
the contracted basin of the past. "We talked about it--we talked about
it; you don't remember so well as I. You too didn't know--and it
was beautiful of you; like Kitty and Dotty you too thought we had a
position, and were surprised when _I_ thought we ought to have told them
we weren't doing for them what they supposed. In fact," Maggie pursued,
"we're not doing it now. We're not, you see, really introducing them. I
mean not to the people they want."

"Then what do you call the people with whom they're now having tea?"

It made her quite spring round. "That's just what you asked me the other
time--one of the days there was somebody. And I told you I didn't call
anybody anything."

"I remember--that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn't
'count'; that Fanny Assingham knew they didn't." She had awakened, his
daughter, the echo; and on the bench there, as before, he nodded his
head amusedly, he kept nervously shaking his foot. "Yes, they were only
good enough--the people who came--for US. I remember," he said again:
"that was the way it all happened."

"That was the way--that was the way. And you asked me," Maggie
added, "if I didn't think we ought to tell them. Tell Mrs. Rance, in
particular, I mean, that we had been entertaining her up to then under
false pretences."

"Precisely--but you said she wouldn't have understood."

"To which you replied that in that case you were like her. YOU didn't
understand."

"No, no--but I remember how, about our having, in our benighted
innocence, no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation."

"Well then," said Maggie with every appearance of delight, "I'll crush
you again. I told you that you by yourself had one--there was no doubt
of that. You were differ