between
consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous
poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation.
What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer
to him, her father's and her own, of an opportunity to separate from
Mrs. Verver with the due amount of form--and all the more that he was,
in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on
the score of taste. Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea;
for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine
of them, wouldn't be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had
always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile, at all
events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her
profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She
was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in
reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and
perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. "They're doing
the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to go--!" And he
looked down at her over his cigar.

If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her father's
age, Charlotte's need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the
job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to "live into"
their queer future--it was high time that they should take up their
courage. This was eminent sense, but it didn't arrest the Princess, who,
the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. "But shan't you
then so much as miss her a little? She's wonderful and beautiful, and I
feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically," Maggie
went on--"she's so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done
with life. But dying for us--for you and me; and making us feel it by
the very fact of there being so much of her left."

The Prince smoked hard a minute. "As you say, she's splendid, but there
is--there always will be--much of her left. Only, as you also say, for
others."

"And yet I think," the Princess returned, "that it isn't as if we had
wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It's as if her
unhappiness had been necessary to us--as if we had needed her, at her
own cost, to build us up and start us."

He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry.
"Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father'