rts of ways, make use of her, and distant
relations who are so afraid she'll make use of THEM that they seldom let
her look at them."

Mr. Verver was struck--and, as usual, to some purpose. "If we get her
here to improve us don't we too then make use of her?"

It pulled the Princess up, however, but an instant. "We're old,
old friends--we do her good too. I should always, even at the
worst--speaking for myself--admire her still more than I used her."

"I see. That always does good."

Maggie hesitated. "Certainly--she knows it. She knows, I mean, how
great I think her courage and her cleverness. She's not afraid--not of
anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she
trembled for her life. And then she's INTERESTING--which plenty of
other people with plenty of other merits never are a bit." In which fine
flicker of vision the truth widened to the Princess's view. "I myself of
course don't take liberties, but then I do, always, by nature, tremble
for my life. That's the way I live."

"Oh I say, love!" her father vaguely murmured.

"Yes, I live in terror," she insisted. "I'm a small creeping thing."

"You'll not persuade me that you're not as good as Charlotte Stant," he
still placidly enough remarked.

"I may be as good, but I'm not so great--and that's what we're talking
about. She has a great imagination. She has, in every way, a great
attitude. She has above all a great conscience." More perhaps than ever
in her life before Maggie addressed her father at this moment with a
shade of the absolute in her tone. She had never come so near telling
him what he should take it from her to believe. "She has only twopence
in the world--but that has nothing to do with it. Or rather indeed"--she
quickly corrected herself--"it has everything. For she doesn't care. I
never saw her do anything but laugh at her poverty. Her life has been
harder than anyone knows."

It was moreover as if, thus unprecedentedly positive, his child had an
effect upon him that Mr. Verver really felt as a new thing. "Why then
haven't you told me about her before?"

"Well, haven't we always known--?"

"I should have thought," he submitted, "that we had already pretty well
sized her up."

"Certainly--we long ago quite took her for granted. But things change,
with time, and I seem to know that, after this interval, I'm going to
like her better than ever. I've lived more myself, I'm older, and
one judges better. Yes, I'm go