d have described it, for hearing things said about this young
woman, hearing, so to speak, what COULD be said about her: almost as it
her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it
grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs. Assingham, it struck him,
applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young
friend--so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie's
as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions
of his having paternally lumped the two children together in the
recommendation that they shouldn't make too much noise nor eat too much
jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte's prompt
influence she had not been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent
visitors. "I felt in fact, privately, so sorry for them, that I kept my
impression to myself while they were here--wishing not to put the rest
of you on the scent; neither Maggie, nor the Prince, nor yourself,
nor even Charlotte HERself, if you didn't happen to notice. Since you
didn't, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I'm
not--I followed it all. One SAW the consciousness I speak of come over
the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the
Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had
the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison's
only a little awkward, for I don't in the least mean that Charlotte was
consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their
poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them--but she didn't
know it."

"Ah, she didn't know it?" Mr. Verver had asked with interest.

"Well, I THINK she didn't"--Mrs. Assingham had to admit that she
hadn't pressingly sounded her. "I don't pretend to be sure, in every
connection, of what Charlotte knows. She doesn't, certainly, like to
make people suffer--not, in general, as is the case with so many of us,
even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with
her. She likes, that is--as all pleasant people do--to be liked."

"Ah, she likes to be liked?" her companion had gone on.

"She did, at the same time, no doubt, want to help us--to put us at our
ease. That is she wanted to put you--and to put Maggie about you. So far
as that went she had a plan. But it was only AFTER--it was not before, I
really believe--that she saw how effectively she could work."

Again, as Mr. Verve