n some other woman."

"Ah, don't talk to me of other women!" Fanny now overtly panted. "Do you
call Mr. Verver's perfectly natural interest in his daughter--?"

"The greatest affection of which he is capable?" Charlotte took it up
in all readiness. "I do distinctly--and in spite of my having done all I
could think of--to make him capable of a greater. I've done, earnestly,
everything I could--I've made it, month after month, my study. But I
haven't succeeded--it has been vividly brought home to me to-night.
However," she pursued, "I've hoped against hope, for I recognise that,
as I told you at the time, I was duly warned." And then as she met in
her friend's face the absence of any such remembrance: "He did tell me
that he wanted me just BECAUSE I could be useful about her." With which
Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. "So you see I AM!"

It was on Fanny Assingham's lips for the moment to reply that this was,
on the contrary, exactly what she didn't see; she came in fact within an
ace of saying: "You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to
work--since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more,
on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there
to remain so much of what was to be obviated?" But she saved herself
in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper
things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was "more in it"
than any admission she had made represented--and she had held herself
familiar with admissions: so that, not to seem to understand where she
couldn't accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn't approve,
and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere
appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young
friend's consistency. The only thing was that, as she was quickly
enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her
invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. "I
can't conceive, my dear, what you're talking about!"

Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour,
for the first time, perceptibly heightened. She looked, for the minute,
as her companion had looked--as if twenty protests, blocking each
other's way, had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a
selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was
happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow. "You
gi