and
surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of
this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been
unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying:
"Ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for
you?"--but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had
at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and
cheer. He had his view, as well--or at least a partial one--of the inner
spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent
with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver's
last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square
her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no
use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and
moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her
just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt
herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the
expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made
up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been
grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all,
in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for
being--as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first
half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself--the sole and single frump of
the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor
values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and
her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons
amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham's--these matters and
others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give
her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst,
be picturesque--for she habitually spoke of herself as "local" to Sloane
Street whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And
it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement, in her,
of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn't really
watching him--ground for which would have been too terribly grave--she
had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: SO she might, precisely,
mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take--the
Prince could see it all: it wasn't a shade of interfere