nce that a
good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn't even say, when she
told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously
going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed
eyes and lips, that she now knew her--he didn't then say "Ah, see what
you've done: isn't it rather your own fault?" He behaved differently
altogether: eminently distinguished himself--for she told him she had
never seen him so universally distinguished--he yet distinguished her
in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and
frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all
the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and
complexion, a sense for "bridge" and a credit for pearls, could have
importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his
"niceness" to her--she called it only niceness, but it brought tears
into her eyes--had the greatness of a general as well as of a special
demonstration.

"She understands," he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs.
Verver--"she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her
time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we
can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with
the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most
favourable to it. She can't of course very well put it to us that
we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our
circumstances; she can't say in so many words 'Don't think of me, for
I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as
you must.' I don't get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it.
But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean
that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as
tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that
she's--well," the Prince wound up, "what you may call practically all
right." Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn't
call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or
whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it
aloud. She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself;
only on the eve of their visit's end was she, for once, clear or direct
in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the
house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of