er friends?"

"Never, that I know of, a word. It isn't the sort of thing she does. And
whom has she, after all," Mrs. Assingham added, "to complain to?"

"Hasn't she always you?"

"Oh, 'me'! Charlotte and I, nowadays--!" She spoke as of a chapter
closed. "Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me, more and
more, as extraordinary."

A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel's
face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then, isn't that why one
must just resign one's self to wash one's hands of them--to be lost?"
Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of
the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for--her charged
eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back,
alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light
of a plain man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man
now. "Hasn't she then, Charlotte, always her husband--?"

"To complain to? She'd rather die."

"Oh!"--and Bob Assingham's face, at the vision of such extremities,
lengthened for very docility. "Hasn't she the Prince then?"

"For such matters? Oh, he doesn't count."

"I thought that was just what--as the basis of our agitation--he does
do!"

Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. "Not a bit as a
person to bore with complaints. The ground of MY agitation is, exactly,
that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!" And in the
imagination of Mrs. Verver's superiority to any such mistake she gave,
characteristically, something like a toss of her head--as marked a
tribute to that lady's general grace, in all the conditions, as the
personage referred to doubtless had ever received.

"Ah, only Maggie!" With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But
it found his wife again prepared.

"No--not only Maggie. A great many people in London--and small
wonder!--bore him."

"Maggie only worst then?" But it was a question that he had promptly
dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly
before sown the seed. "You said just now that he would by this time be
back with Charlotte 'if they HAVE arrived.' You think it then possible
that they really won't have returned?"

His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her
responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from
entertaining it. "I think there's nothing they're not now capable of--in
their so intens