Fanny shook her head.
"What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while,
she really HASN'T had him. Never."

"Ah, my dear--!" the poor Colonel panted.

"Never!" his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. "Do you
remember what I said to you long ago--that evening, just before their
marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?"

The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be feared,
robust. "What haven't you, love, said in your time?"

"So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or
twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when
I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world
to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her
imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, That
therefore," Fanny continued, "is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense
will have to open."

"I see." He nodded. "To the wrong." He nodded again, almost
cheerfully--as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a
lunatic. "To the very, very wrong."

But his wife's spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain
higher. "To what's called Evil--with a very big E: for the first time in
her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude
experience of it." And she gave, for the possibility, the largest
measure. "To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath
of it. Unless indeed"--and here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit "unless
indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further),
simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that
mere dose of alarm will prove enough."

He considered. "But enough for what then, dear--if not enough to break
her heart?"

"Enough to give her a shaking!" Mrs. Assingham rather oddly replied. "To
give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won't break her heart.
It will make her," she explained--"well, it will make her, by way of a
change, understand one or two things in the world."

"But isn't it a pity," the Colonel asked, "that they should happen to be
the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?"

"Oh, 'disagreeable'--? They'll have had to be disagreeable--to show her
a little where she is. They'll have HAD to be disagreeable to make her
sit up. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live."

Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companio