something a little different. For
Maggie has done the most."

He wondered. "What do you call the most?"

"Well, she did it originally--she began the vicious circle. For
that--though you make round eyes at my associating her with 'vice'--is
simply what it has been. It's their mutual consideration, all round,
that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they're really so embroiled
but because, in their way, they've been so improbably GOOD."

"In their way--yes!" the Colonel grinned.

"Which was, above all, Maggie's way." No flicker of his ribaldry was
anything to her now. "Maggie had in the first place to make up to her
father for her having suffered herself to become--poor little dear,
as she believed--so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her
husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent
together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to
do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment,
whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path--by
instalments, as it were--in proportion as she herself, making sure her
father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the
same time, however," Mrs. Assingham further explained, "by so much as
she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver,
by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made
up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new
obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her
unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began
with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever
temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext
for deserting or neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed
her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other
desire--this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little
daughter she had always been--involved in some degree, and just for the
present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold,"
Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a person can
mostly feel but one passion--one TENDER passion, that is--at a
time. Only, that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive
attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's feeling for a parent
or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other
intensities--as you will recognise, my dear,