when you remember how I
continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore, for
years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie"--she kept it up--"is
in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was,
thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in
the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have
had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little
lucidities, which were really so divinely blind--her feverish little
sense of justice, as I say--had brought the two others together as her
grossest misconduct couldn't have done. And now she knows something or
other has happened--yet hasn't heretofore known what. She has only
piled up her remedy, poor child--something that she has earnestly but
confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy,
on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and
that would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her
only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her
father's wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly
for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that,
peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there's
anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the
least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each
day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that--God forgive me
the comparison!--she's like an old woman who has taken to 'painting' and
who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity,
with a greater impudence even, the older she grows." And Fanny stood a
moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. "I like the idea of
Maggie audacious and impudent--learning to be so to gloss things over.
She could--she even will, yet, I believe--learn it, for that sacred
purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man
should see it's all rouge--!" She paused, staring at the vision.

It imparted itself even to Bob. "Then the fun would begin?" As it but
made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry.
"You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?"

She was silent a moment more. "As I've told you before, she won't be
lost if her father's saved. She'll see that as salvation enough."

The Colonel took it in. "Then she's a little