stupid uneasy man.
"Conspiring--so far as YOU were concerned--to what end?"

"Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife--at Maggie's
expense. And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr.
Verver's."

"Of rendering friendly services, yes--which have produced, as it
turns out, complications. But from the moment you didn't do it FOR the
complications, why shouldn't you have rendered them?"

It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connexion, how, with time
given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the
presence of her clear-cut image of the "worst," speak for herself.
Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by
the way. "Oh, isn't what I may have meddled 'for'--so far as it can
be proved I did meddle--open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr.
Verver's and Maggie's? Mayn't they see my motive, in the light of that
appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others
than to the victimised father and daughter?" She positively liked to
keep it up. "Mayn't they see my motive as the determination to serve
the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to 'place' him
comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? Mayn't
it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain
between us--something quite unholy and louche?"

It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo. "'Louche,'
love--?"

"Why, haven't you said as much yourself?--haven't you put your finger on
that awful possibility?"

She had a way now, with his felicities, that made him enjoy being
reminded of them. "In speaking of your having always had such a
'mash'--?"

"Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly
at his ease. A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it
only as likely to have been--but we're not talking, of course, about
impartial looks. We're talking of good innocent people deeply worked
upon by a horrid discovery, and going much further, in their view of the
lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider
awake, all round, from the first. What I was to have got from my
friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for
him--well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to
myself, for me shrewdly to consider." And she easily lost herself, each
time, in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture. "It would
have bee