n seen, it would have been heard of, before, the case of the
woman a man doesn't want, or of whom he's tired, or for whom he has
no use but SUCH uses, and who is capable, in her infatuation, in her
passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose
sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all.
Cela s'est vu, my dear; and stranger things still--as I needn't tell
YOU! Very good then," she wound up; "there is a perfectly possible
conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, there's
no imagination so lively, once it's started, as that of really agitated
lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are
blases, are brought up, from the first, to prowling and mauling. It does
give us, you'll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily,
however, in what I finally do think."

He was well enough aware, by this time, of what she finally did think;
but he was not without a sense, again, also for his amusement by the
way. It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between
the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his
favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly
because he knows what is next to happen. "What of course will pull them
up, if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume, is the
profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver's marriage. You
weren't at least in love with Charlotte."

"Oh," Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, "my hand in that is
easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to HIM."

"To Mr. Verver?"

"To the Prince--by preventing her in that way from taking, as he was in
danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he wouldn't be able to
open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law. I've
brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have
remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man."

"Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?"

"Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress." She brought
it out grandly--it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly,
for her husband's, its effect. "The facilities in the case, thanks to
the particular conditions, being so quite ideal."

"Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little--from
your own point of view--as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of
TWO beautiful women.