, an abjectly simple person.
And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning, for
herself, that, whatever he might have to take from her--she being, on
her side, beautifully free--he would absolutely not be able, for any
qualifying purpose, to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law's
wife Mrs. Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and
prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was,
at the least, to bring her into the question--which would be by the
same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie
wouldn't open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking
herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he were not fairly writhing in
his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it was
not till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he
couldn't.

"You're apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small
matters. Won't you perhaps feel, in fairness, that you're striking out,
triumphing, or whatever I may call it, rather too easily--feel it when
I perfectly admit that your smashed cup there does come back to me? I
frankly confess, now, to the occasion, and to having wished not to
speak of it to you at the time. We took two or three hours together, by
arrangement; it WAS on the eve of my marriage--at the moment you say.
But that put it on the eve of yours too, my dear--which was directly the
point. It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some
small wedding-present--a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet
possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could
be of use. You were naturally not to be told--precisely because it was
all FOR you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about
and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I
freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup--which I'm bound to
say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from
whatever good motive, should have treated so." He had kept his hands in
his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the
ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the
achieved quietness of his explanation a long, deep breath of comparative
relief. Behind everything, beneath everything, it was somehow a comfort
to him at last to be talking with her--and he seemed to be proving to
himself that he COULD talk. "It was a