otte--yes: if there's so
much beneath it, for you, and if it's all such a plan. That makes
it hang together it makes YOU hang together." She fairly exhaled her
admiration. "You're like nobody else--you're extraordinary."

Maggie met it with appreciation, but with a reserve. "No, I'm not
extraordinary--but I AM, for every one, quiet."

"Well, that's just what is extraordinary. 'Quiet' is more than _I_ am,
and you leave me far behind." With which, again, for an instant, Mrs.
Assingham frankly brooded. "'Now that I understand,' you say--but
there's one thing I don't understand." And the next minute, while her
companion waited, she had mentioned it. "How can Charlotte, after all,
not have pressed him, not have attacked him about it? How can she not
have asked him--asked him on his honour, I mean--if you know?"

"How can she 'not'? Why, of course," said the Princess limpidly, "she
MUST!"

"Well then--?"

"Well then, you think, he must have told her? Why, exactly what I mean,"
said Maggie, "is that he will have done nothing of the sort; will, as I
say, have maintained the contrary."

Fanny Assingham weighed it. "Under her direct appeal for the truth?"

"Under her direct appeal for the truth."

"Her appeal to his honour?"

"Her appeal to his honour. That's my point."

Fanny Assingham braved it. "For the truth as from him to her?"

"From him to any one."

Mrs. Assingham's face lighted. "He'll simply, he'll insistently have
lied?"

Maggie brought it out roundly. "He'll simply, he'll insistently have
lied."

It held again her companion, who next, however, with a single movement,
throwing herself on her neck, overflowed. "Oh, if you knew how you help
me!"

Maggie had liked her to understand, so far as this was possible; but had
not been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when
one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound. This inability in
her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as
we have seen, was only now in a position to boast of touching bottom.
Maggie lived, inwardly, in a consciousness that she could but partly
open even to so good a friend, and her own visitation of the fuller
expanse of which was, for that matter, still going on. They had been
duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination--that, no
doubt, was what might at present be said for them. She had looked into
them, on the eve of her leaving town, almost without penetration: she