Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/292

THE GOLDEN BOWL you as of less importance to him than some other woman."

"Ah don't talk to me of other women!" Fanny now overtly panted. "Do you call Mr. Verver's perfectly natural interest in his daughter—?"

"The greatest affection of which he's capable?"—Charlotte took it up in all readiness. "I do distinctly—in spite of my having done all I could think of to make him capable of a greater. I've done, earnestly, everything I could—I've made it, month after month, my study. But I haven't succeeded—that has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However," she pursued, "I've hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned." And then as she met in her friend's face the absence of any such remembrance: "He did tell me he wanted me just because I could be useful about her." With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. "So you see I am!"

It was on Fanny Assingham's lips for the moment to reply that this was on the contrary what she saw least of all; she came in fact within an ace of saying: "You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work—since by your account Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?" But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was "more in it" than any admission she had made represented—and she had held herself familiar with admissions: so that, not to 262