’s side, everything that came up – and what had come, often, was beyond words: just as, precisely, with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs Verver and her husband’s son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus it had been in short that Charlotte could, for her friend’s appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions from which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of his own. ‘What could be more simple than one’s going through with everything,’ she had asked, ‘when it’s so plain a part of one’s contract? I’ve got so much, by my marriage’ – for she had never for a moment concealed from him how ‘much’ she had felt it and was finding it – ‘that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I’m not a brute,’ she had wound up, ‘you shall see me as I am!’ Which was therefore as he had seen her – dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless all the while contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her husband’s daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something more than this – it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in – on the crudest expression of it – to do the ‘worldly’ for them, and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it moreover was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt, quite equally provide for – that would be, to balance, just in a manner Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognise it.
Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually recognising it was a reflexion that, during the days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the Prince’s breast these others, these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently – considering in especial his fuller resources in that line – while he worked out to the last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to follow up Fanny in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and ultimate; and it consorted with common prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square in fine would be to show that he hadn’t, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case moreover was that the