Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 23
[Fanny of the Prince and Charlotte] “Well?” he asked as she paused.
“Well, shows that I’m right—for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. They’re beautiful,” she declared.
“The Prince and Charlotte?”
“The Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”
“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of themselves.”
The Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”
Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes—of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”
He turned it over. “That danger BEING the blindness—?”
“That danger being their position. What their position contains—of all the elements—I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily—for that’s the mercy—everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”
[Of Fanny and the Colonel] Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny’s drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone—the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 