by Henry James
Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth, in the connection, to utter. “What I feel is that there is somehow something that used to be right and that I’ve made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn’t married, and that you didn’t seem to want to. It used also”—she continued to make out “to seem easy for the question not to come up. That’s what I’ve made different. It does come up. It WILL come up.”
“You don’t think I can keep it down?” Mr. Verver’s tone was cheerfully pensive.
“Well, I’ve given you, by MY move, all the trouble of having to.”
He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. “I guess I don’t feel as if you had ‘moved’ very far. You’ve only moved next door.”
“Well,” she continued, “I don’t feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I’ve made the difference for you, I must think of the difference.”
“Then what, darling,” he indulgently asked, “DO you think?”
“That’s just what I don’t yet know. But I must find out. We must think together—as we’ve always thought. What I mean,” she went on after a moment, “is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you.”
“An alternative to what?”
“Well, to your simply missing what you’ve lost—without anything being done about it.”
“But what HAVE I lost?”
She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. “Well, whatever it was that, BEFORE, kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I’m married to some one else you’re, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to THEM.”
“Isn’t it enough of a reason,” he mildly inquired, “that I don’t want to be?”
“It’s enough of a reason, yes. But to BE enough of a reason it has to be too much of a trouble. I mean FOR you. It has to be too much of a fight. You ask me what you’ve lost,” Maggie continued to explain. “The not having to take the trouble and to make the fight—that’s what you’ve lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were—because I was just as I was—that’s what you miss.”
“So that you think,” her father presently said, “that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?”
The detached tone of it—detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate—was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short, light laugh. “Well, what I don’t want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn’t understand. I SHOULD understand. That’s all,” said the Princess gently.
Her companion turned it pleasantly over. “You don’t go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don’t like?”
“Ah, father,” she sighed, “you know how far I go—how far I COULD go. But I only wish that if you ever SHOULD like anybody, you may never doubt of my feeling how I’ve brought you to it. You’ll always know that I know that it’s my fault.”
“You mean,” he went on in his contemplative way, “that it will be you who’ll take the consequences?”
Maggie just considered. “I’ll leave you all the good ones, but I’ll take the bad.”
“Well, that’s handsome.” He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly. “It’s about all I could expect of you. So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square. I’ll let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up. But am I to understand meanwhile,” he soon went on, “that, ready as you are to see me through my collapse, you’re not ready, or not AS ready, to see me through my resistance? I’ve got to be a regular martyr before you’ll be inspired?”
She demurred at his way of putting it. “Why, if you like it, you know, it won’t BE a collapse.”
“Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don’t WANT to like it. That is,” he amended, “unless I feel surer I do than appears very probable. I don’t want to have to THINK I like it in a case when I really shan’t. I’ve had to do that in some cases,” he confessed—”when it has been a question of other things. I don’t want,” he wound up, “to be MADE to make a mistake.”
“Ah, but it’s too dreadful,” she returned, “that you should even have to FEAR—or just nervously to dream—that you may be. What does that show, after all,” she asked, “but that you do really, well within, feel a want? What does it show but that you’re truly susceptible?”
“Well, it may show that”—he defended himself against nothing. “But it shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we’re leading now, numerous and formidable.”
Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which, however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular. “Do you feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?”
“Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing. I think she’d do anything.”
“Oh well, I’d help you,” the Princess said with decision, “as against HER—if that’s all you require. It’s too funny,” she went on before he again spoke, “that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I’m bound to say, too funny. The thing is,” Maggie developed under this impression, “that I don’t think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don’t at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I’m sure, to Fanny Assingham.”
Mr. Verver-as if from due regard for these persons—considered a little. “What life would they like us to lead?”
“Oh, it’s not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together. SHE thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater.”
“Greater—?” He echoed it vaguely. “And Amerigo too, you say?”
“Ah yes”-her reply was prompt “but Amerigo doesn’t mind. He doesn’t care, I mean, what we do. It’s for us, he considers, to see things exactly as we wish. Fanny herself,” Maggie pursued, “thinks he’s magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for accepting the ‘social limitations’ of our life, for not missing what we don’t give him.”
Mr. Verver attended. “Then if he doesn’t miss it his magnificence is easy.”
“It IS easy-that’s exactly what I think. If there were things he DID miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He COULD be a Hero—he WILL be one if it’s ever necessary. But it will be about something better than our dreariness. I know,” the Princess declared, “where he’s magnificent.” And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as she had begun. “We’re not, all the same, committed to anything stupid. If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we CAN be grander. There’s nothing to prevent.”
“Is it a strict moral obligation?” Adam Verver inquired.
“No—it’s for the amusement.”
“For whose? For Fanny’s own?”
“For everyone’s—though I dare say Fanny’s would be a large part.” She hesitated; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring out, which she finally produced. “For yours in particular, say—if you go into the question.” She even bravely followed it up. “I haven’t really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done for you than is done.”
Mr. Verver uttered an odd vague sound. “Don’t you think a good deal is done when you come out and talk to me this way?”
“Ah,” said his daughter, smiling at him,
“we make too much of that!” And then to explain: “That’s good, and it’s natural—but it isn’t great. We forget that we’re as free as air.”
“Well, THAT’S great,” Mr. Verver pleaded. “Great if we act on it. Not if we don’t.”
She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that belied a light tone. “What do you want,” he demanded, “to do to me?” And he added, as she didn’t say: “You’ve got something in your mind.” It had come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to be vague in him. There had been from the first something in her anxious eyes, in the way she occasionally lost herself, that it would perfectly explain. He was therefore now quite sure.
“You’ve got something up your sleeve.”
She had a silence that made him right. “Well, when I tell you you’ll understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes—it HAS been in my mind. I’ve been asking myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you if you could stand just now another woman.”
It relieved him a little, yet the beautiful consideration of her manner made it in a degree portentous. “Stand” one—?”
“Well, mind her coming.”
He stared—then he laughed. It depends on who she is.”
“There—you see! I’ve at all events been thinking whether you’d take this particular person but as a worry the more. Whether, that is, you’d go so far with her in your notion of having to be kind.”
He gave at this the quickest shake to his foot. How far would she go in HER notion of it.
“Well,” his daughter returned, “you know how far, in a general way, Charlotte Stant goes.”
“Charlotte? Is SHE coming?”
“She writes me, practically, that she’d like to if we’re so good as to ask her.”
Mr. Verver continued to gaze, but rather as if waiting for more. Then, as everything appeared to have come, his expression had a drop. If this was all it was simple. “Then why in the world not?”
Maggie’s face lighted anew, but it was now another light. “It isn’t a want of tact?”
“To ask her?”
“To propose it to you.”
“That I should ask her?”
He put the question as an effect of his remnant of vagueness, but this had also its own effect. Maggie wondered an instant; after which, as with a flush of recognition, she took it up. “It would be too beautiful if you WOULD!”
This, clearly, had not been her first idea—the chance of his words had prompted it. “Do you mean write to her myself?”
“Yes—it would be kind. It would be quite beautiful of you. That is, of course,” said Maggie, “if you sincerely CAN.”
He appeared to wonder an instant why he sincerely shouldn’t, and indeed, for that matter, where the question of sincerity came in. This virtue, between him and his daughter’s friend, had surely been taken for granted. “My dear child,” he returned, “I don’t think I’m afraid of Charlotte.”
“Well, that’s just what it’s lovely to have from you. From the moment you’re NOT—the least little bit—I’ll immediately invite her.”
“But where in the world is she?” He spoke as if he had not thought of Charlotte, nor so much as heard her name pronounced, for a very long time. He quite in fact amicably, almost amusedly, woke up to her.
“She’s in Brittany, at a little bathing-place, with some people I don’t know. She’s always with people, poor dear—she rather has to be; even when, as is sometimes the case; they’re people she doesn’t immensely like.”
“Well, I guess she likes US,” said Adam Verver. “Yes—fortunately she likes us. And if I wasn’t afraid of spoiling it for you,” Maggie added, “I’d even mention that you’re not the one of our number she likes least.”
“Why should that spoil it for me?”
“Oh, my dear, you know. What else have we been talking about? It costs you so much to be liked. That’s why I hesitated to tell you of my letter.”
He stared a moment—as if the subject had suddenly grown out of recognition. “But Charlotte—on other visits—never used to cost me anything.”
“No—only her ‘keep,’” Maggie smiled.
“Then I don’t think I mind her keep—if that’s all.” The Princess, however, it was clear, wished to be thoroughly conscientious. “Well, it may not be quite all. If I think of its being pleasant to have her, it’s because she WILL make a difference.”
“Well, what’s the harm in that if it’s but a difference for the better?”
“Ah then—there you are!” And the Princess showed in her smile her small triumphant wisdom. “If you acknowledge a possible difference for the better we’re not, after all, so tremendously right as we are. I mean we’re not—as satisfied and amused. We do see there are ways of being grander.”
“But will Charlotte Stant,” her father asked with surprise, “make us grander?”
Maggie, on this, looking at him well, had a remarkable reply. “Yes, I think. Really grander.”
He thought; for if this was a sudden opening he wished but the more to meet it. “Because she’s so handsome?”
“No, father.” And the Princess was almost solemn. “Because she’s so great.”
“Great—?”
“Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life.”
“So?” Mr. Verver echoed. “What has she done—in life?”
“Well, she has been brave and bright,” said Maggie. “That mayn’t sound like much, but she has been so in the face of things that might well have made it too difficult for many other girls. She hasn’t a creature in the world really—that is nearly—belonging to her. Only acquaintances who, in all sorts of ways, make use of her, and distant relations who are so afraid she’ll make use of THEM that they seldom let her look at them.”
Mr. Verver was struck—and, as usual, to some purpose. “If we get her here to improve us don’t we too then make use of her?”
It pulled the Princess up, however, but an instant. “We’re old, old friends—we do her good too. I should always, even at the worst—speaking for myself—admire her still more than I used her.”
“I see. That always does good.”
Maggie hesitated. “Certainly—she knows it. She knows, I mean, how great I think her courage and her cleverness. She’s not afraid—not of anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she trembled for her life. And then she’s INTERESTING—which plenty of other people with plenty of other merits never are a bit.” In which fine flicker of vision the truth widened to the Princess’s view. “I myself of course don’t take liberties, but then I do, always, by nature, tremble for my life. That’s the way I live.”