THE PRINCESS
to him, arrive. But she waited a little—as if made nervous precisely by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were avoiding the serious, standing off anxiously from the real, and they fell again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge. "Don't you remember," she went on, "how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn't so very sure we ourselves had the thing itself?"
He did his best to do so. "Had you mean a social situation?"
"Yes—after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that at the rate we were going we should never have one."
"Which was what put us on Charlotte?" Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.
Maggie had another pause—taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been at their critical moment "put" on Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. "Well," she continued, "I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more 'placed,' or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn't have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn't obligingly leave me more exalted by having themselves smaller ideas. For those," she said, "were the feelings we used to have."
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