THE PRINCE
it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn't known what was happening—happening, that is, as a result of her influence. "Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke," Mrs. Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie—the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend—an odd little taste, as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing, so to speak, what could be said about her: almost as if her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs. Assingham, it struck him, applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young friend—so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie's as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions of his having paternally lumped the two children together in the recommendation that they shouldn't make too much noise nor eat too much jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte's prompt influence she hadn't been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent visitors. "I felt in fact privately so sorry for them that I kept my impression to myself while they were here—wishing not to put the rest of you on the scent; neither Maggie, nor the Prince, nor yourself, nor even Charlotte herself, if you didn't happen to notice. Since you didn't, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I'm not—I followed it all. One saw the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the Borgias may have watched each
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