THE PRINCE
leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren't the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable?"
"If they're not," Charlotte replied, "it's only from their being in a way too evident. They're not grounds for me—they weren't when I accepted Adam's preference that I should come to-night without him: just as I accept absolutely, as a fixed rule, all his preferences. But that of course doesn't alter the fact that my husband's daughter rather than his wife should have felt she could after all be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour—seeing especially that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field." With which she produced, as it were, her explanation. "I've simply to see the truth of the matter—see that Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such," she went on, "that this becomes immediately, don't you understand? a thing I have to count with."
Mrs. Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. "If you mean such a thing as that she doesn't adore the Prince!—"
"I don't say she doesn't adore him. What I say is that she doesn't think of him. One of those conditions doesn't always at all stages involve the other. This is just how she adores him," Charlotte said. "And what reason is there in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn't, as you say, show together? We've shown together, my dear," she smiled, "before."
Her friend, for a little, only looked at her—speak-
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