THE PRINCE
anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I'm not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I'm speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, their lives in hand, and how therefore that ties her up to-day. She can't go to them and say 'It's very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.'"
He took it in still, with his long look at her. "All the more that she wasn't. She was right. Everything's right," he went on, "and everything will stay so."
"Then that's all I say."
But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. "We're happy—and they're happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?"
"Ah my dear," said Charlotte, "it's not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she's fixed, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It's you who have seemed haunted with the possibility for her of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for." And she had with her high reasoning a strange cold smile. "We are prepared—for anything, for everything; and as we are, practically, so she must take us. She's condemned to consistency; she's doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then therefore," Mrs. Verver gently laughed, "she has the chance of her life!"
"So that her present professions may even at the
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