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Poor Fanny Assingham's challenge amounted to nothing: one of the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble balustrade so like others that he knew in still more nobly-terraced Italy was that she was squared, all-conveniently even to herself, and that, rumbling toward London with this contentment, she had become an image irrelevant to the scene.
Assingham's rejoinder, at all events however much or however little it was a choice was presently a triumph. "Speaking with this love of your own then, have you undertaken to convey to me that you believe your husband and your father's wife to be in act and in fact lovers of each other?" And then as the Princess didn't at first answer: "Do you call such an allegation as that 'mild'?"
Assingham's dark, neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs.
Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs. Assingham's, a word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory which we have just found in our path.
Assingham's almost imprudently interested expression of face, positively acquired such a price for her that she may, for ourselves, while the intensity lasted, rather resemble a person holding out a small mirror at arm's length and consulting it with a special turn of the head.
"Oh, bother her child!" and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. "To live, you poor dear, for her father which is another pair of sleeves!" And Mrs. Assingham's whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. "Any idiot can do things for her child.
"Well, as I've faith in THEM, it comes to the same thing." Maggie, at this last, appeared for a moment to think again; but she embraced the proposition. "The same thing." "Then you're no longer unhappy?" her guest urged, coming more gaily toward her. "I doubtless shan't be a great while." But it was now Mrs. Assingham's turn to want more. "I've convinced you it's impossible?"
Against this stood nothing but Fanny Assingham's apparent belief in her privation more mercilessly imposed, or more hopelessly felt, in the actual relation of the parties; over and beyond everything that, from more than three months back, of course, had fostered in the Princess a like conviction.
Assingham's face a mild perception of some finer sense a sense for his wife's situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did.
Against what we've already so fully talked of its having to be recognised between them that he doubts. That's where my part is so plain to see her through, to see her through to the end." Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham's reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the next instant, to qualify her view of it.
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