“Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays—and how that ought to keep her present to him.”
This, in its turn, after an instant, Mrs. Assingham could meet with a smile. “Trust him, my dear, to keep her present! But trust him also to keep himself absent. Leave him his own way.”
“I’ll leave him everything,” said Maggie. “Only—you know it’s my nature—I THINK.”
“It’s your nature to think too much,” Fanny Assingham a trifle coarsely risked.
This but quickened, however, in the Princess the act she reprobated. “That may be. But if I hadn’t thought—!”
“You wouldn’t, you mean, have been where you are?”
“Yes, because they, on their side, thought of everything BUT that. They thought of everything but that I might think.”
“Or even,” her friend too superficially concurred, “that your father might!”
As to this, at all events, Maggie discriminated. “No, that wouldn’t have prevented them; for they knew that his first care would be not to make me do so. As it is,” Maggie added, “that has had to become his last.”
Fanny Assingham took it in deeper—for what it immediately made her give out louder. “HE’S splendid then.” She sounded it almost aggressively; it was what she was reduced to—she had positively to place it.