imagination. She has, in every way, a great attitude. She has above all a great conscience.” More perhaps than ever in her life before Maggie addressed her father at this moment with a shade of the absolute in her tone. She had never come so near telling him what he should take it from her to believe. “She has only twopence in the world—but that has nothing to do with it. Or rather indeed”—she quickly corrected herself—“it has everything. For she doesn’t care. I never saw her do anything but laugh at her poverty. Her life has been harder than anyone knows.”
It was moreover as if, thus unprecedentedly positive, his child had an effect upon him that Mr. Verver really felt as a new thing. “Why then haven’t you told me about her before?”
“Well, haven’t we always known—?”
“I should have thought,” he submitted, “that we had already pretty well sized her up.”
“Certainly—we long ago quite took her for granted. But things change, with time, and I seem to know that, after this interval, I’m going to like her better than ever. I’ve lived more myself, I’m older, and one judges better. Yes, I’m going to see in Charlotte,” said the Princess—and speaking now as with high and free expectation—“more than I’ve ever seen.”
“Then I’ll try to do so too. She WAS”—it came back to Mr. Verver more—“the one of your friends I thought the best for you.”
His companion, however, was so launched in her permitted liberty of appreciation that she for the moment scarce heard him. She was lost in the case she made out, the vision of the different ways in which Charlotte had distinguished herself.
“She would have liked for instance—I’m sure she would have liked extremely—to marry; and nothing in general is more ridiculous, even when it has been pathetic, than a woman who has tried and has not been able.”
It had all Mr. Verver’s attention. “She has ‘tried’—?”
“She has seen cases where she would have liked to.”
“But she has not been able?”
“Well, there are more cases, in Europe, in which it doesn’t come to girls who are poor than in which it does come to them. Especially,” said Maggie with her continued competence, “when they’re Americans.”
Well, her father now met her, and met her cheerfully, on all sides. “Unless you mean,” he suggested, “that when the girls are American there are more cases in which it comes to the rich than to the poor.”
She looked at him good-humouredly. “That may be—but I’m not going to be smothered in MY case. It ought to make me—if I were in danger of being a fool—all the nicer to people like Charlotte. It’s not hard for ME,” she practically explained, “not to be ridiculous—unless in a very different way. I might easily be ridiculous, I suppose, by behaving as if I thought I had done a great thing. Charlotte, at any rate, has done nothing, and anyone can see it, and see also that it’s rather strange; and yet no one—no one not awfully presumptuous or offensive would like, or would dare, to treat her, just as she is, as anything but quite RIGHT. That’s what it is to have something about you that carries things off.”
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