Maggie held her breath. “’Ours’—?”

“My husband’s and mine.  I’m not speaking for you.”

“Oh!” said Maggie, only praying not to be, not even to appear, stupid.

“I’m speaking for ourselves.  I’m speaking,” Charlotte brought out, “for him.”

“I see.  For my father.”

“For your father.  For whom else?” They looked at each other hard now, but Maggie’s face took refuge in the intensity of her interest.  She was not at all even so stupid as to treat her companion’s question as requiring an answer; a discretion that her controlled stillness had after an instant justified.  “I must risk your thinking me selfish—­for of course you know what it involves.  Let me admit it—­I am selfish.  I place my husband first.”

“Well,” said Maggie smiling and smiling, “since that’s where I place mine—!”

“You mean you’ll have no quarrel with me?  So much the better then; for,” Charlotte went on with a higher and higher flight, “my plan is completely formed.”

Maggie waited—­her glimmer had deepened; her chance somehow was at hand.  The only danger was her spoiling it; she felt herself skirting an abyss.  “What then, may I ask is your plan?”

It hung fire but ten seconds; it came out sharp.  “To take him home—­to his real position.  And not to wait.”

“Do you mean—­a—­this season?”

“I mean immediately.  And—­I may as well tell you now—­I mean for my own time.  I want,” Charlotte said, “to have him at last a little to myself; I want, strange as it may seem to you”—­and she gave it all its weight “to keep the man I’ve married.  And to do so, I see, I must act.”

Maggie, with the effort still to follow the right line, felt herself colour to the eyes.  “Immediately?” she thoughtfully echoed.

“As soon as we can get off.  The removal of everything is, after all, but a detail.  That can always be done; with money, as he spends it, everything can.  What I ask for,” Charlotte declared, “is the definite break.  And I wish it now.”  With which her head, like her voice rose higher.  “Oh,” she added, “I know my difficulty!”

Far down below the level of attention, in she could scarce have said what sacred depths, Maggie’s inspiration had come, and it had trembled the next moment into sound.  “Do you mean I’m your difficulty?”

“You and he together—­since it’s always with you that I’ve had to see him.  But it’s a difficulty that I’m facing, if you wish to know; that I’ve already faced; that I propose to myself to surmount.  The struggle with it—­none too pleasant—­hasn’t been for me, as you may imagine, in itself charming; I’ve felt in it at times, if I must tell you all, too great and too strange, an ugliness.  Yet I believe it may succeed.”

She had risen, with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved, for the emphasis of it, a few steps away; while Maggie, motionless at first, but sat and looked at her.  “You want to take my father from me?”