Only, when you ask me as if I mightn't perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to think." Mrs.Assingham hesitated; then, blinking a little, she took her risk.
"You didn't think that if it was a question of anyone's returning to him, in his trouble, it would be better you yourself should have gone ?" Well, Charlotte's answer to this inquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations.

The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the REAL truth.

"If we couldn't be perfectly frank and dear with each other, it would be ever so much better, wouldn't it?
that we shouldn't talk about anything at all; which, however, would be dreadful--and we certainly, at any rate, haven't yet come to it.

You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because, don't you see?
you can't upset me." "I'm sure, my dear Charlotte," Fanny Assingham laughed, "I don't want to upset you." "Indeed, love, you simply COULDN'T even if you thought it necessary--that's all I mean.

Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I'm, by no merit of my own, just fixed--fixed as fast as a pin stuck, up to its head, in a cushion.