He had his view, as well--or at least a partial one--of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr.Verver's last dinner.

Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible depression.

By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake.

Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being--as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself--the sole and single frump of the party.

The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham's--these matters and others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch.