That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for "bridge" and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his "niceness" to her--she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes--had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration.
"She understands," he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs.
Verver--"she understands all she needs to understand.

She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it.

She can't of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can't say in so many words 'Don't think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.' I don't get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it.
But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers.

So that she's--well," the Prince wound up, "what you may call practically all right." Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn't call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud.

She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit's end was she, for once, clear or direct in response.