But one's excuse here," she insisted, "was that these people clearly DIDN'T see them for themselves--didn't see them at all.

It struck one for very pity--that they were making a mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go.

They didn't know HOW to live--and somehow one couldn't, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it.

That's what I pay for"-- and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness.

"I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.
Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte--Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr.Verver and Maggie were.