I've NOT felt at any time that you've wronged me." "How could I come within a mile," Charlotte inquired, "of such a possibility ?" Maggie, with her eyes on her more easily now, made no attempt to say; she said, after a little, something more to the present point.

"I accuse you--I accuse you of nothing." "Ah, that's lucky!" Charlotte had brought this out with the richness, almost, of gaiety; and Maggie, to go on, had to think, with her own intensity, of Amerigo--to think how he, on his side, had had to go through with his lie to her, how it was for his wife he had done so, and how his doing so had given her the clue and set her the example.

He must have had his own difficulty about it, and she was not, after all, falling below him.

It was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which covered the last inch of the ground.

He had given her something to conform to, and she hadn't unintelligently turned on him, "gone back on" him, as he would have said, by not conforming.