"Because I don't at all want," she explained, "to be blinded, or made 'sniffy,' by any sense of a social situation." Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him--to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive.

But she waited a little--as if made nervous, precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said.

They were avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge.

"Don't you remember," she went on, "how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn't so very sure we, ourselves had the thing itself ?" He did his best to do so.

"Had, you mean a social situation ?" "Yes--after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that, at the rate we were going, we should never have one." "Which was what put us on Charlotte ?" Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.
Maggie had another pause--taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been, at their critical moment, "put on" Charlotte.