THE PRINCE
gether. But she likes to arrange," Charlotte steadily proceeded; "it peculiarly suits her; and the result of our separate households is really, for them, more contact and more intimacy. To-night for instance has been practically an arrangement. She likes him best alone. And it's the way," said our young woman, "in which he best likes her. It's what I mean therefore by being 'placed.' And the great thing is, as they say, to 'know' one's place. Doesn't it all strike you," she wound up, "as rather placing the Prince too?"
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. She picked out after consideration a solitary plum. "So placed that you have to arrange?"
"Certainly I have to arrange."
"And the Prince also—if the effect for him is the same?"
"Really I think not less."
"And does he arrange," Mrs. Assingham asked, "to make up his arrears?" The question had risen to her lips—it was as if another morsel, on the dish, had tempted her. The sound of it at once struck her own ear as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended; but she quickly saw that she must follow it up, at any risk, with simplicity, and that what
259
