I quite hold," Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a person can mostly feel but one passion--one TENDER passion, that is--at a time.

Only, that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother.

Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities--as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore, for years after I had begun to adore you.

Well, Maggie"-- she kept it up--"is in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had.

Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind--her feverish little sense of justice, as I say--had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn't have done.