The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man.
"Conspiring--so far as YOU were concerned--to what end ?" "Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife--at Maggie's expense.

And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr.
Verver's." "Of rendering friendly services, yes--which have produced, as it turns out, complications.

But from the moment you didn't do it FOR the complications, why shouldn't you have rendered them ?" It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connexion, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the "worst," speak for herself.
Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way.

"Oh, isn't what I may have meddled 'for'-- so far as it can be proved I did meddle--open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr.
Verver's and Maggie's?
Mayn't they see my motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter ?" She positively liked to keep it up.

"Mayn't they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to 'place' him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money?
Mayn't it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain between us--something quite unholy and louche ?" It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo.