that is important.
But Maggie does eventually force out of Fanny an admission that she considers Maggie's suspicions to be an impossibility because she trusts Amerigo and Charlotte. Fanny's subtlety here is, of course, another instance in which the European plays with the truth in a manner that avoids direct lying but disguises much of what she thinks. Fanny's motive (although slightly based on self-preservation) is also to put Maggie's mind at rest. Yet the reader is simultaneously aware that Maggie has exerted herself to put the pair in tempting situations and to provoke the bad behavior of which she believes them to be capable. Thus, by the end of the scene, their acceptance of the impossibility of adultery is clearly a matter of forms rather than of substance. In beginning, with a very direct blunt question that reveals the streak of violence in Maggie, James raises the possibility of direct communication. But he subtly inserts a small misunderstanding, in which Maggie, in reply to Fanny's question, says that she is not jealous of Charlott
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