 CHAPTER XXVI Amorigo was away from her again as she sat there as she walked there without him, for she had, with the difference of his presence in the house, ceased to keep herself from moving about. But the hour was filled nevertheless with the effect of his nearness, and above all with the effect, strange and an intimacy so established, of an almost renewed vision of the facts of his aspect. She had seen him last but five days since, yet he had stood there before her as if restored from some far country, some long voyage, some combination of dangers or fatigues, this unquenchable variety in his appeal to her interest. What did it mean, but that reduced to the flatness of mere statement, she was married by good fortune to an altogether dazzling person? That was an old old story, but the truth of it shone out to her like the beauty of some family picture, some mellow portrait of an ancestor that she might have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long intermission. The dazzling person was upstairs and she was down, and there were moreover the other facts of the selection and decision that this demonstration of her own had required, and of the constant care that the equilibrium involved. But she had all the same, never felt so absorbingly married, so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would with her, in fact what was actually happening was that he was actually doing it. What he would, what he really would, only that quantity itself escaped perhaps in the brightness of the high harmony familiar naming and discussing. It was enough of a recognition for her that whatever the thing he might desire he would always absolutely bring it off. She knew at this moment without a question, with the fullest surrender, how he had brought off in her, by scarce more than a single illusion, a perfect flutter of tenderness. If he had come back tired, tired from his long day, the exertion had been literally in her service and her father's. They too had sat at home at peace, the principino between them, the complications of life kept down, the boars sifted out, the large ease of the home preserved, because of the way the others held the field and braved the weather. Amorigo never complained, any more than for that matter Charlotte did. But she seemed to see tonight, as she had never yet quite done, that their business of social representation conceived as they conceived it, beyond any conception of her own and conscientiously carried out, was an affair of living always in harness. She remembered Fanny Asingham's old judgment, that friend's description of her father and herself as not living at all, as not knowing what to do or what might be done for them, and there came back to her with it an echo of the long talk they had had together, one September day at Fawn's under the trees, when she put before him this dictum of Fanny's. That occasion might have counted for them, she had already often made the reflection, as the first step in an existence more intelligently arranged. It had been an hour from which the chain of causes and consequences was definitely traceable, so many things, and at the head of the list her father's marriage, having appeared to her to flow from Charlotte's visit to Fawn's, and that event itself having flowed from the memorable talk. But what perhaps most came out in the light of these concatenations was that it had been, for all the world, as if Charlotte had been had in, as the servants always said of extra help, because they had thus suffered it to be pointed out to them, that if their family coach lumbered and stuck, the fault was in its lacking its complement of wheels. Having but three, as they might say, it had wanted another, and what had Charlotte done from the first but began to act on the spot, and ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth. Nothing had been immediately more manifest than the greater grace of the movement of the vehicle, as to which, for the completeness of her image, Maggie was now supremely to feel how every strain had been lightened for herself. So far as she was one of the wheels she had but to keep in her place, since the work was done for her she felt no weight, and it wasn't too much to acknowledge that she had scarce to turn round. She had a long pause before the fire during which she might have been fixing with intensity her projected vision have been conscious even of its taking an absurd, fantastic shape. She might have been watching the family coach pass and noting that somehow Amarigo and Charlotte were pulling it while she and her father were not so much as pushing. They were seated inside together, dandling the Principino and holding him up to the windows to see and to be seen like an infant positively royal, so that the exertion was all with the others. Maggie found in this image a repeated challenge. Again and yet again she paused before the fire, after which each time in the manner of one for whom a strong light has suddenly broken she gave herself to lively her movement. She had seen herself at last in the picture she was studying suddenly jump from the coach where upon frankly with the wonder of the sight her eyes open wider and her heart stood still for a moment. She looked at the person so acting as if this person were somebody else waiting with intensity to see what would follow. The person had taken a decision which was evidently because an impulse long gathering had at last felt a sharpest pressure. Only how was the decision to be applied? What in particular would the figure in the picture do? She looked about her from the middle of the room under the force of this question as if there exactly were the field of action involved. Then as the door opened again she recognized whatever the action the form at any rate of a first opportunity. Her husband had reappeared. He stood before her refreshed almost radiant quite reassuring. Dressed anointed fragrant ready above all for his dinner he smiled at her over the end of their delay. It was as if her opportunity had depended on his look and now she saw that it was good. There was still for the instant something in suspense but it passed more quickly than on his previous entrance. He was already holding out his arms. It was for hours and hours later on as if she had somehow been lifted aloft, were floated and carried on some warm high tide beneath which stumbling blocks had sunk out of sight. This came from her being again for the time in the enjoyment of confidence, from her knowing as she believed what to do. All the next day and all the next she appeared to herself to know it. She had a plan and she rejoiced in her plan. This consisted of the light that suddenly breaking into her restless reverie had marked the climax of that vigil. It had come to her as a question. What if five abandoned them, you know? What if five accepted too passively the funny form of our life? There would be a process of her own by which she might do differently in respect to Amerigo and Charlotte, a process quite independent of any process of theirs. Such a solution had but to rise before her to affect her, to charm her, with its simplicity and advantageous simplicity she had been stupid for so long not to have been struck by, and the simplicity meanwhile seemed proved by the success that had already begun to attend her. She had only had herself to do something to see how immediately it answered. This consciousness of its having answered with her husband was the uplifting, sustaining wave. He had met her, she so put it to herself, met her with an effect of generosity and of gaiety, and a special on his coming back to her ready for dinner, which she wore in her breast as the token of an escape for them both from something not quite definite but clearly much less good. Even at that moment, in fact, her plan had begun to work. She had been, when he brightly reappeared, in the act of plucking it out of the heart of her earnestness, plucking it in the garden of thought, as if it had been some full-blown flower that she could present to him on the spot. Well, it was the flower of participation, and as that, then and there, she held it out to him, putting straight way into execution the idea, so needlessly, so absurdly obscured, of her sharing with him whatever the enjoyment, the interest, the experience might be, and sharing also, for that matter, with Charlotte. She had thrown herself at dinner into every feature of the recent adventure of the companions, letting him see, without reserve, that she wished to hear everything about it, and making Charlotte in particular, Charlotte's judgment of matchum, Charlotte's aspect, her success there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes inimitably worn, her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility, and fine, brilliantly exemplified, the subject of endless inquiry. Maggie's inquiry was most empathetic, moreover, for the whole happy thought of the Cathedral Hunt, which she was so glad they had entertained, and asked her the pleasant results of which, down to the cold beef and bread and cheese, the queer old smell and the dirty tablecloth at the inn, Amorigo was good humorably responsive. He had looked at her across the table more than once, as if touched by the humility of this welcome offered to impressions at second hand, the amusements, the large freedoms only of others, as if recognizing in it something fairly exquisite. And at the end, while they were alone, before she had rung for a servant, he had renewed again his condemnation of the little irregularity, such as it was, on which she had ventured. They had risen together to come upstairs. He had been talking, at the last, about some of the people, at the very last of all about Lady Casseldeen and Mr. Blint, after which she had once more broken ground on the matter of the type of Gloucester. It brought her, as he came round the table to join her, yet another of his kind conscious stares, one of the looks visibly beguiled, but at the same time not invisibly puzzled, with which he had already shown his sense of this charming grace of her curiosity. It was as if he might, for a moment, be going to say, You needn't pretend, dearest, quite so hard. You needn't think it necessary to care quite so much. It was as if he stood there before her with some such easy intelligence, some such intimate reassurance on his lips. Her answer would have been already, that she wasn't in the least pretending. And she looked up at him, while he took her hand, with the maintenance, the real persistence, of her lucid little plan in her eyes. She wanted him to understand, from that very moment, that she was going to be with him again, quite with them, together, as she doubtless hadn't been since the funny changes. That was really all one could call them, into which they had each, as for the sake of the others, too easily and too obligingly slipped. They had taken too much for granted that their life together required, as people in London said, a special form, which was very well so long as the form was kept only for the outside world, and was made no more of among themselves than the pretty mold of an iced pudding, or something of that sort, into which to help yourself, you didn't hesitate to break with a spoon. So much as that she would, with an opening, have allowed herself furthermore to observe, she wanted him to understand how her scheme embraced Charlotte, too, so that if he had but uttered the acknowledgment she judged him on the point of making, the acknowledgment of his catching at her brave little idea for their case, she would have found herself, as distinctly, voluble almost to eloquence. What befell, however, was that even while she thus waited, she felt herself present at a process taking place rather deeper within him than the occasion on the whole appeared to require, a process of weighing something in the balance, of considering, deciding, dismissing. He had guessed that she was there with an idea, there in fact by reason of her idea. Only this, oddly enough, was what at the last, stayed his words. She was helped to these perceptions by his now looking at her still harder than he had yet done, which really brought it to the turn of a hair for her, that she didn't make sure his notion of her idea was the right one. It was the turn of a hair, because he had possession of her hands and was bending toward her ever so kindly, as if to see, to understand, more or possibly give more, she didn't know which, and that had the effect of simply putting her, as she would have said, in his power. He gave up, let her idea go, let everything go. Her one consciousness was that he was taking her again into his arms. It was not till afterwards that she discriminated as to this. Felt how the act operated with him instead of the words he hadn't uttered. Operated in his view, as probably better than any words, as always better in fact at any time than anything. Her acceptance of it, her response to it, inevitable, foredoomed, came back to her later on, as a virtual ascent to the assumption he had thus made that there was really nothing such a demonstration didn't anticipate and didn't dispose of, and that the spring acting within herself moreover might well have been, beyond any other, the impulse legitimately to provoke it. It made for any issue the third time since his return that he had drawn her to his breast, and at present holding her to his side as they left the room, he kept her close for their moving into the hall and across it, kept her for their slow return together to the apartments above. He had been right, overwhelmingly right, as to the felicity of his tenderness and the degree of her sensibility, but even while she felt these things sweep all others away, she tasted of a sort of terror of the weakness they produced in her. It was still for her that she had positively something to do, and that she mustn't be weak for this, must much rather be strong. For many hours after, nonetheless, she remained weak, if weak it was, though holding fast indeed to the theory of her success, since her agitated overture had been after all, so unmistakably met. She recovered soon enough on the whole, the sense that this left her Charlotte always to deal with. Charlotte, who at any rate, however she might see overtures, must meet them at the worst, more or less differently. Of that inevitability, of such other ranges of response as were open to Charlotte, Maggie took the measure in approaching her, on the moral of her return from Machum, with the same show of desire to hear all her story. She wanted the whole picture from her, as she had wanted it from her companion, and promptly in Eaton Square, with her, without the Prince, she repaired, almost ostentatiously, for the purpose, this purpose only, she brought her repeatedly back to the subject, both in her husband's presence and during several scraps of independent colloquy. Before her father instinctively, Maggie took the ground that his wish for interesting echoes would be not less than her own, allowing that is, for everything his wife would already have had to tell him, for such passages, between them as might have occurred since the evening before. Joining them after luncheon, reaching them in her desire to proceed with the application of her idea, before they had quitted the breakfast room, the scene of their midday meal, she referred, in her parents' presence, to what she might have lost by delay, and expressed the hope that there would be an anecdote or two left for her to pick up. Charlotte was dressed to go out, and her husband that appeared rather positively prepared not to. He had left the table, but was seated near the fire with two or three of the morning papers, and the residuum of the second and third posts on a stand beside him, more even than the usual extravagance as Maggie's glance made out, of circulars, catalogs, advertisements, announcements of sales, foreign envelopes and foreign handwriting that were as unmistakable as foreign clothes. Charlotte, at the window, looking into the side street that abutted on the square, might have been watching for their visitor's advent before withdrawing, and in the light, strange and colored, like that of a painted picture, which fixed the impression for her, objects took on values not hitherto so fully shown. It was the effect of her quick insensibility. She knew herself again in presence of a problem, in need of a solution for which she must intensely work. That consciousness, lately born in her, had been taught the evening before to accept a temporary lapse, but had quickly enough again, with her getting out of her own house and her walking across half the town, for she had come from Portland Place on foot, found breath still in its lungs. It exhaled this breath in a sigh, faint and unheard, her tribute, while she stood there before speaking, to realities looming through the golden mist that had already begun to be scattered. The conditions facing her had yielded for the time to the golden mist had considerably melted away, but there they were again definite, and it was for the next quarter of an hour as if she could have counted them one by one on her fingers. Sharp to her above all was the renewed attestation of her father's comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long regarded as of the same quality with her own, but which, so distinctly now, she should have the complication of being obliged to deal with separately. They had not yet struck her as absolutely extraordinary, which had made for her lumping them with her own, since her view of her own had but so lately begun to change, though it instantly stood out for her that there was really no new judgment of them she should be able to show without attracting in some degree his attention, without perhaps exciting his surprise and making thereby for the situation she shared with him some difference. She was reminded and warned by the concrete image, and for a minute Charlotte's face immediately presented to her effect that her is searching her own to see the reminder tell. She had not less promptly kissed her stepmother and then had bent over her father, from behind, and laid her cheek upon him. Little amenities tantamount here to fore to an easy change of guard. Charlotte's own frequent, though always cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer. Maggie figured thus as the relieving century, and so smoothly did use and custom work for them that her mate might even, on this occasion, after acceptance of the password, have departed without irrelevant and in strictness unsolderly gossip. This was not nonetheless what happened. In as much as if our young woman had been floated over her first impulse to break the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but an instant to sound at any risk, the note she had been privately practicing. If she had practiced it the day before at dinner on Amorigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs. Verver, and it immensely helped her for that matter, to be able at once to speak of the princes having done more to quicken than to soothe her curiosity. Frankly, in Galey she had come to ask, to ask what, in their unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved. She had got out of her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the persons who answered such questions ideally. He had only made her more curious, and she had arrived early this way in order to miss as little as possible of Charlotte's story. Wives, papa, she said, are always much better reporters, though I grant, she added for Charlotte, that fathers are not much better than husbands. He never, she smiled, tells me more than a tenth of what you tell him, so I hope you haven't told him everything yet, since in that case I shall probably have lost the best part of it. Maggie went, she went, she felt herself going, she reminded herself of an actress who had been studying a part in rehearsing it, but who suddenly on the stage before the footlights had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise higher, just as it was the sense of action that logically involved some platform, action quite positively for the first time in her life, or counting in the previous afternoon, for the second. The platform remained for three or four days, thus sensibly under her feet, and she had all the while with it the inspiration of quite remarkably, of quite heroically improvising. Preparation and practice had come but a short way. Her part opened out, and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art to keep within bounds and not lose her head. Certainly she might see for a week how far that would take her. She said to herself in her excitement that it was perfectly simple, to bring about a difference, touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all her father, so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn't ready with a reason, not that is with what she would have called a reasonable one. She thought of herself instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt all her life at her father's side and, by his example, only in reasonable reasons, and what she would really have been most ashamed of would be to produce for him, in this line, some inferior substitute. Unless she were in a position to plead, definitely, that she was jealous, she should be in no position to plead decently that she was dissatisfied. This latter condition would be the necessary implication of the former. Without the former behind it it would have to fall to the ground. So had the case wonderfully been arranged for her. There was a card she could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be to end the game. She felt herself, as at the small square green table between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged counters, her father's playmate and partner, and what it constantly came back to in her mind was that for her to ask a question, to raise a doubt, to reflect in any degree on the play of the others, would be to break the charm. The charm she had to call it, since it kept her companion so constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so contentedly occupied, to say anything at all would be in fine to have to say why she was jealous, and she could in her private hours, but stare long with suffused eyes at that impossibility. By the end of a week, the week that had begun especially with her morning hour in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily greater than her consciousness of anything else, and I must add moreover that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what else as a consciousness could have been quite so overwhelming. Charlotte's response to the experiment of being more with her ought, as she very well knew, to stamp the experiment with the feeling of success, so that if the success itself seemed to boon less substantial than the original image of it, it enjoyed thereby a certain analogy with our young woman's aftertaste of Amorigo's own determined demonstrations. Maggie was to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste, and if I have spoken of the impressions fixed in her as soon as she had so insidiously taken the field, a definite note must be made of her perception during those moments of Charlotte's prompt uncertainty. She had shown no doubt, she couldn't not have shown, that she had arrived with an idea, quite exactly as she had shown her husband the night before that she was awaiting him with a sentiment. This analogy in the two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of a kinship of expression in the two faces in respect to which all she has yet professed to herself was that she had affected them, or at any rate the sensibility each of them so admirably covered in the same way. To make the comparison at all was for Maggie, to return to it often, to root upon it, to extract from it the last dregs of its interest, to play with it in short nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait, and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness that no effort would ever snap. The miniatures were back to back, but she saw them forever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other she found in Charlotte's eyes the gleam of the momentary, what does she really want? They had come and gone for her in the princes. So again she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland Place and in Eaton Square as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted no harm, wanted no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in that she meant to go out with her. She had been present at that process as personally as she might have been present at some other domestic incident, the hanging of a new picture, say, or the fitting of the principino with his first little trousers. She remained present accordingly all the week, so charmingly and systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome her company. Charlotte had but wanted the hint. And what was it but the hint, after all, that during the so subdued but so ineffacable passage in the breakfast room she had seen her take? It had been taken moreover, not with resignation, not with qualifications or reserves, however bland, it had been taken with avidity, with gratitude, with the grace of gentleness at supplanted explanations. The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter, as if it had fairly written the princess down as a person of variations, and had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the fit had changed, become the sign unfailingly of the advent of the other. And it was emblazoned in rich color, on the bright face of this period, that Mrs. Verver only wished to know, on any occasion, what was expected of her, only held herself there for instructions, in order even to better them if possible. The two young women, while the passage lasted, became again very much the companions of other days, the days of Charlotte's prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the days when equality of condition for them had been all the result of the latter's native vagueness about her own advantages. The earlier elements fleshed into life again, the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of accompanying expression, appreciation, endearment, confidence, the rare charm produced in each by this act of contribution to the felicity of the other, all enhanced furthermore, enhanced or qualified, who should say which, by a new note of diplomacy, almost of anxiety, just sensible on Charlotte's part in particular, of intensity of observance, and the matter of appeal and response, and the matter of making sure the Princess might be disposed or gratified, that resembled an attempt to play again, with more refinement, at disparity of relation. Charlotte's attitude had, in short, its moments of flowering into pretty excesses of civility, self-effacement in the presence of others, sudden little formalisms of suggestion and recognition, that might have represented her sense of the duty of not losing sight of a social distinction. This impression came out most from Maggie, when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companions in veteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting, too familiarly, that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a reminder that the lady-in-waiting was an established favorite, safe in her position. A little queen, however good-natured, was always a little queen, and might, with small warning, remember it. And yet another of these concomitants of feverish success, all the while, was the perception that in another quarter, too, things were being made easy. Charlotte's alacrity in meeting her had, in one sense, operated slightly over much as an intervention. It had begun to reabsorb her at the very hour of her husband's showing her that, to be all there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required, as one of the other phrases was, too, the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the straight tip in his moods of amusement and English slang, in his remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes and higher inspirations, and he had taken it from her at need in a way that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval seem large. Then, however, immediately, and even though superficially, there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was, once more, practically a little sacrificed. I must do everything, she had said, without letting Papa see what I do, at least till it's done. But she scarce knew how she proposed, even for the next few days, to blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had, in fact, promptly enough happened, she presently recognized, was that if her stepmother had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been rather snatched again thereby from her husband's side, so on the other hand, this had, with this little delay, entailed some very charming assistance for her in Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte from whatever happy demonstration for the benefit of the world in which they supposed themselves to live, that there was no smallest reason why their closer association shouldn't be public and acclaimed. At these times, she regularly found that Amorigo had come either to sit with his father-in-law and the absence of the ladies, or to make on his side precisely some such display of the easy working of the family life as would represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte. Under this particular impression, it was that everything in Maggie most melted and went to pieces, everything that is that belonged to her disposition to challenge the perfection of their common state. It divided them again, that was true, this particular turn of the tide, cut them up afresh into pairs and parties, quite as if a sense for the equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power of insistence, quite as if Amorigo himself were all the while at bottom, equally thinking of it and watching it. But, as against that, he was making her father not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of them a more excellent service. He was acting in short on a cue, the cue given him by observation. It had been enough for him to see the shade of change in her behavior. His instinct for relations, the most exquisite conceivable, prompted him immediately to meet and match the difference, to play somehow into its hands. That was what it was, she renewedly felt, to have married a man who was sublimely a gentleman, so that, in spite of her not wanting to translate all their delicacies into the grossness of discussion, she yet found again and again, in Portland Place, moments for saying, If I didn't love you, you know for yourself, I should still love you for him. He looked at her after such speeches as Charlotte looked in Eaton Square, when she called her attention to his benevolence, through the dimness of the almost musing smile that took account of her extravagance, harmless though it might be, as a tendency to reckon with. But, my poor child, Charlotte might under this pressure have been on the point of replying, that's the way nice people are, all round, so that why should one be surprised about it? We're all nice together, as why shouldn't we be? If we hadn't been, we wouldn't have gone far, and I consider that we've gone very far indeed. Why should you take on as if you weren't a perfect dear yourself, capable of all the sweetest things, as if you hadn't in fact grown up in an atmosphere, the atmosphere of all the good things that I recognized, even of old, as soon as I came near you, and that you've allowed me now between you to make so blessedly my own? Mrs. Verver might in fact have but just failed to make another point, a point charmingly natural to her as a grateful and irreproachable wife. It isn't a bit wonderful, I may also remind you, that your husband should find when opportunity permits worse things to do than to go about with mine. I happen love to appreciate my husband. I happen perfectly to understand that his acquaintance should be cultivated and his company enjoyed. Some such happily provoked remarks as these from Charlotte at the other house had been in the air, but we have seen how there was also in the air for our young woman, as an emanation from the same source, a distilled difference of which the very principle was to keep down objections and retorts. That impression came back. It had its hours of doing so, and it may interest us on the ground of its having prompted in Maggie a final reflection, a reflection out of the heart of which a light flashed for her like a great flower grown in a night. As soon as this light had spread a little it produced in some quarters a surprising distinctness, made her of a sudden ask herself why there should have been, even for three days, the least obscurity. The perfection of her success decidedly was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The word for it, the word that flashed the light, was that they were treating her, that they were proceeding with her, and for that matter, with her father, by a plan that was the exact counterpart of her own. It was not from her that they took their cue, but, and this was what in particular made her sit up, from each other. And with a depth of unanimity, an exact coincidence of inspiration that, when once her attention had begun to fix it, struck her as staring out at her in recovered identities of behavior, expression, and tone. They had a view of her situation and of the possible forms her own consciousness of it might take, a view determined by the change of attitude they had had ever so subtly to recognize in her on their return from match them. They had had to read into this small and all but suppressed variation, a mute comment, on they didn't quite know what, and it now arched over the princess's head like a vault of bold span that important communication between them on the subject couldn't have failed of being immediate. This new perception bristled for her, as we have said, with odd intimations, but questions answered, played in and out of it as well. The question, for instance, of why such promptitude of harmony should have been important. Ah, when she began to recover, piece by piece, the process became lively. She might have been picking small, shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent in this pursuit over her dustbin. She challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of Amorigo that evening, and a rest at the door of her Salatino while her eyes from her placed chair took him in. Then it was that this immense little memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of doors, she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out. She had responsibly shut in as we have understood, shut in there with her sentient self, only the fact of his reappearance and the plenitude of his presence. These things had been testimony after all to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while she looked, the warmly washing wave had traveled far up the strand. She had subsequently lived for hours she couldn't count, under the dizzying, smothering welter positively in subbering depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother of pearl, though indeed she had got her head above them for breath when face to face with Charlotte again on the morrow in Eaton Square. Meanwhile, nonetheless, as was so apparent, the prior, the prime impression had remained in the manner of a spying servant on the other side of the barred threshold, a witness availing himself in time of the lightest pretext to re-enter. It was as if he had found this pretext in her observed necessity of comparing, comparing the obvious common elements in her husbands and her stepmother's ways of now taking her. Whether without her witness, at any rate, she was led by comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating and operating so harmoniously between her companions, and it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had made out the promise of her dawn. It was a worked out scheme for their not wounding her, for their behaving to her quite nobly, to which each had in some winning way, induced the other to contribute, in which therefore, so far as that went, proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study. Quickly, quickly on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they should, without knowing it, wound her. They had signaled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these days, her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their purpose, which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch, so that she sat there in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just managed to see by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very well, but at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed, saved by one's request. It wasn't in the least what she had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all, she hadn't complained, not by the quaver of a syllable, so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving? What wound had she received, as to which she had exchanged the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped, they might have had some reason. But she would be hanged, she conversed with herself in strong language, if she had been, from beginning to end, anything but pliable and mild. It all came back in consequence to some required process of their own, a process operating quite positively as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and for consistency with themselves, which was with each other, must keep her there. In that condition she wouldn't interfere with the policy, which was established, which was arranged. Her thought over this arrived at a great intensity, had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well nigh covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement. Policy or no policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in position so as not to disarrange them. It fitted immensely together the whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive. For strangely, as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had hitherto not imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her own. Of course they were arranged, all four arranged, but what had the basis of their life been precisely but that they were arranged together? Amarigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she, to confine the matter only to herself, was arranged apart. It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before, and as her father himself seemed not to meet the vaguely clutching hand with which, during the first shock of complete perception, she tried to study herself. She felt very much alone. There had been, from far back, that is from the Christmas time on, a plan that the parent and the child should do something lovely together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought it up theoretically, though without as yet quite allowing it to put its feet to the ground. The most it had done was to try a few steps on the drawing-room carpet, with much attendance on either side, much holding up and guarding, much anticipation and fine of awkwardness or accident. Their companions, by the same token, had constantly assisted at the performance, following the experiment with sympathy and gaiety, and never so full of applause, Maggie now made out for herself, as when the infant project had kicked its little legs most wildly, kicked them for all the world across the channel and half the continent, kicked them over the Pyrenees and innocently crowed out some rich Spanish name. She asked herself at present if it had been a real belief that they were but wanting, for some such adventure, to snatch their moment. Whether either had at any instant seen it as workable, save in the form of a toy to dangle before the other, that they should take flight without wife or husband for one more look before they died, at the Madrid pictures as well as for a drop of further a week delay in respect to three or four possible prizes privately offered, rarities of the first water, responsibly reported on and profusely photographed, still patiently awaiting their noiseless arrival and retreats to which the clue had not otherwise been given away. The vision dallyed with, during the dusk-year days in Eaton Square, had stretched to the span of three or four weeks of springtime for the total adventure. Three or four weeks in the very spirit, after all, of their regular life as their regular life had been persisting. Full of shared mornings, afternoons, evenings, walks, drives, looks in, at old places on vague chances. Full also in a special of that purchased social ease, the sense of the comfort and credit of their house, which had essentially the perfection of something paid for, but which came, on the whole, so cheap that it might have been felt as costing, as costing the parent and child, nothing. It was for Maggie to wonder at present if she had been sincere about their going, to ask herself whether she would have stuck to their plan even if nothing had happened. Her view of the impossibility of sticking to it now may give us the measure of her sense that everything had happened. A difference had been made in her relation to each of her companions, and what it compelled her to say to herself was that to behave as she might have behaved before would be to act for Amarigo and Charlotte with the highest hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father would, more than anything else, have amounted on his part and her own to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of the idea, in fact, had been in some such sublimity. Day after day she put off the moment of speaking, as she inwardly and very comprehensively called it, speaking, that is, to her father, and all the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as to his himself breaking silence. She gave him time, gave him during several days, that morning, that noon, that night, and the next and the next and the next, even made up her mind that if he stood off longer it would be proof conclusive that he, too, was in debt peace. They would then have been, all successfully throwing dust in each other's eyes, and it would be at last as if they must turn away their faces, since the silver mist that protected them had begun to grow sensibly thin. Finally at the end of April she decided that if he should say nothing for another period of twenty-four hours she must take it as showing that they were, in her private phraseology, lost. So little possible sincerity could there be in pretending to care for a journey to Spain at the approach of a summer that already promised to be hot. Such a proposal on his lips, such an extravagance of optimism, would be his way of being consistent, for that he didn't really want to move or to move further at the worst than back to fawns again, could only signify that he wasn't at heart contented. What he wanted at any rate, and what he didn't want were in the event put to the proof for Maggie just in time to give her a fresh wind. She had been dining with her husband in Eaton Square on the occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady Casseldeen. The propriety of some demonstration of this sort had been for many days before our group, the question reduced to the mere issue of which of the two houses should first take the field. The issue had been easily settled, in the manner of every issue referred in any degree to Amorigo and Charlotte. The initiative obviously belonged to Mrs. Verver, who had gone to Matchum while Maggie had stayed away, and the evening in Eaton Square might have passed for a demonstration all the more personal that the dinner had been planned on intimate lines. Six other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matchum, made up the company, and each of these persons had for Maggie the interest of an attested connection with the Easter rebels at that visionary house. Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly left behind it an infasible charm, this air of beatific reference, less subdued in the others than in Amorigo and Charlotte, lent them together an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman's imagination broke in a small, vain wave. It wasn't that she wished she had been of the remembered party and possessed herself of its secrets, for she didn't care about its secrets. She could concern herself at present, absolutely, with no secret but her own. What occurred was simply that she became aware, at a stroke, of the quantity of further nourishment required by her own, and of the amount of it she might somehow extract from these people, whereby she rose of a sudden to the desire to possess and use them, even to the extent of braving, of fairly defying, of directly exploiting, of possibly quite enjoying, under cover of an evil duplicity, the felt element of curiosity with which they regarded her. Once she was conscious of the flitting wing of this last impression, the perception, irresistible, that she was something for their queer experience, just as they were something for hers, there was no limit to her conceived design if not letting them escape. She went and went again, to-night, after her start was taken, went positively as she had felt herself going three weeks before, on the morning when the vision of her father and his wife awaiting her together in the breakfast room had been so determinate. In this other scene it was Lady Casseldine who was determinate, who kindled the light, or at all, events the heat, and who acted on the nerves. Lady Casseldine, whom she knew she so oddly didn't like, in spite of reasons upon reasons, the biggest diamonds on the yellowest hair, the longest lashes on the prettiest, falsest eyes, the oldest lace on the most violet velvet, the rightest manner on the wrongest assumption. Her ladyship's assumption was that she kept, at every moment of her life, every advantage. It made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous. So she didn't distinguish the little pertuberant eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range from the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings. Maggie had liked, in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she had thought it right to fear, right even to so much as judge, that it positively quickened her fever to have to recognize, in this case, such a lapse of all the sequences. It was only that a charming, clever woman wondered about her. That is, wondered about her as Amarigo's wife, and wondered moreover, with the intention of kindness and the spontaneity almost, of surprise. The point of view, that one, was what she read in their free contemplation, and that of the whole eight. There was something in Amarigo to be explained, and she was passed about, all tenderly and expertly, like a dress doll held in the right manner, by its firmly stuffed middle for the account she could give. She might have been made to give it by pressure of her stomach. She might have been expected to articulate with a rare imitation of nature. Oh yes, I'm here all the while. I'm also in my way a solid little fact, and I cost originally a great deal of money, cost that is my father, for my outfit, and let in my husband for an amount of pains toward my training, that money would scarce represent. Well, she would meet them in some such way, and she translated her idea into action after dinner, before they dispersed by engaging them all unconventionally, almost violently, to dine with her in Portland Place, just as they were, if they didn't mind the same party, which was the party she wanted. Oh, she was going, she was going, she could feel it afresh. It was a good deal as if she had sneezed ten times, or it suddenly burst into a comic song. There were breaks in the connection, as there would be hitches in the process. She didn't wholly see yet what they would do for her, nor quite how herself she should handle them. But she was dancing up and down beneath her propriety, with the thought that she had at least begun something. She so fairly liked to feel that she was a point for convergence of wonder. It wasn't after all, either, that their wonder so much signified, that of the cornered six, whom it glimmered before her that she might still live to drive about like a flock of sheep, the intensity of her consciousness, its sharpest savor, was in the theory of her having diverted, having, as they said, captured the attention of Amarigo and Charlotte, at neither of whom all the while did she so much as once look. She had pitched them in with the six, for that matter. So far as they themselves were concerned, they had dropped for the succession of minutes out of contact with their function, had, in short, startled and impressed, abandoned their post. They're paralyzed. They're paralyzed, she commented, deep within, so much it helped her own apprehension to hang together that they should suddenly lose their bearings. Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion to her view of causes, but it came to her then and there that if she could only get the facts of appearance straight, only jam them down into their place, the reasons lurking behind them, kept uncertain for the eyes by their wavering and shifting, wouldn't perhaps be able to help showing. It wasn't, of course, that the Prince and Mrs. Verver marveled to see her civil to their friends. It was rather precisely that civil was just what she wasn't. She had so departed from any such custom of delicate approach, approach by the permitted note, the suggested if, the accepted vagueness, as would enable the people in question to put her off if they wished, and the profit of her plan, the effect of the violence she was willing to let it go for, was exactly in their being the people in question, people she had seemed to be rather shy of before and for whom she suddenly opened her mouth so wide. Later on we may add, with the ground soon covered by her agitated but resolute step, it was to cease to matter what people they were or weren't, but meanwhile the particular sense of them that she had taken home tonight had done her the service of seeming to break the ice where that formation was thickest. Still more unexpectedly, the service might have been the same for her father. In as much as, immediately, when everyone had gone, he did exactly what she had been waiting for and despairing of, and did it, as he did everything, with a simplicity that left any purpose of sounding him deeper, of drawing him out further, of going, in his own frequent phrase, behind what he said, nothing whatever to do. He brought it out straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea of what they should lose by breaking the charm. I guess we won't go down there after all will be mag, just when it's getting so pleasant here. That was all, with nothing to lead up to it, but it was done for her at a stroke, and done not less, more rather, for Amarigo and Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost breathlessly measured it, was prodigious. Everything now so fitted for her to everything else that she could feel the effect as prodigious even while sticking to her policy of giving the pair no look. There were thus some five wonderful minutes during which they loomed to her sightless eyes, on either side of her, larger than they had ever loomed before, larger than life, larger than thought, larger than any danger or any safety. There was thus a space of time, in fine, fairly vertiginous for her, during which she took no more account of them than if they were not in the room. She had never, never treated them in any such way, not even just now, when she had plied her art upon the matchum band. Her present manner was an intenser exclusion, and the air was charged with their silence while she talked with her other companion as if she had nothing but him to consider. He had given her the note amazingly, by his allusion to the pleasantness, that of such an occasion as his successful dinner, which might figure as their bribe for renouncing, so that it was all as if they were speaking selfishly, counting on a repetition of just such extensions of experience. Maggie achieved accordingly an act of unprecedented energy, through herself and to her father's presence as by the absolute consistency with which she held his eyes, saying to herself at the same time that she smiled and talked and inaugurated her system. What does he mean by it? That's the question. What does he mean? But studying again all the signs in him that recent anxiety had made familiar, and counting the stricken minutes on the part of the others, it was in their silence that the others loomed as she felt. She had had no measure she afterwards knew of this duration, but it drew out and out, really to what would have been called in simpler conditions awkwardness, as if she herself were stretching the cord. Ten minutes later, however, and the homeward carriage to which her husband, cutting delay short, had proceeded at the first announcement, ten minutes later she was to stretch it almost to breaking. The prince had permitted her to linger much less before his move to the door than they usually lingered at the gossiping clothes of such evenings, which she, all responsive, took for a sign of his impatience to modify for her the odd effect of his not having, and of Charlotte's not having, instantly acclaimed the issue of the question debated, or more exactly settled before them. He had had time to become aware of this possible impression in her, and his virtually urging her into the carriage was connected with his feeling that he must take action on the new ground. A certain ambiguity in her would absolutely have tormented him, but he had already found something to soothe and correct, as to which she had on her side a shrewd notion of what it would be. She was herself for that matter prepared, and she was of a truth as she took her seat in the brome, amazed at her preparation. It allowed her scarce an interval. She brought it straight out. I was certain that was what father would say if I should leave him alone. I have been leaving him alone, and you see the effect. He hates now to move. He likes too much to be with us. But if you see the effect, she felt herself magnificently keeping it up. Perhaps you don't see the cause. The cause, my dear, is too lovely. Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything. He had been for that sense as if thinking, waiting, deciding. Yet it was still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitely acted. He put his arm round her and drew her close, indulged in the demonstration the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed. Held accordingly, and as she could but too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited. She had said the thing she was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do, she mustn't be irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what that was. But she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived responsibility. And the extraordinary thing was that, of the two intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper. He took his time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion. The cause of your father's deciding not to go. Yes, and if my having wanted to let it act for him quietly, I mean without my insistence. She had in her compressed state another pause, and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough was the sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing by miraculous help, some advantage that absolutely then and there in the carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange and expressibly strange, so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up, she should somehow give up everything forever. And what her husband's grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she should give it up. It was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing magic. He knew how to resort to it. He could be on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover, all of which was precisely a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn't resist. To this, as they went, every throb of her consciousness prompted her. Every throb, that is, but one. The throb of her deeper need to know where she really was. By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it, though she was also staring out of the carriage window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, indistinguishable perhaps, happily in the dusk. She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and as she couldn't cry out, her eyes swam in her silence. With them all the same, through the square opening beside her, through the gray panorama of the London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted, and her lips helped and protected her by being able to be gay. It's not to leave you, my dear. For that he'll give up anything. Just as he would go off anywhere, I think, you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone. Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window. For which Amorigo's answer again took him a moment. Oh, the dear old boy, you would like me to propose him something? Well, if you think you could bear it. And leave, the prince asked, you and Charlotte alone. Why not? Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came clear. Why shouldn't Charlotte be just one of my reasons? Why not liking to leave her? She has always been so good, so perfect to me, but never so wonderfully as just now. We have somehow been more together, thinking for the time, almost only of each other. It has been quite as in old days. And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it as consummate. It's as if we have been missing each other, had got a little apart, though going on so side by side. But the good moments, if one only waits for them, she hastened to add, come round of themselves. Moreover, you've seen for yourself, since you've made it up so to father, feeling for yourself and your beautiful way, every difference, every error that blows, not having to be told or pushed, only being perfect to live with through your habit of kindness and your exquisite instincts. But of course you've seen all the while, that both he and I have deeply felt how you've managed, managed that he hasn't been too much alone, and that I on my side haven't appeared to, what you might call neglect him. This is always, she continued, what I can never bless you enough for, for all the good things you've done for me, you've never done anything better. She went on explaining as for the pleasure of explaining, even though nothing he must recognize as a part of his easy way to her description of his large liberality. You're taking the child down yourself those days, and you're coming each time to bring him away. Nothing in the world, nothing you could have invented would have kept father more under the charm. Besides, you know how you've always suited him and how you've always so beautifully let it seem to him that he suits you. Only it has been these last weeks, as if you wished, just in order to please him, to remind him of it afresh. So there it is, she wound up. It's your doing. You've produced your effect. That of his wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where you're not. He doesn't want to bother or bore you. That, I think you know, he never has done. And if you'll only give me time, I'll come round again to making it my care, as always, that he shan't. But he can't bear you out of his sight. She had kept it up and up, filling it out, crowding it in, and all really without difficulty, for it was every word of it, thanks to a long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim with. She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him, remembering happily how he had gone so far one day, supported by the principino, as to propose the zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him there on the spot, under this pleasant inspiration, both his elder and his younger companion, with the latter of whom he had taken the tone that they were introducing granddaddy, granddaddy nervous and rather funking it, to lions and tigers, more or less at large. Touch by touch she thus dropped into her husband's silence the truth about his good nature and his good manners. And it was this demonstration of his virtue, precisely, that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of her failing as yet to yield to him. It would be a question but of the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere movement of a muscle. But the act grew important between them just through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone that would naturally have swept her into tenderness. She knew more and more, every lapsing minute taught her, how he might by a single rightness make her cease to watch him. That rightness, a million miles removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy and consequence. Come away with me somewhere, you, and then we needn't think, we needn't even talk, of anything, of anyone else. Five words like that would answer her, would break her utterly down, but they were the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of them, she seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips. Only they didn't sound, and as that made her wait again, so it made her more intensely watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn't come. Yes, it wouldn't come if he didn't answer her, if he but said the wrong things instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would come, it hung by a hair that everything might crystallize for their recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility gloated her, however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away from her, she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigor of her attitude, a rigor beyond that of her natural being. They had silences at last that were almost crudities of mutual resistance, silences that persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking to him as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no such manner heaven knew for Maggie. She could make love, if this had been in question better than that, on top of which it came to her presently to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken. Except, of course, that for the question of going off somewhere he'd go readily quite delightedly with you, I verily believe he'd like to have you for a while to himself. What do you mean he thinks of proposing it? The prince after a moment sounded. Oh, no, he doesn't ask, as you must so often have seen, but I believe he'd go like a shot, as you say, if you were to suggest it. It had the air she knew of a kind of condition made, and she had asked herself while she spoke if it wouldn't cause his arm to let her go. The fact that it didn't suggested to her that she had made him of a sudden still more intensely think. Think with such concentration that he could do but one thing at once. And it was precisely as if the concentration had the next moment been proved in him. He took a turn inconsistent with a superficial impression, a jump that made light of their approach to gravity and represented for her the need in him to gain time. That she made out was his drawback, that the warning from her had come to him, and had come to Charlotte after all too suddenly. That they were in face of it rearranging, that they had to rearrange, was all before her again. Yet to do as they would like they must enjoy a snatch, longer or shorter, of recovered independence. Amorigo for the instant was but doing as he didn't like, and it was as if she were watching his effort without disguise. What's your father's idea this year then about fawns? Will he go at wits and tide, and will he then stay on? Maggie went through the form of thought. He will really do, I imagine, as he has in so many ways, so often done before. Do whatever may seem most agreeable to yourself. And there is, of course, always Charlotte to be considered. Only they're going early to fawns, if they do go, she said. Negent in the least, until you're in my going. Ah! Amorigo echoed. It negent in the least, until you're in my going. We can do as we like. What they may do negent trouble us, since they're by good fortune perfectly happy together. Oh! the prince returned. Your father is never so happy as with you near him to enjoy his being so. Well, I may enjoy it, said Maggie, but I'm not the cause of it. You're the cause, her husband declared, of the greater part of everything that's good among us. But she received this tribute in silence, and the next moment he pursued. If Mrs. Verver has a rears of time with you to make up, as you say, she'll scarcely do it, or you scarcely will, by our cutting, your and my cutting, too loose. I see what you mean, Maggie mused. He led her for a little to give her attention to it, after which. Shall I just quite of a sudden, he asked, propose him a journey? Maggie hesitated, but she brought forth the fruit of reflection. It would have the merit that Charlotte then would be with me, with me I mean so much more, also that I shouldn't, by choosing such a time for going away, seem unconscious and ungrateful, seem not to respond, seem in fact rather to wish to shake her off. I should respond on the contrary, very markedly, by being here alone with her for a month. And would you like to be here alone with her for a month? I could do with it beautifully, or we might even, she said quite gaily, go together down to fawns. You could be so very content without me, the Prince presently inquired. Yes, my own dear, if you could be content for a while with father, that would keep me up. I might for the time, she went on, go to stay there with Charlotte, or better still she might come to Portland Place. Oh, ho! said the Prince with cheerful vagueness. I should feel you see, she continued, that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness. Amarigo thought, the two of us, Charlotte and I, Maggie again hesitated. You and I, darling, I see, I see, he promptly took it in. And what reason shall I give, give, I mean, your father? For asking him to go off, why the very simplest, if you conscientiously can, the desire, said Maggie, to be agreeable to him, just that only. Something in this reply made her husband again reflect. Conscientiously? Why shouldn't I conscientiously? It wouldn't, by your own contention, he developed, represent any surprise for him. I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him. Ah, there it was again for Maggie, the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm. Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained at the very least as little as herself. Would their stillness together so perfect? What had suggested so around them? The attitude of sparing them. Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it in the others, as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to Charlotte. Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amorigo's last words. You're the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him. She heard herself, heard her tone after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband's eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard, though his answer when it came was straight enough. Why, isn't that just what we have been talking about, that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it, the prince went on, by proposing to me an excursion. And you would go with him? Maggie immediately asked. He hung fire but an instant. Bordillo. She also had her paws, but she broke it, since Gaiety was in the air, with an intense smile. You can say that safely, because the proposal's one that of his own motion he won't make. She couldn't have narrated afterwards, and in fact was at a loss to tell herself, by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to between them. She felt it in the tone with which he repeated after her. Safely. Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all in such a case too long. He's a person to think you might easily feel yourself to be. So it won't, Maggie said. Come from father. He's too modest. Their eyes continued to meet on it from corner to corner of the brome. Oh, you're modesty, between you. But he still smiled for it. So that unless I insist, we shall simply go on as we are. Well we're going on beautifully, he answered, though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction that of attempted capture and achieved escape had not taken place. As Maggie said nothing, nonetheless, to gain say his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea. I wonder if it would do. I mean for me to break in. Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way, he said, we can make Charlotte ask him. And then as Maggie herself now wondered, echoing it again, we can suggest to her to suggest to him that he shall let me take him off. Oh, said Maggie. Then if he asks her why, so suddenly break out, she'll be able to tell him the reason. They were stopping, and the footman who had alighted, had rung at the house door, that you think it would be so charming, that I think it would be so charming that we've persuaded her will be convincing. I see, Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out. I see, she said again, though she felt a little disconcerted. What she really saw, all of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her need that her father shouldn't think her concerned in any degree for anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat. Her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high that preceded their open entrance on either side of which one of their servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose before her, and there was something in Amorigo's very face, while his eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight that was like a conscious reminder of it. He had answered her just before, distinctly, and that appeared to leave her nothing to say. It was almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was almost as if, in the strangest way in the world, he were paying her back by the production of a small paying that of a new uneasiness for the way she had slipped from him during their drive. CHAPTER XXVIII. He's new uneasiness might have had time to drop in as much as she not only was conscious during several days that followed of no fresh indication for it to feed on, but was even struck in quite another way with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it into her head to work for. She recognized, by the end of a week, that if she had been in a manner caught up, her father had been not less so, with the effect of her husbands and his wives closing in together around them, and of their all having suddenly begun as a party of four, to lead a life gregarious and from that reason almost hilarious, so far as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an accident and a mere coincidence, so at least she said to herself at first, but a dozen chances that further the whole appearance had risen to the surface. Oh, certainly pleasant, as pleasant as Amorigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings, quite for shared adventures, for it's always turning out amusingly that they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact that the father and daughter for so long had expressed so few positive desires, yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amorigo and Charlotte had at last got a little tired of each other's company, they should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level of their companions, as in wishing to pull the ladder into the train in which they so constantly moved. We're in the train, Maggie mutely reflected after the dinner and eaten square with Lady Casseldeen. We've suddenly waked up in it and found ourselves rushing along very much as if we'd been put in during sleep, shoved like a pair of labeled boxes into the van. And since I wanted to go, I'm certainly going. She might have added, I'm moving without trouble, they're doing it all for us. It's wonderful how they understand and how perfectly it succeeds. For that was the thing she had most immediately to acknowledge. It seemed as easy for them to make a quartet as it had formerly so long appeared for them to make a pair of couples, this ladder being thus a discovery too absurdly belated. The only point at which, day after day, the success appeared at all qualified was represented, as might have been said, by her irresistible impulse to give her father a clutch when the train indulged in one of its occasional urges. Then, there was no denying it, his eyes and her own met, so that they were themselves doing active violence, as against the others, to that very spirit of union, or at least to that very achievement of change which she had taken the field to invoke. The maximum of change was reached, no doubt, the day the match and party dined in Portland Place, the day, really perhaps, of Maggie's maximum of social glory, and the sense of its showing for her own occasion, her very own, with everyone else extravagantly rallying and falling in, absolutely conspiring to make her its heroine. It was as if her father himself, always with more initiative as a guest than as a host, had dabbled too in the conspiracy, and the impression was not diminished by the presence of the assingums, likewise very much caught up now, after something of a lull, by the side-wind of all the rest of the motion, and giving our young woman, so far at least as Fanny was concerned, the sense of some special intention of encouragement and applause. Fanny, who had not been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show with this one, a new orange-colored velvet with multiplied turquoise's, and with a confidence furthermore, as different as possible, her hostess inferred, from her two-marked betrayal, of a belittled state at Machum. Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this balance, which seemed for the hour, part of a general rectification. She liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland Place, a spot exempt on all sorts of grounds, from jealous jurisdictions, her friend could feel as good as anyone, and could in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the luster of the little princess. Mrs. Assingham produced on her the impression of giving her constantly her cue for this, and it was in truth, partly by her help, intelligently, quite gratefully accepted, that the little princess in Maggie was drawn out and emphasized. She couldn't definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself for the first time in her career, living up to the public and popular notion of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round. Rather wondering, inwardly too, while she did so, at that strange mixture in things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by such supposedly great ones of the earth as the castle-deans and their kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been there at all events, like one of the assistants in the ring at the circus. To keep up the pace of the sleek, revolving animal on whose back the lady in short, spangled skirts should brilliantly caper in posture. That was all, doubtless Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be the little princess on anything like the scale open to her. But now that the collective hand had been held out to her with such alacrity, so that she might skip up into the light, even as seemed to her modest mind, with such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving under arched eyebrows where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later hours, after her dinner, a fresh contingent, the whole list of her apparent London acquaintance, which was again a thing in the manner of little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her appointed, her expected, her imposed character. And though there were latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she was having tonight an inordinate quantity of practice. None of it so successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Casseldeen, who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity. The perception of this high result caused Mrs. Asingham fairly to flush with responsive joy. She glittered at her young friend from moment to moment, quite feverishly. It was positively as if her young friend had, in some marvelous, sudden, super-subtle way, become a source of succor to herself, became beautifully divinely retributive. The intensity of the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by a process and through a connection not again to be traced, she so practiced at the same time on Amarigo and Charlotte, with only the drawback, her constant check and second thought that she concomitantly practiced perhaps still more on her father. This last was a danger indeed that, for much of the ensuing time, had its hours of strange beguilement, those at which her sense for precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with him more intimate than any other. It couldn't but pass between them that something singular was happening. So much as this she again and again said to herself, whereby the comfort of it was there, after all, to be noted, just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of the couple they formed together as groping with sealed lips but with mutual looks that had never been so tender for some freedom, some fiction, some figured bravery under which they might safely talk of it. The moment was to come, and it finally came with an effect as penetrating as a sound that follows the pressure of an electric button, when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation she had created. The merely specious description of their case would have been that, after being for a long time, as a family, delightfully, uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover. A felicity for which, blessedly, her father's appetite and her own in particular had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at, very much as if he had said to her, in default of her breaking silence first, Everything is remarkably pleasant, isn't it? But where, for it, after all, are we, up in a balloon and whirling through space, or down in the depths of the earth in the glimmering passage of a gold mine? The equilibrium, the precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement. There had been a fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted and triumphed, all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden, face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a test. If they balanced, they balanced. She had to take that. It deprived her of every pretext for arriving, while however covert a process at what he thought. But she had her hours, thus, of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigor of their law, and when it came over her that, all the while, the wish on his side, to spare her, might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing inward really to talk about, wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless, however, was only more utterly hushed when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him, Yes, this is, by every appearance, the best time we've had yet. But don't you see all the same, how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being their success, above all, their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession in short, of our life. For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal more, without saying, they'll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing, prescribe a line for us that will make them separate. How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly murmuring that, without putting into his mouth the very words that would have made her quail, separate, my dear, do you want them to separate? Then you want us to, you and me, for how can the one separation take place without the other? That was the question that, in spirit, she had heard him ask, with its dread train, moreover, of involved and connected inquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was, of course, perfectly thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons. Well, the sharpest, the very sharpest, would be that they could no longer afford, as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, run them in such compact formation, and say they accepted this account of their situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a division, would no somber ghosts of the smothered past on either side, show across the widening straight, pale unappeased faces, or rays in the very passage, deprecating denouncing hands. Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say to herself that there might be but a deeper treachery in recoveries and reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the castledeens in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come. The alarm, after all, was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour inevitably when she knew with a chill what she had feared and why. It had taken this hour a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognize it, for it showed her sharply what Amorigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity of Charlotte. The more she thought at present of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious at the moment of many things, conscious even not a little of desiring, and thereby of needing to see what she would do in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, menaced, horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, and a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own business. Why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected for her temporarily from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way. That precisely was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair or rather indeed with an excessive imitation of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince's equivocal light, and that made for patience. Yet she was nonetheless to have to admit, after delay, that the bread he had cast on the waters had come home, and that she should thus be justified of her old apprehension. The consequence of this, in turn, was a renewed pang in presence of his remembered ingenuity, to be ingenious with her what didn't, what might not that mean, when she had so absolutely never, at any point of contact with him, put him, by as much as the value of a penny, to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having in any way whatever to reckon with her. The ingenuity had been in his simply speaking of their use of Charlotte, as if it were common to them in an equal degree, and his triumph on the occasion had been just in the simplicity. She couldn't, and he knew it, say what was true. Oh, you use her, and I use her, if you will, yes, but we use her ever so differently and separately, not at all in the same way or degree. There's nobody we really use together but ourselves, don't you see? By which I mean that where our interests are the same, I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other of us. So why is a matter of course, in such a case as this, dragon Charlotte? She couldn't so challenge him, because it would have been, when there she was paralyzed, the note. It would have translated itself on the spot for his ear and to jealousy, and from reverberation to repercussion would have reached her father's exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy. There had been in fact of old, the time so strangely seemed already far away, an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability round about them of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost always there when Amorigo brought her to Eden Square, where Amorigo was constantly bringing her, and Amorigo was almost always there when Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was constantly bringing him. The fractions of occasions, the chance minutes that put them face to face had, as yet of late, contrived account but little between them, either for the sense of opportunity or for that of exposure, in as much as the lifelong rhythm of their intercourse made against all cursory handling of deep things. They had never availed themselves of any given quarter of an hour to gossip about fundamentals. They moved slowly through large still spaces. They could be silent together at any time, beautifully, with much more comfort than hurriedly expressive. It appeared indeed to have become true that their common appeal measured itself for vividness just by this economy of sound. They might have been talking at each other when they talked with their companions, but these latter assuredly were not in any director way to gain light on the current phase of their relation. Such were some of the reasons for which Maggie suspected fundamentals, as I have called them, to be rising by a new movement to the surface, suspected at one morning late in May when her father presented himself in Portland Place alone. He had his pretext, of that she was fully aware. The principino two days before had shown signs, happily not persistent, of a feverish cold, and had notoriously been obliged to spend the interval at home. This was ground, ample ground, for punctual inquiry. But what it wasn't ground for, she quickly found herself reflecting, was his having managed, in the interest of his visit, to dispense so unwantedly, as their life had recently come to be arranged, with his wife's attendance. It had so happened that she herself was, for the hour, exempt from her husbands, and it will at once be seen that the hour had equality all its own, when I note that, remembering how the prince had looked in to say he was going out, the princess whimsically wondered if their respective sposey might in frankly be meeting, whimsically hoped indeed they were temporarily so disposed of. Strange was her need at moments, to think of them as not attaching an excessive importance to their repudiation of the general practice that had rested only a few weeks before on such a consecrated rightness. Repudiation surely were not in the air. They had none of them come to that. For wasn't she at this minute testifying directly against them by her own behavior? When she should confess to fear of being alone with her father, to fear of what he might then, with such a slow, painful motion as she had a horror of, say to her, then would be time enough for Amorigo and Charlotte to confess to not liking to appear to foregather. She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a particular question from him and of being able to check, yes, even to disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent manner of receiving it, any restless imagination he might have about its importance. The day bright and soft had the breath of summer. It made them talk to begin with the fawns of the way fawns invited, Maggie aware of the while that in thus regarding with him the sweetness of its invitation to one couple just as much as to another, her humbugging smile grew very nearly convulsive. That was it, and there was relief truly of a sort in taking it in. She was humbugging him already by absolute necessity as she had never, never done in her life, doing it up to the full height of what she had allowed for. The necessity and the great dimly shining room where declining for his reasons to sit down he moved about in Amorigo's very footsteps. The necessity affected her as pressing upon her with the very force of the charm itself, of the old pleasantness between them so candidly playing up there again, of the positive flatness of their tenderness, a surface all for familiar use, quite as if generalized from the long succession of tapestry sofas, sweetly faded on which his theory of contentment had sat through unmeasured pauses beside her own. She knew from this instant, new in advance and as well as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove that there was nothing to matter with her. She saw of a sudden everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from it with any number of remote matters, struck herself for instance as acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out and the exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season for a turn in the Regent's Park. This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already preceded there under high attendance, all of which considerations were defensive for Maggie, all of which became to her mind part of the business of cultivating continuity. Upstairs while she left him to put on something to go out again, the thought of his waiting below for her, in possession of the empty house, brought with it, sharply if briefly, one of her abrupt arrests of consistency, the brush of a vain imagination almost paralyzing her, often for the minute before her glass. The vivid look, in other words, of the particular difference his marriage had made. The particular difference seemed at such instance the loss, more than anything else, of their old freedom, there never having had to think, where they were together concerned, of any one, of anything but each other. It hadn't been her marriage that did it. That had never, for three seconds, suggested to either of them that they must act diplomatically, must reckon with another presence. No, not even with her husband's. She groaned to herself while the vain imagination lasted. Why did he marry? Ah, why did he? And then it came up to her, more than ever, that nothing could have been more beautiful than the way in which, till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amarigo hadn't interfered. What she had gone on owing him for this, mounted up again to her eyes, like a column of figures, or call it even if one would, a house of cards. It was her father's wonderful act that had tipped the house down and made the sum wrong, with all of which, immediately after her question, her, why did he, why did he, rushed back inevitably, the confounding, the overwhelming wave of the knowledge of his reason. He did it for me, he did it for me, she moaned. He did it exactly that our freedom, meaning beloved man, simply and solely mine, should be greater instead of less. He did it divinely to liberate me so far as possible from caring what became of him. She found time upstairs, even in her haste, as she had repeatedly found time before, to let the wonderments involved in these recognitions flash at her with their customary effect of making her blank. The question in a special of whether she might find her solution in acting herself, in the spirit of what he had done, enforcing her care, really to grow as much less as he had tried to make it. Thus she felt the whole weight of their case drop afresh upon her shoulders, was confronted unmistakably with the prime source of her haunted state. It all came from her not having been able not to mind, not to mind what became of him, not having been able without anxiety to let him go his way and take his risk and lead his life. She had made anxiety her stupid little idol, and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat. She had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her. She tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them and consequence of which he should cut loose. Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility, that consciousness too had taken its turn by the time she was ready. All the vibration, all the emotion of this present passage being precisely, and the very sweetness of their laps back into the conditions of the simpler time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the moment, and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far away. She had been quick in her preparation, in spite of the flow of the tide that sometimes took away her breath, but a pause once more was still left for her to make, a pause at the top of the stairs before she came down to him, in the span of which she asked herself if it weren't thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that she should simply sacrifice him. She didn't go into the detail of what sacrificing him would mean. She didn't need to. So distinct was it, in one of her restless lights, that there he was awaiting her, that she should find him walking up and down the drawing-room in the warm, fragrant air to which the open windows in the abundant flowers contributed, slowly and vaguely moving there and looking very slight and young, and superficially manageable, almost as much like her child, putting it a little freely as like her parent, with the appearance about him, above all, of having perhaps arrived just on purpose to say it to her, himself in so many words. Sacrifice me, my own love. Do sacrifice me. Do sacrifice me. Should she want to, should she insist on it, she might verily hear him bleeding at her, all conscious and all accommodating, like some precious, spotless, exceptionally intelligent lamb. The positive effect of the intensity of this figure, however, was to make her shake it away in her resumed descent, and after she had rejoined him, after she had picked him up, she was to know the full pang of the thought that her impossibility was made, absolutely, by his consciousness, by the lucidity of his intention. This she felt while she smiled there for him again, all hypocritically, while she drew on fair, fresh gloves, while she interrupted the process first to give his neck-tie a slightly smarter twist, and then to make up to him for her hidden madness by rubbing her nose into his cheek, according to the tradition of their frankest levity. In the instant she should be able to convict him of intending, every issue would be closed and her hypocrisy would have to redouble. The only way to sacrifice him would be to do so without his dreaming what it might be for. She kissed him, she arranged his cravat, she dropped remarks, she guided him out, she held his arm not to be led, but to lead him, and taking it to her by much the same intimate pressure she had always used, when a little girl, to mark the inseparability of her doll, she did all these things so that he should sufficiently fail to dream of what they might be for. End of Chapter 28