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By Root 17248 0

‘world’, by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be added, did on occasion wake up to opportunity and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations – one of which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect of disturbing a little our young man’s measure of his margin. Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr Verver, who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte’s own judgement was always that they were ideally free – the proof of which would always be, she maintained, that every one they feared they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive, wreathed in smiles, on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in smiles, all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck Amerigo as being; they were frankly touching occasions to him, marked, in the great London bousculade,1 with a small still grace of their own, an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came, everybody rushed; but all succumbed to the soft influence, and the brutality of mere multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put off, at the foot of the fine staircase, with the overcoats and shawls. The entertainment offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not insistently incurred, and had thus possibly all the more the note of this almost Arcadian2 optimism: a large bright dull murmurous mild-eyed middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince knew, Maggie’s anxiety had conferred with Charlotte’s ingenuity and both had supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr Verver’s solvency.

The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the foot of the social ladder; and with the Colonel’s wife, in spite of her humility of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because in the first place she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and the standard of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the second, the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially, well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It wasn’t indistinguishable to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself – and this, he knew, in spite of any desire she entertained – to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew as well the other things of which her appearance was at any time – and in Eaton Square especially – made up: her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, during the first flushed days after their engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally – for it was analogy somehow more than identity – to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia3 in miniature. A light however broke for him in season, and when once it had done so it made him more than ever aware of Mrs Verver