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By Root 17333 0

’s face, immediately presented to her, affected her as searching her own to see the reminder tell. She had not less punctually kissed her stepmother, and then had been over her father, from behind, and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore 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 sentry, 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, un-soldierly gossip. This was not, none the less, what happened: inasmuch 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 practising. If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on Amerigo, 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 Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her curiosity. Frankly and gaily 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 aren’t 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 and 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 a 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.