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By Root 17420 0

‘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 recognised, 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, 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 reflexion, a reflexion 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 wasn’t from her 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 behaviour, 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 recognise in her on their return from Matcham. 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 unanswered 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 dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of Amerigo that evening in arrest at the door of her salottino while her eyes, from her placed chair, took him in