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By Root 17346 0

– suspected it 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 enquiry; 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 unwontedly – 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 husband’s, and it will at once be seen that the hour had a quality 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 sposi mightn’t 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. Repudiations 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 behaviour? When she should confess to fear of being alone with her father, to fear of what he might then – ah with such a slow painful motion as she had a horror of! – say to her, then would be time enough for Amerigo 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, of Fawns, of the way Fawns invited – Maggie aware 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 truly relief 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, in the great dimly-shining room where, declining for his reasons to sit down, he moved about in Amerigo’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 generalised from the long succession of tapestried sofas, sweetly faded, on which his theory of contentment had sat, through unmeasured pauses, beside her own. She knew from this instant, knew 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 there was nothing the matter with her. She of a sudden saw everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connexions from it with any number of remote matters, struck herself for instance as acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in 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 proceeded 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 in, 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 paralysing her often for the minute before her glass