’t presently feign to recollect how rejoining the child had been their original purpose. Maggie’s uneffaced note was that it had, at the end of five minutes more, driven them to that endeavour as to a refuge, and caused them afterwards to rejoice, as well, that the boy’s irrepressibly importunate company, in due course secured and enjoyed, with the extension imparted by his governess, a person expectant of consideration, constituted a cover for any awkwardness. For that was what it had all come to, that the dear man had spoken to her to try her – quite as he had been spoken to himself by Charlotte with the same fine idea. The Princess took it in on the spot, firmly grasping it; she heard them together, her father and his wife, dealing with the queer case. ‘The Prince tells me that Maggie has a plan for your taking some foreign journey with him, and as he likes to do everything she wants he has suggested my speaking to you for it as the thing most likely to make you consent. So I do speak – see? – being always so eager myself, as you know, to meet Maggie’s wishes. I speak, but without quite understanding this time what she has in her head. Why should she of a sudden at this particular moment desire to ship you off together and remain here alone with me? The compliment’s all to me, I admit, and you must decide quite as you like. The Prince is quite ready, evidently, to do his part – but you’ll have it out with him. That is you’ll have it out with her.’ Something of that kind was what, in her mind’s ear, Maggie heard – and this, after his waiting for her to appeal to him directly, was her father’s invitation to her to have it out. Well, as she could say to herself all the rest of the day, that was what they did while they continued to sit there in their penny chairs, that was what they had done as much as they would now ever, ever, have out anything. The measure of this at least had been given, that each would fight to the last for the protection, for the perversion, of any real anxiety. She had confessed instantly, with her humbugging grin, not flinching by a hair, meeting his eyes as mildly as he met hers, she had confessed to her fancy that they might both, he and his son-in-law, have welcomed such an escapade, since they had both been so long so furiously domestic. She had almost cocked her hat under the inspiration of this opportunity to hint how a couple of spirited young men, reacting from confinement and sallying forth arm-in-arm, might encounter the agreeable in forms that would strike them for the time at least as novel. She had felt for fifty seconds, with her eyes all so sweetly and falsely in her companion’s, horribly vulgar; yet without minding it either – such luck should she have if to be nothing worse than horribly vulgar would see her through. ‘And I thought Amerigo might like it better,’ she had said, ‘than wandering off alone.’
‘Do you mean that he won’t go unless I take him?’
She had considered here, and never in her life had she considered so promptly and so intently. If she really put it that way her husband, challenged, might belie the statement; so that what would that do but make her father wonder, make him perhaps ask straight out, why she was exerting pressure? She couldn’t of course afford to be suspected for an instant of exerting pressure; which was why she was obliged only to make answer: ‘Wouldn’t that be just what you must have out with him?’
‘Decidedly – if he makes me the proposal. But he hasn’t made it yet.’
Oh once more how she was to feel she had smirked! ‘Perhaps he’s too shy!’
‘Because you’re so sure he so really wants my company?’
‘I think he has thought you might like it.’
‘Well, I should –!’ But with this he looked away from her, and she held her breath to hear him either ask if she wished him to address the question to Amerigo straight, or enquire if she should be greatly disappointed by his letting it drop. What had ‘settled’ her, as she was privately to call it, was that he had done neither of these things, and had thereby markedly stood off from the risk involved in trying to draw out her reason. To attenuate on the other hand this appearance, and quite as if to fill out the too large receptacle made so musingly by his abstention, he had himself presently given her a reason