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By Root 17224 0

’s so vivid felicity; it suggested that she took for granted at the most certain vague recent enhancements of that state. If the Princess now, more than before, was going and going, she was prompt to publish that she beheld her go, that she had always known she would, sooner or later, and that any appeal for participation must more or less contain and invite the note of triumph. There was a blankness in her blandness, assuredly, and very nearly an extravagance in her generalising gaiety; a precipitation of cheer particularly marked whenever they met again after short separations: meetings during the first flush of which Maggie sometimes felt reminded of other looks in other faces; of two strangely unobliterated impressions above all, the physiognomic light that had played out in her husband at the shock – she had come at last to talk to herself of the ‘shock’ – of his first vision of her on his return from Matcham and Gloucester, and the wonder of Charlotte’s beautiful bold wavering glance when, the next morning in Eaton Square, this old friend had turned from the window to begin to deal with her.

If she had dared to think of it so crudely she would have said that Fanny was afraid of her, afraid of something she might say or do, even as for their few brief seconds Amerigo and Charlotte had been – which made exactly an expressive element common to the three. The difference however was that this look had in the dear woman its oddity of a constant renewal, whereas it had never for the least little instant again peeped out of the others. Other looks, other lights, radiant and steady, with the others, had taken its place, reaching a climax so short a time ago, that morning of the appearance of the pair on the balcony of her house to overlook what she had been doing with her father; when their general interested brightness and beauty, attuned to the outbreak of summer, had seemed to shed down warmth and welcome and the promise of protection. They were conjoined not to do anything to startle her – and now at last so completely that, with experience and practice, they had almost ceased to fear their liability. Mrs Assingham on the other hand, deprecating such an accident not less, had yet less assurance through having less control. The high pitch of her cheer accordingly, the tentative adventurous expressions, of the would-be smiling order, that preceded her approach even like a squad of skirmishers, or whatever they were called, moving ahead of the baggage-train – these things had at the end of a fortnight brought a dozen times to our young woman’s lips a challenge that had the cunning to await its right occasion, but of the relief of which, as a demonstration, she meanwhile felt no little need. ‘You’ve such a dread of my possibly complaining to you that you keep pealing all the bells to drown my voice; but don’t cry out, my dear, till you’re hurt – and above all ask yourself how I can be so wicked as to complain. What in the name of all that’s fantastic can you dream that I have to complain of?’ Such enquiries the Princess temporarily succeeded in repressing, and she did so, in a measure, by the aid of her wondering if this ambiguity with which her friend affected her wouldn’t be at present a good deal like the ambiguity with which she herself must frequently affect her father. She wondered how she should enjoy on his part such a take-up as she but just succeeded from day to day in sparing Mrs Assingham, and that made for her trying to be as easy with this associate as Mr Verver, blessed man, all indulgent but all inscrutable, was with his daughter. She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte’s view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.

Fanny stood off from that proposition as visibly to the Princess, and as consciously to herself, as she might have backed away from the edge of a chasm into which she feared to slip; a truth that contributed again to keep before our young woman her own constant danger of advertising subtle processes. That Charlotte should have begun to be restrictive about the Assinghams