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By Root 17331 0

‘making up’ effusively, as women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply on her father’s part, on Amerigo’s and on Fanny Assingham’s, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference. There had been something in the incident, there had been but too much, for each observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without seeming essentially to say: ‘See, see, the dear things – their quarrel’s blissfully over!’ ‘Our quarrel? What quarrel?’ the dear things themselves would necessarily in that case have demanded; and the wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of exercise. No one had been equal to the flight of producing off-hand a fictive reason for any estrangement – to take, that is, the place of the true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air; and every one accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was pretending immediately after to have remarked nothing that any one else hadn’t.

Maggie’s own measure had remained all the same full of the reflexion caught from the total inference; which had acted virtually by enabling every one present – and oh Charlotte not least! – to draw a long breath. The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it re-enforced – re-enforced even immensely – the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter. Supremely however, while this glass was held up to her, had Maggie’s sense turned to the quality of the success constituted on the spot for Charlotte. Most of all, if she was guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in a flash, seen daylight for herself – most of all had she tasted, by communication, of the high profit involved for her companion. She felt in all her pulses Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement. It was the added touch, and now nothing was wanting – which, to do her stepmother justice, Mrs Verver had appeared but to desire from that evening to show with the last vividness that she recognised. Maggie lived over again the minutes in question – had found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had for instance animated the four with just the right restlessness too, had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their game of bridge – however abysmal a face it had worn for her – give way precisely to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate Charlotte’s impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.

If Mrs Verver meanwhile then had struck her as determined in a certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail of appreciating the truth that she hadn’t after all been put at ease with absolute permanence. Maggie had seen her unmistakeably desire to rise to the occasion and be magnificent – seen her decide that the right way for this would be to prove that the reassurance she had extorted there, under the high cool lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of crystal and silver, hadn’t only poured oil on the troubled waters of their question, but had fairly drenched their whole intercourse with that lubricant. She had exceeded the limit of discretion in this insistence on her capacity to repay in proportion a service she acknowledged as handsome. ‘Why handsome?’ Maggie would have been free to ask; since if she had been veracious the service assuredly wouldn’t have been huge. It would in that case have come up vividly, and for each of them alike, that the truth on the Princess