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By Root 17430 0

‘hurting’, but might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment, whether that was to be after all the last word of their conscientious development. Certain it was at all events that in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs Rance the attendance at tea just in the right place on the west terrace might perfectly comprise the four or five persons – among them the very pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted announced and now brought – from the couple of other houses near enough, one of these the minor residence of their proprietor, established thriftily, while he hired out his ancestral home, within sight and sense of his profit. It wasn’t less certain either that for once in a way the group in question must all take the case as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr Verver and his daughter, to see their reputation for a decent friendliness, through any momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo’s possible funny Italian anxiety; Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware, conveniently amenable to his friend’s explanations, beguilements, reassurances, and perhaps in fact rather more than less dependent on them as his new life – since that was his own name for it – opened out. It was no secret to Maggie – it was indeed positively a public joke for her – that she couldn’t explain as Mrs Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition of this luxury had to be met. He didn’t seem to want them as yet for use – rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed beautiful general, his slightly indolent lack of more dissipated or even just of more sophisticated tastes.

However that might be the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily recognised – and not least by herself – as filling in the intimate little circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she had taken, with her kind melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of leisure. It naturally led, her position in the household as she called it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form of protest. She was there to keep him quiet – it was Amerigo’s own description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit. Fanny herself limited indeed, she minimised, her office; you didn’t need a jailor, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon. This wasn’t an animal to be controlled – it was an animal to be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was educative – which Maggie was so aware that she herself inevitably wasn’t; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge of was his mere intelligence. This left, goodness knew, plenty of different calls for Maggie to meet – in a case in which so much pink ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature. What it all amounted to at any rate was that Mrs Assingham would be keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with them there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of people, strange English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so little as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she hadn