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would consist of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy inconsequence. 'Come away with me, somewhere, you - and then we needn't think, we needn't even talk, of anything, of anyone else:' five words like that would answer her, would break her utterly down. But they were the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of him, she seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn't sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn't come. Yes, it wouldn't come if he didn't answer her, if he but said the wrong things instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would come - it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility glowed at her, however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being. They had silences, at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance - silences that persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no such manner, heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in question, better than that! On top of which it came to her presently to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken: 'Except of course that, for the question of going off somewhere, he'd go readily, quite delightedly, with you. I verily believe he'd like to have you for a while to himself.'

'Do you mean he thinks of proposing it?' the Prince after a moment sounded.

'Oh no - he doesn't ask, as you must so often have seen. But I believe he'd go "like a shot," as you say, if you were to suggest it.'

It had the air, she knew, of a kind of condition made, and she had asked herself while she spoke if it wouldn't cause his arm to let her go. The fact that it didn't suggested to her that she had made him, of a sudden, still more intensely think, think with such concentration that he could do but one thing at once. And it was precisely as if the concentration had the next moment been proved in him. He took a turn inconsistent with the superficial impression - a jump that made light of their approach to gravity andrepresented for her the need in him to gain time. That, she made out,was his drawback - that the warning from her had come to him, and hadcome to Charlotte, after

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all, too suddenly. That they were in face of it rearranging, that they had to rearrange, was all before her again; yet to do as they would like they must enjoy a snatch, longer or shorter, of recovered independ­ence. Amerigo, for the instant, was but doing as he didn't like, and it was as if she were watching his effort without disguise. 'What's your father's idea, this year, then, about Fawns? Will he go at Whitsuntide, and will he then stay on?'

Maggie went through the form of thought. 'He will really do, I imagine, as he has, in so many ways, so often done before; do whatever may seem most agreeable to yourself. And there's of course always Charlotte to be considered. Only their going early to Fawns, if they do go,' she said, 'needn't in the least entail your and my going.'

'Ah,' Amerigo echoed, 'it needn't in the least entail your and my going?'

'We can do as we like. What they may do needn't trouble us, since they're by good fortune perfectly happy together.'

'Oh,' die Prince returned, 'your father's never so happy as with you near him to enjoy his being so.'

'Well, I may enjoy it,' said Maggie, 'but I'm not the cause of it.'

'You're the cause,' her husband declared, 'of the greater part of everything that's good among us.' But she received this tribute in silence, and the next moment he pursued: 'If Mrs Verver has arrears of time widi you to make up, as you say, she'll scarcely do it - or^ow scarcely will - by our cutting, your and my cutting, too loose.'

'I see what you mean,' Maggie mused.

He let her for a little give her attention to it; after which, 'Shall I just quite, of a sudden,' he asked, 'propose him a journey?'

Maggie hesitated, but she brought forth the fruit of reflection. 'It would have the merit that Charlotte then would be with me - with me, I mean, so much more. Also that I shouldn't, by choosing such a time for going away, seem unconscious and ungrateful, seem not to respond, seem in fact rather to wish to shake her off. I should respond, on the contrary, very markedly - by being here alone with her for a month.'

'And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?'

'I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even,' she said quite gaily, 'go together down to Fawns.'

'You could be so very content without me?' the Prince presently inquired.

'Yes, my own dear - if you could be content for a while with father. That would keep me up. I might, for the time,' she went on, 'go to

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stay there with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place.'

'Oho!' said the Prince with cheerful vagueness.

'I should feel, you see,' she continued, 'that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness.'

Amerigo thought. 'The two of us? Charlotte and I?'

Maggie again hesitated. 'You and I, darling.'

'I see, I see' - he promptly took it in. 'And what reason shall I give -give, I mean, your father?'

'For asking him to go off? Why, the very simplest - if you conscientiously can. The desire,' said Maggie, 'to be agreeable to him. Just that only.'

Something in this reply made her husband again reflect.' "Consci­entiously"? Why shouldn't I conscientiously? It wouldn't, by your own contention,' he developed, 'represent any surprise for him. I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.'

Ah, there it was again, for Maggie - the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least, as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it, in the others, as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to Charlotte. Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amerigo's last words. 'You're the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.'

She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband's eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard - though his answer, when it came, was straight enough. 'Why, isn't that just what we have been talking about - that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it,' the Prince went on, 'by proposing to me an excursion.'

'And you would go with him?' Maggieimmediately asked.

He hung fire but an instant. ''Per Dio!'⁹²

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almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was almost as if- in the strangest way in the world - he were paying her back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for the way she had slipped from him during their drive.

Chapter 28

Maggie's new uneasiness might have had time to drop, inasmuch as she not only was conscious, during several days that followed, of no fresh indication for it to feed on, but was even struck, in quite another way, with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it into her head to work for. She recognised by the end of a week that if she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so - with tbe effect of her husband's and his wife's closing in, together, round them, and of their all having suddenly begun, as a party of four, to lead a life gregarious, and from that reason almost hilarious, so far as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an accident and a mere coincidence - so at least she said to herself at first; but a dozen chances that furthered the whole appearance had risen to the surface, pleasant pretexts, oh certainly pleasant, as pleasant as Amerigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings, quite for shared adventures, for its always turning out, amusingly, that they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact that the father and daughter, for so long, had expressed so few positive desires; yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amerigo and Charlotte had at last got a little tired of each other's company they should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level of their companions as in wishing to pull die latter into die train in which they so constantly moved. 'We're in the train,' Maggie mutely reflected after the dinner in Eaton Square with Lady Casde-dean; 'we've suddenly waked up in it and found ourselves rushing along, very much as if we had been put in during sleep - shoved, like a pair of labelled boxes, into the van. And since I wanted to "go" I'm certainly going,' she might have added; 'I'm moving widiout trouble - diey're doing it all for us: it's wonderful how they understand and how perfectly it succeeds.' For that was the thing she had most immediately to acknowledge: it seemed as easy for them to make a quartette as it had formerly so long

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appeared for them to make a pair of couples - this latter being thus a discovery too absurdly belated. The only point at which, day after day, the success appeared at all qualified was represented, as might have been said, by her irresistible impulse to give her father a clutch when the train indulged in one of its occasional lurches. Then - there was no denying it - his eyes and her own met; so that they were themselves doing active violence, as against the others, to that very spirit of union, or at least to that very achievement of change, which she had taken the field to invoke.

The maximum of change was reached, no doubt, the day the Matcham party dined in Portland Place; the day, really perhaps, of Maggie's maximum of social glory, in the sense of its showing for her own occasion, her very own, with everyone else extravagantly rallying and falling in, absolutely conspiring to make her its heroine. It was as if her father himself, always with more initiative as a guest than as a host, had dabbled too in the conspiracy; and the impression was not diminished by the presence of the Assinghams, likewise very much caught-up, now, after something of a lull, by the side-wind of all the rest of the motion, and giving our young woman, so far at least as Fanny was concerned, the sense of some special intention of encouragement and applause. Fanny, who had not been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show at this one, in new orange-coloured velvet with multiplied turquoises, and with a confidence, further­more, as different as possible, her hostess inferred, from her too-marked betrayal of a belittled state at Matcham. Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this balance - which seemed, for the hour, part of a general rectification; she liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland Place, a spot exempt, on all sorts of grounds, from jealous jurisdictions, her friend could feel as 'good' as anyone, and could in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the lustre of the little Princess. Mrs Assingham produced on her the impression of giving her constantly her cue for this; and it was in truth partly by her help, intelligently, quite gratefully accepted, that the little Princess, in Maggie, was drawn out and emphasised. She couldn't definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself, for the first time in her career, living up to the public and popular notion of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round; rather wondering, inwardly, too, while she did so, at that strange mixture in things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by such supposedly great ones of

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die earth as die Casdedeans and dieir kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been diere, at all events, like one of die assistants in die ring at die circus, to keep up die pace of die sleek revolving animal on whose back die lady in short spangled skirts should brilliandy caper and posture. That was all, doubdess: Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be die little Princess on anydiing like die scale open to her; but now that die collective hand had been held out to her widi such alacrity, so diat she might skip up into die light, even, as seemed to her modest mind, widi such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving, under arched eyebrows, where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later hours, after her dinner, a fresh contingent, die whole list of her apparent London acquaintance -which was again a thing in die manner of little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though diere were latent considerations diat somewhat interfered with the lesson, she was having tonight an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Casdedean, who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity. The perception of this high result caused Mrs Assingham fairly to flush widi responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend, from moment to moment, quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had, in some marvellous, sudden, supersubde way, become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully, divinely retributive. The intensity of the taste of diese registered phenomena was in fact diat somehow, by a process and through a connection not again to be traced, she so practised, at the same time, on Amerigo and Charlotte - -with only the drawback, her constant check and second-diought, diat she concomitandy practised perhaps still more on her father.

This last was a danger indeed that, for much of the ensuing time, had its hours of strange beguilement - those at which her sense for precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion widi him more intimate dian any odier. It couldn't but pass between diem diat somediing singular was happening - so much as this she again and again said to herself; whereby die comfort of it was there, after all, to be noted, just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of die couple they formed together as groping, with sealed lips, but with mutual looks diat had never been so tender, for some freedom, some fiction, some figured bravery, under which they

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might safely talk of it. The moment was to come - and it finally came with an effect as penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric button - when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation she had created. The merely specious description of their case would have been mat, after being for a long time, as a family, delightfully, uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover; a felicity for which, blessedly, her father's appetite and her own, in particular, had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at; very much as if he had said to her, in default of her breaking silence first: 'Everything is remarkably pleasant, isn't it? -but where, for it, after all, are we? up in a balloon and whirling through space, or down in the depths of the earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold-mine?' The equilibrium, the precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted and triumphed: all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden, face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a test. If they balanced they balanced - she had to take that; it deprived her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what he thought. But she had her hours, thus, of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigour of their law, and when it came over her that, all the while, the wish, on his side, to spare her might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing 'inward' really to talk about wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless, however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him, 'Yes, this is by every appearance the best time we've had yet; but don't you see, all the same, how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession, in short, of our life?' For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal more? without saying 'They'll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing- prescribe a line for us that will make them separate.' How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would have made her quail? 'Separate, my dear? Do you want them to separate? Then you want us to - you and me? For how can the one separation take

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place without the other?' That was the question that, in spirit, she had heard him ask - with its dread train, moreover, of involved and connected inquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons. Well, the sharpest, the very sharpest, would be that they could no longer afford, as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, 'run' them in such compact formation. And say they accepted this account of their situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past, on either side, show, across the widening strait, pale unappeased faces, or raise, in the very passage, deprecating, de­nouncing hands?

Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say to herself that there might be but a deeper treachery in recoveries and reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come - the alarm, after all, was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour, inevitably, when she knew, with a chill, what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make, for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity, of Charlotte. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious, at the moment, of many things - conscious even, not a little, of desiring, and thereby of needing, to see what she would do in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, menaced- horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own business - why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected, for her, temporarily, from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way. That, precisely, was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince's equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was

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none the less to have to admit, after delay, that the bread he had cast on the waters had come home, and that she should thus be justified of her old apprehension. The consequence of this, in turn, was a renewed pang in presence of his remembered ingenuity. To be ingenious with her - what didn't, what mightn't that mean, when she had so absolutely never, at any point of contact with him, put him, by as much as the value of a penny, to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having in any way whatever to reckon with her? The ingenuity had been in his simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them in an equal degree, and his triumph, on the occasion, had been just in the simplicity. She couldn't - and he knew it - say what was true: 'Oh, you "use" her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever so differently and separately - not at all in the same way or degree. There's nobody we really use together but ourselves, don't you see? - by which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other of us; so why, as a matter of course, in such a case as this, drag in Charlotte?'

She couldn't so challenge him, because it would have been - and there she was paralysed - the note. It would have translated itself on the spot, for his ear, into jealousy; and, from reverberation to repercussion, would have reached her father's exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact, of old - the time, so strangely, seemed already far away - an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability, round about them, of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost always there when Amerigo brought her to Eaton Square, where Amerigo was constantly bringing her; and Amerigo was almost always there when Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was constantly bringing him. The fractions of occasions, the chance minutes that put them face to face had, as yet, of late, contrived to count but little, between them, either for the sense of opportunity or for that of exposure; inasmuch as the lifelong rhythm of their intercourse made against all cursory handling of deep things. They had never availed themselves of any given quarter of an hour to gossip about fundamentals; they moved slowly through large still spaces; they could be silent together, at any time, beautifully, with much more comfort than hurriedly expressive. It appeared indeed to have become true that their

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common appeal measured itself, for vividness, just by this economy of sound; they might have been talking 'at' each other when they talked with their companions, but these latter, assuredly, were not in any directer way to gain light on the current phase of their relation. Such were some of the reasons for which Maggie suspected funda­mentals, as I have called them, to be rising, by a new movement, to the surface - 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 inquiry; 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 Tightness. 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 forgather.

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