Chapter thirty-seven of the Golden Bowl. Her father had asked her, three days later, in an interval of calm, how she was affected in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition by Dottie and Kitty and by the once formidable Mrs. Rance. And the consequence of this inquiry had been for the pair just such another stroll together away from the rest of the party and off into the park as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends, that of their long talk on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then pure-blind discussion of which, at their enjoyed leisure, Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the first beginning of their present situation. The whirl a gig of time had thus brought round for them again on their finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for tea on the terrace, the same odd impulse quietly to slope, so Adam Verver himself, as they went, familiarly expressed it, that it acted in its way of old, acted for the distant autumn afternoon and for the sharpness of their since so outlived crisis. It might have been funny to them now that the presence of Mrs. Rance and the Luches, and with symptoms too at that time less developed, had once for their anxiety and their prudence constituted a crisis. It might have been funny that these ladies could ever have figured, to their imagination, as a symbol of dangers vivid enough to precipitate the need of a remedy. This amount of entertainment and assistance they were indeed disposed to extract from their actual impressions. They had been finding it, for months passed, by Maggie's view, a resource and a relief to talk with an approach to intensity when they met of all the people they weren't really thinking of and didn't really care about, the people with whom their existence had begun almost to swarm. And they closed in at present round the specters of their past, as they permitted themselves to describe the three ladies with a better imitation of enjoying their theme than they had been able to achieve, certainly, during the stay, for instance, of the Castle Deans. The Castle Deans were a new joke, comparatively, and they had had, always to Maggie's view, to teach themselves the way of it, whereas the Detroit, the Providence Party, rebounding so from Providence, from Detroit, was an old and ample one, of which the most could be made and as to which a humorous insistence could be guarded. Up and sudden, moreover, this afternoon, had been their well-nigh-confessed desire just to rest together a little, as from some strain long felt but never named. To rest, as who should say, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, each pair of eyes so yearningly, and indeed what could it be but so wearily, closed as to render the collapse safe from detection by the other pair. It was positively as if, in short, the inward felicity of their being once more, perhaps only for half an hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them, and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest. They were husband and wife, oh so immensely, as regards other persons. But after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented as in the past by neighbors, would do beautifully without them. It was wonderfully like they're having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore, where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dottie and Kitty supplied abundantly for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why into the bargain, for that matter, this came to Maggie, couldn't they always live so far as they lived together in a boat? She felt in her face, with the question, the breath of a possibility that soothed her. They needed only know each other, henceforth, in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening, in the same place, he had been as unmarried as possible, which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then, that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble, with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment. They had, after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other. Each other, that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth, to do exactly what they would with, a provision full of possibilities. Who could tell us yet what, thanks to it, they wouldn't have done before the end? They had meanwhile been tracing together in the golden air that toward six o'clock of a July afternoon hung about the masked Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back beyond the sea, to their native seats for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational, one scarce knew what to call it, outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of wandering Jewesses. Our couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and Maggie was to take up after a drop a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent. Were you amused at me just now, when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me? She asked with some earnestness. Well, fatuous? Fatuous? He seemed at a loss. I mean sublime in our happiness, as if looking down from a height, or rather sublime in our general position, that's what I mean. She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the books of the spirit. Because I don't at all want, she explained, to be blinded or made sniffy by any sense of a social situation. Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they portrayed themselves, have surprises for him, to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty. He might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive. But she waited a little, as if made nervous precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were avoiding the serious, standing off anxiously from the real, and they fell again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge. Don't you remember, she went on, how when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn't so very sure we ourselves had the thing itself? He did his best to do so. Had you mean a social situation? Yes. After Fanny Asingham had first broken it to me, that at the rate we were going, we should never have one. Which was what put us on Charlotte? Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember. Maggie had another pause, taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing, that they had been at their critical moment, put on Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. Well, she continued, I recall how I felt about Kitty and Dottie, that even if we had already then been more placed, or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn't have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn't obligingly leave me more exalted by having themselves smaller ideas. For those, she said, were the feelings we used to have. Oh yes, he responded philosophically, I remember the feelings we used to have. Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little and tend to retrospect, as if they had been also respectable. It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position, but it was worse to be sublime about it, as I was so afraid, as I'm in fact still afraid of being, when it wasn't even there to support one. And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived, became for it, which was doubtless too often even now her danger, almost sententious. One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others of what they may feel deprived of. However, she added, Kitty and Dottie couldn't imagine we were deprived of anything, and now, and now. But she stopped us for indulgence to their wonder and envy. And now they see still more, that we can have got everything, and kept everything, and yet not be proud. No, we're not proud, she answered after a moment. I'm not sure that we're quite proud enough. Yet she changed the next instant that subject too. She could only do so however by harking back, as if it had been a fascination. She might have been wishing under this renewed, this still more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the stream of time and dipping again for the softness of the water and to the contracted basin of the past. We talked about it, we talked about it. You don't remember so well as I. You too didn't know, and it was beautiful of you. Like Kitty and Dottie, you too thought we had a position, and were surprised when I thought we ought to have told them we weren't doing for them what they supposed. In fact, Maggie pursued, we're not doing it now. We're not, you see, really introducing them. I mean not to the people they want. Then what you call the people with whom they're now having tea. It made her quite spring round. That's just what you asked me the other time.  I remember that such people, the people we made so welcome, didn't count. That Fanny Asingham knew they didn't. She had awakened his daughter, the Echo, and on the bench there as before he nodded his head amusedly. He kept nervously shaking his foot. Yes, they were only good enough, the people who came for us. I remember, he said again, that was the way it all happened. That was the way, that was the way. And you asked me, Maggie added, if I didn't think we ought to tell them, tell Mrs. Rance in particular, I mean, that we had been entertaining her up to then under false pretenses. Precisely, but you said she wouldn't have understood. To which you replied that in that case you were like her. You didn't understand. No, no, but I remember how, about our having and our benighted innocence, no position, you quite crushed me with your explanation. Well, then, said Maggie, with every appearance of delight, I'll crush you again.  There was no doubt of that. You were different from me. You had the same one you always had. Then I asked you, her father concurred, why in that case you hadn't the same. Then indeed you did. He had brought her face round to him before, and this held it, covering him with its kindle brightness, the result of the attested truth of their being able thus in talk to live again together. What I replied was that I had lost my position by my marriage. That one, I know how I saw it, would never come back. I had done something to it. I didn't quite know what, given it away somehow, and yet not, as then appeared, really got my return. I had been assured, always by dear Fanny, that I could get it, only I must wake up. So I was trying, you see, to wake up, trying very hard. Yes, and to a certain extent you succeeded, as also in waking me, which you made much, he said, of your difficulty, to which he added. It's the only case I remember, Mag, of you ever making anything of a difficulty. She kept her eyes on him a moment. That I was so happy as I was. That you were so happy as you were. Well, you admitted, Maggie kept it up, that that was a good difficulty. You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful. He thought a moment. Yes, I may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me. But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile. What do you want to put on me now? Only that we used to wonder, that we were wondering then, if our life wasn't perhaps a little selfish. This also, for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed. Because Fanny Assingham thought so? Oh, no. She never thought. She couldn't think, if she would, anything of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools, Maggie developed. She doesn't seem to think so much about there being wrong, wrong that is, in the sense of being wicked. She doesn't, the Princess, further adventured. Despite so much mind there being wicked. I see, I see. And yet it might have been for his daughter that he didn't so very vividly see. Then she only thought us fools. Oh, no, I don't say that. I'm speaking of our being selfish. And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones. Oh, I don't say she condones. A scruple and Maggie raised its crest. Besides, I'm speaking of what was. Her father showed, however, after a little, that he had not been reached by this discrimination, his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled. Look here, Maggie, he said reflectively. I ain't selfish. I'll be blowed if I'm selfish. Well Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce. Then father, I am. Oh, shucks, said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular and moments of deepest sincerity could thus come back. I'll believe it, he presently added, when Amorigo complains of you. Ah, it's just he who's my selfishness. I'm selfish, so to speak, for him. I mean, she continued, that he's my motive in everything. Well, her father could, from experience, fancy what she meant. But hasn't a girl a right to be selfish about her husband? What I don't mean, she observed without answering, is that I'm jealous of him. But that's his merit, it's not mine. Her father again seemed amused at her. You could be otherwise? Oh, how can I talk, she asked, of otherwise. It isn't, luckily for me, otherwise. If everything were different, she further presented her thought. Of course everything would be. And then again, as if that were but half, my idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous. Or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way than you are, in the same proportion, jealous. Your jealousy has intensity and no doubt ferocity. When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all, or then you're beyond everything and nothing can pull you down. Mr. Verver listened as if he had nothing on these high lines to oppose. And that's the way you love? For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered. It wasn't to talk about that. I do feel, however, beyond everything, and as a consequence of that, I daresay, she added with a turn to gaiety, seem often not to know quite where I am. The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly, or sinking otherwise than in play, was impossible. Nothing of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half-shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he, in his day, had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving. He sat a while as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time, yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed. Besides, Hubert himself really knew what he, after all, hadn't or even had gained. The beauty of her condition was keeping him at any rate as he might feel, inside of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and the splash in the play become for him too a sensation. That couldn't be fixed upon him as missing, since if it wasn't personally floating, if it wasn't even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss in a communicated, irresistible way for tasting the balm. It could pass further for knowing, for knowing that without him nothing might have been, which would have been missing least of all. I guess I've never been jealous, he finally remarked, and it said more to her he had occasion next to perceive than he was intending, for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she couldn't speak. But she at last tried for one of them. Oh, it's you, Father, who are what I call beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down. He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy communion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity. He might have been seeing things to say, and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back. So he settled on the merely obvious. Well, then, we make a pair. We're all right. Oh, we're all right.  At this juncture, however, with the act of their crossing the bar, to get, as might be, into port, there occurred the only approach to a betrayal of their having had to beat against the wind. Her father kept his place, and it was as if she had got over first and were pausing for her consort to follow. If they were all right, they were all right, yet he seemed to hesitate and wait for some word beyond. His eyes met her own, suggestively, and it was only after she had contented herself with simply smiling at him, smiling ever so fixedly, that he spoke for the remaining importance of it from the bench. Where he leaned back, raising his face to her, his legs thrust out a trifle wearily, and his hands grasping either side of the seat, they had beaten against the wind, and she was still fresh. They had beaten against the wind, and he, as at the best the more battered vessel, perhaps just vaguely drooped. But the effect of their silence was that she appeared to beckon him on, and he might have been fairly alongside of her when, at the end of another minute, he found their word. The only thing is that, as for ever putting up again with your pretending that you're selfish, at this she helped him out with it. You won't take it from me? I won't take it from you. Well, of course you won't, for that's your way. It doesn't matter, and it only proves. But it doesn't matter, either, what it proves. I'm at this very moment, she declared, frozen stiff with selfishness. He faced her a while longer in the same way. It was strangely as if, by this sudden arrest, while they're having in their acceptance of the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically given up pretending, it was as if they were in for it for something they had been ineffably avoiding, but the dread of which was itself, in a manner, a seduction, just as any confession of the dread was by so much an illusion. Then she seemed to see him let himself go. When a persons of the nature you speak of there are always other persons to suffer, which you've just been describing to me what you'd take if you had once a good chance from your husband. Oh, I'm not talking about my husband. Then whom are you talking about? Both the retort and the rejoinder had come quicker than anything previously exchanged, and they were followed on Maggie's part by a momentary drop. But she was not to fall away, and while her companion kept his eyes on her, while she wondered if he weren't expecting her to name his wife then, with high hypocrisy, as paying for his daughter's bliss, she produced something that she felt to be much better. I'm talking about you. Do you mean I've been your victim? Of course you've been my victim. What have you done, ever done, that hasn't been for me? Many things, more than I can tell you, things you've only to think of for yourself. What do you make of all that I've done for myself? Yourself? She brightened out with derision. What do you make of what I've done for American City? It took her but a moment to say, I'm not talking of you as a public character. I'm talking of you on your personal side. Well, American City, if personalities can do it, has given me a pretty personal side. What do you make, he went on, of what I've done for my reputation. Your reputation there? You've given it up to them, the awful people, for less than nothing.   From Verver almost artlessly urged. Then there, exactly you are, she triumphed.  Just as he had been sitting he looked at her an instant longer, then he slowly rose while his hands stole into his pockets and stood there before her.  It has never been my idea, he smiled, that you should work for your living. I wouldn't have liked to see it. With which for a little again they remained face to face. Say therefore I have had the feelings of a father. How have they made me a victim? Because I sacrifice you. But to what in the world? At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as an advice, her impression of his now with his strange smile, which touched her to deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest. This was the moment in the whole process of their mutual vigilance, in which it decidedly most hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch. It shook between them this transparency with their very breath. It was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard. She held her breath, for she knew by his eyes the light at the heart of which he couldn't blind, that he was, by his intention, making sure, sure whether or no, her certainty was like his. The intensity of his dependence on it at that moment. This itself was what absolutely convinced her so, that, as if perched up before him on her vertiginous point, and in the very glare of his observation, she balanced for thirty seconds. She almost rocked. She might have been for the time, and all her conscious person, the very form of the equilibrium they were, in their different ways, equally trying to save. And they were saving it, yes they were, or at least she was, that was still the workable issue, she could say, as she felt her dizziness drop. She held herself hard. The thing was to be done, once for all, by her acting now, where she stood. So much was crowded into so short a space that she knew already she was keeping her head. She had kept it by the warning of his eyes. She shouldn't lose it again. She knew how and why, and if she had turned cold this was precisely what helped her. He had said to himself, she'll break down and name Amorigo, she'll say it's to him she's sacrificing me, and it's by what that will give me, with so many other things too, that my suspicion will be clenched. He was watching her lips, spying for the symptoms of the sound, whereby these symptoms had only to fail, and he would have got nothing that she didn't measure out to him as she gave it. She had presently, in fact, so recovered herself that she seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than he had made her name her husband. It was there before her that if she should so much as force him just not consciously to avoid saying, Charlotte, Charlotte, he would have given himself away. But to be sure of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing instant what they were both doing. He was doing what he had steadily been coming to. He was practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her as a sacrifice. He had read his way so and to her best possibility. And where had she already, for weeks and days past, planted her feet, if not on her acceptance of the offer? Cold indeed, colder and colder she turned, as she felt herself suffer this close personal vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken. That was her very certitude, the intensity of his pressure. For if something dreadful hadn't happened there wouldn't, for either of them, be these dreadful things to do. She had, meanwhile as well, the immense advantage that she could have named Charlotte without exposing herself. As for that matter, she was the next minute showing him. Why, I sacrifice you simply to everything and to everyone. I take the consequences of your marriage as perfectly natural. He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his eyeglass. What do you call, my dear, the consequences? Your life as your marriage has made it. Well, hasn't it made it exactly what we wanted? She just hesitated, then felt herself steady, oh, beyond what she had dreamed. To what I wanted, yes. His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he might, with his intense or fixed smile, had been knowing she was for herself rightly inspired. What do you make, then, of what I wanted? I don't make anything, any more than of what you've got. That's exactly the point. I don't put myself out to do so, I never have. I take from you all I can get, all you've provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can.  I don't even pretend to concern myself. To concern yourself? He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face. With what may have really become of you? This is if we had agreed from the first not to go into that, such an arrangement being, of course, charming for me. You can't say you know that I haven't stuck to it. He didn't say so then, even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath.  But it made no difference, know as she might what a past, still so recent and yet so distant it alluded to.  I never went into anything, and you see I don't. I continue to adore you, but what's that from a decent daughter to such a father? What but a question of convenient arrangement? Are having two houses, three houses, instead of one? You would have arranged for fifty if I had wished. Am I making it easy for you to see the child? You don't claim, I suppose, that my natural course, once you had set up for yourself, would have been to ship you back to American City? These were direct inquiries. They quite rang out in the soft, wooded air, so that Adam Verver, for a minute, appeared to meet them with reflection. She saw reflection, however, quickly enough show him what to do with them. Do you know, Mag, what you make me wish when you talk that way? And he waited again while she further got from him the sense of something that had been behind, deeply in the shade, coming cautiously to the front, and just feeling its way before presenting itself. You regularly make me wish that I had shipped back to American City, when you go on as you do, but he really had to hold himself to say it. Well, when I go on, why, you make me quite want to ship myself back. You make me quite feel as if American City would be the best place for us. It made her all too finely vibrate. For us? For me and Charlotte, do you know that if we should ship, it would serve you quite right? With which he smiled. Oh, he smiled. And if you say much more, we will ship. Ah, then it was that the cup of her conviction, full to the brim, overflowed at a touch. There was his idea, the clearness of which, for an instant, almost dazzled her. It was a blur of light in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked by contrast in blackness, saw her waiver in the field of vision, saw her removed, transported, doomed. And he had named Charlotte, named her again, and she had made him, which was all she had needed more. It was as if she had held a blank letter to the fire, and the writing had come out still larger than she hoped. The recognition of it took her some seconds. But she might, when she spoke, have been folding up these precious lines and restoring them to her pocket. Well, I shall be as much as ever then the cause of what you do. I haven't the least doubt of your being up to that if you should think I might get anything out of it, even the little pleasure, she laughed, of having said, as you call it, more.  She had drawn a long breath. She had made him do it all for her, and had lighted the way to it without his naming her husband. That silence had been as distinct as the sharp, the inevitable sound, and something now in him followed it up, a sudden eras of confessing it last fully to where she was and of begging the particular question. Don't you think, then, I can take care of myself? Ah, it's exactly what I've gone upon. If it wasn't for that. But she broke off, and they remained only another moment, face to face. I'll let you know, my dear, the day I feel you've begun to sacrifice me. Be gone! She extravagantly echoed. Well, it will be for me the day you've ceased to believe in me. With which his glasses still fixed on her, his hands in his pockets, his hat pushed back, his legs a little apart, he seemed to plant or to square himself for a kind of assurance that it occurred to him he might as well treat her to, and a fault of other things before they changed their subject. It had the effect for her of a reminder, a reminder of all he was, of all he had done, of all, above and beyond his being, her perfect little father, she might take him as representing, take him as having quite eminently, in the eyes of two hemispheres, been capable of, and as therefore wishing not, was it illegitimately, to call her attention to, the successful beneficent person, the beautiful bountiful, original, dauntlessly willful great citizen, the consummate collector and infallible high authority he had been and still was. These things struck her on the spot, as making up for him in a wonderful way, a character she must take into account in dealing with him either for pity or for envy. He positively, under the impression, seemed to loom larger than life for her, so that she saw him during these moments in a light of recognition, which had had its brightness for her at many an hour of the past, but which had never been so intense and so almost admonitory. His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscrutable and calculable energy, and this quality perhaps it might be, all the more too is the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable, replaceable effort, that placed him in her eyes as no precious a work of art probably had ever been placed in his own. There was a long moment, absolutely, during which her impression rose and rose, even as that of the typical charmed gazer in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated. Extraordinary in particular was the number of the different ways in which he thus affected her as showing. He was strong, that was the great thing. He was sure, sure for himself always, whatever his idea. The expression of that in him had somehow never appeared more identical with his proved taste for the rare and the true. But what stood out beyond everything was that he was always marvelously young, which couldn't but crown at this juncture his whole appeal to her imagination. Before she knew it she was lifted aloft by the consciousness that he was simply a great and deep and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness was not to be distinguished a wit from loving him with pride. It came to her all strangely as a sudden and immense relief. The sense that he wasn't a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness, made it as if they had really emerged in their transmuted union to smile almost without pain. It was like a new confidence, and after another instant she knew even still better why. Wasn't it because now also on his side he was thinking of her as his daughter, was trying her, during these mute seconds, as the child of his blood? Oh, then, if she wasn't with her little conscious passion, the child of any weakness, what was she but strong enough too? It swelled in her fairly. It raised her higher, higher. She wasn't in that case a failure, either. Hadn't been, but the contrary. His strength was her strength, her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together. This was all in the answer she finally made him. I believe in you more than any one. Than any one at all? She hesitated for all it might mean, but there was, oh, a thousand times, no doubt of it. Than any one at all? She kept nothing of it back now, met his eyes over it, let him have the whole of it, after which she went on. And that's the way I think you believe in me. He looked at her a minute longer, but his tone at last was right. About the way, yes. Well, then? She spoke as for the end and for other matters, for anything, everything, else there might be. They would never return to it. Well then? His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go. But it was an embrace that, August and almost stern, produced for all its intimacy, no revulsion, and broke into no inconsequence of tears. Golden Bowl by Henry James Book 5 Chapter 38 Maggie was to feel, after this passage, how they had both been helped through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught a few nights before in the familiar embrace of her father's wife. His return to the saloon had chance to coincide exactly with this demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by the assingums, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the billiard-room with him. She had been conscious enough at the time of what such an impression received by the others might in that extended state do for her case, and nonetheless that as no one had appeared to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on perceptibly the special shade of consecration conferred by unanimities of silence. The effect she might have considered had been almost awkward. The promptitude of her separation from Charlotte is if they had been discovered in some absurdity on her becoming aware of spectators. The spectators, on the other hand, that was the appearance, might tend to have supposed them in the existing relation addicted to mutual endearments, and yet, hesitating with a fine scruple between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt that almost any spoken or laughed comment could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding, beyond any permitted measure, intelligent. They had evidently looked the two young wives, like a pair of women 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 Amorigo's and on Fanny Assingham's, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their indifference. There had been something, there had been but too much in the incident, for each observer. Yet there was nothing anyone could have said without seeming essentially to say. See, see, the dear things, their quarrels 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 offhand effective 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 everyone, accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was pretending, immediately after, to have remarked nothing that anyone else hadn't.  The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced, reinforced 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 since 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 Asingham 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 recognized. He 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 that 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 detectively 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 had not been put at ease, after all, with absolute permanence. Maggie had seen her unmistakably, desire to rise to the occasion and be magnificent. Seeing 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, had not only poured oil upon 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 voracious the service assuredly would not have been huge, it would in that case have come up vividly, and for each of them alike that the truth on the princess's lips presented no difficulty. If the latter's mood in fact could have turned itself at all to private gaiety, it might have failed to resist the diversion of seeing so clever a creature so beguiled. Charlotte's theory of a generous manner was manifestly to express that her stepdaughter's word, wiping out, as she might have said, everything, had restored them to the serenity of a relation without a cloud. It had been, in short, in this light, ideally conclusive, so that no ghost of anything it referred to could ever walk again. What was the ecstasy of that, however, but in itself a trifle compromising? As truly within the week Maggie had occasioned to suspect her friend of beginning, and rather abruptly to remember. Convinced as she was of the example already given her by her husband, and in relation to which her profession of trust in his mistress had been an act of conformity exquisitely calculated, her imagination yet sought in the hidden play of his influence the explanation of any change of surface, any difference of expression or intention. There had been, through life, as we know, few quarters in which the princess's fancy could let itself loose. But it shook off restraint when it plunged into the figured void of the detail of that relation. This was a realm it could peeple with images. Then and again, with fresh ones, they swarmed there like the strange combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight. They loomed into the definite and faded into the vague, their main present sign for her being, however, that they were always, that they were duskily agitated. Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure by the very intensity of the bliss this had dropped from her. She had ceased to see, as she lost herself, the pair of operatic, of high, vulgarian lovers, she found deep within her these comparisons interlocked in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one's dream of an old German forest. The picture was veiled, on the contrary, with the dimness of trouble, behind which she felt, indistinguishable, the procession of forms that had lost, also pitifully, their precious confidence. Therefore, though there was in these days for her, with Amorigo, little enough even of the imitation, from day to day, of unembarrassed references, as she had foreseen, for that matter, from the first that there would be, her act of conception of his accessibility to their companion's own private and unextinguished right to break ground was not much less active than before. So it was that her inner sense, in spite of everything, represented him as still pulling wires and controlling currents, or rather indeed as muffling the whole possibility, keeping it down and down, leading his accomplice continually on to some new turn of the road. As regards herself, Maggie had become more conscious from week to week of his ingenuities of intention to make up to her for their forfeiture, and so dire a degree of any reality of frankness, a privation that had left on his lips perhaps a little of the same thirst with which she fairly felt her own distorted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens in desert sands for the possible, the impossible, plash of water. It was just this hampered state in him, nonetheless, that she kept before her when she wished most defined grounds of dignity for the hard little passion which nothing he had done could smother. There were hours enough, lonely hours, in which she let dignity go. Then there were others when, clinging with her winged concentration to some deep cell of her heart, she stored away her hives tenderness as if she had gathered it all from flowers. He was walking ostensibly beside her, but in fact given over, without a break, to the gray medium in which he helplessly groped, a perception on her part which was a perpetual pang in which might last what it would, for ever if need be, but which, if relieved at all, must be relieved by his act alone. She herself could do nothing more for it. She had done the utmost possible. It was meantime not the easier to bear for this aspect under which Charlotte was presented as depending on him for guidance, taking it from him even in doses of bitterness, and yet lost with him in devious depths. Nothing was thus more sharply to be inferred than that he had promptly enough warned her, unhearing from her of the precious assurance received from his wife, that she must take care her satisfaction didn't betray something of her danger. Maggie had a day of still waiting, after allowing him time to learn how unreservedly she had lied for him, of waiting as for the light of she scarce knew what slow shining reflection of this knowledge in his personal attitude, what retarded evolution, she asked herself in these hours, might in poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated. She was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie, even while Maggie's own head was bowed, and the reason for this kept coming back to our young woman, and the conception of what would secretly have passed. She saw her, face to face with the Prince, take from him the chill of his stiffest admonition, with the possibilities of deeper difficulty that it represented for each. She heard her ask, irritated in somber, what tone, in God's name, since her bravery didn't suit him, she was then to adopt. And by way of a fantastic flight of divination, she heard Amorigo reply, and a voice of which every fine note, familiar and admirable, came home to her, that one must really manage such prudence as a little for oneself. It was positive in the Princess that for this she breathed Charlotte's cold air, turned away from him in it with her, turned with her in growing compassion, this way and that, hovered behind her while she felt her ask herself where then she should rest, marvellous the manner in which, under such imaginations, Maggie thus circled and lingered, quite as if she were materially following her unseen, counting every step she helplessly wasted, noting every hindrance that brought her to a pause. A few days of this accordingly had brought a change in that apprehension of the instant beatitude of triumph, of triumph magnanimous and serene, with which the upshot of the night scene on the terrace had condemned our young woman to make terms. She had had, as we know, her vision of the guilt bars bent, of the door of the cage forced open from within, and the creature imprisoned roaming at large, of movement on the creature's part that was to have even for the short interval its impressive beauty, but of which the limit, and in yet another direction, had loomed straight into view during her last talk under the great trees with her father. It was when she saw his wife's face ruefully attached to the quarter to which, in the course of their session, he had so significantly addressed his own. It was then that Maggie could watch for its turning pale. It was then she seemed to know what she had meant by thinking of her in the shadow of his most ominous reference, as doomed. If, as I say, her attention now, day after day, so circled and hovered, it found itself arrested for certain passages during which she absolutely looked with Charlotte's grave eyes. What she unfailingly made out through them was the figure of a little quiet gentleman who mostly wore, as he moved alone, across the field of vision, a straw hat, a white waistcoat and a blue neck tie, keeping a cigar in his teeth and his hands and his pockets, and who, oftener than not, presented a somewhat meditative back while he slowly measured the perspectives of the park and broodingly counted, it might have appeared, his steps. There were hours of intensity for a week or two, when it was for all the world as if she had guardedly tracked her stepmother in the great house, from room to room and from window to window, only to see her, here and there and everywhere, try her uneasy outlook, question her issue and her fate. Something unmistakably had come up for her that had never come up before. It represented a new complication and had begotten a new anxiety. As these that she carried about with her done up in the napkin of her lovers accepted rebuke, while she vainly hunted for some corner where she might put them safely down. The disguise, solemnity, the prolonged futility of her search might have been grotesque to a more ironic eye, but Maggie's provision of irony, which we have taken for naturally small, had never been so scant as now, and there were moments while she watched with her, thus unseen, when the mere effect of being near her was to feel her own heart and her throat, was to be almost moved to saying to her, Hold on tight, my poor dear, without too much terror, and it will all come out somehow. Even to that indeed she could reflect, Charlotte might have replied that it was easy to say. Even to that no great meaning could attach so long as the little meditative man in the straw hat kept coming into view with his indescribable air of weaving his spell, weaving it off thereby himself. In whatever quarter of the horizon the appearances were scanned he was to be noticed as absorbed in this occupation, and Maggie was to become aware of two or three extraordinary occasions of receiving from him the hint that he measured the impression he produced. It was not really till after their recent long talk in the park that she knew how deeply, how quite exhaustively, they had then communicated, so that they were to remain together for the time, in consequence, quite in the form of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the table over which they have been resting their elbows over which they have emptied to the last drop their respective charged cups. The cups were still there on the table, but turned upside down, and nothing was left for the companions but to confirm by placid silences the fact that the wine had been good. They had parted positively as if on either side, primed with it, primed for whatever was to be, and everything between them, as the month waned, added its touch of truth to this similitude. Nothing truly was at present between them saved that they were looking at each other in infinite trust. It fairly wanted no more words, and when they met during the deep summer days, met even without witnesses, when they kissed at morning and evening, or on any of the other occasions of contact that they had always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of the upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite each other to sit down and worry afresh. So it was that in the house itself, where more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she sometimes only looked at him. From end to end of the great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance, as if in one of the halls of a museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a betaker, and he a vague gentleman to whom even betakers were unknown. He had ever, of course, had his way of walking about to review his possessions and verify their condition, but this was a past time to which he now struck her as almost extravagantly addicted, and when she passed near him, and he turned to give her a smile, she caught, or so she fancied, the greater depth of his small perpetual hum of contemplation. It was as if he were singing to himself Satavocce as he went, and it was also, on occasion, quite ineffably, as if Charlotte, hovering, watching, listening, on her side too, kept sufficiently within ear shot to make it out a song, and yet for some reason connected with the very manner of it stood off and didn't dare. One of the attentions she had from immediately after her marriage, most freely paid him, was that of her interest in his rarities, her appreciation of his taste, her native passion for beautiful objects, and her grateful desire not to miss anything he could teach her about them. Maggie had, in due course, seen her begin to work this fortunately natural source of sympathy for all it was worth. She took possession of the mound throughout its extent. She abounded to odd excess, one might have remarked, and the assumption of its being for her, with her husband, all the ground, the finest, clearest air and most breathable medium common to them. It had been given to Maggie to wonder if she didn't, in these intensities of approbation, too much shut him up to his province. But this was a complaint he had never made his daughter, and Charlotte must at least have had for her that, thanks to her admirable instinct, her range of perception marching with his own and never falling behind, she had probably not so much as once treated him to a rasping mistake or a revealing stupidity.  And it was never so much forced upon her as at these odd moments of her encountering the Sposy, as Amorigo called them, under the cove ceilings of fawns while, sewed together, yet at the same time so separate, they were making their daily round. Charlotte hung behind with emphasized attention. She stopped when her husband stopped, but at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects, and the likeness of their connection would not have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands, the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck. He didn't twitch it, yet it was there. He didn't drag her, but she came. And those indications that I have described the princess as finding extraordinary in him were two or three mute facial intimations, which his wife's presence didn't prevent his addressing his daughter, nor prevent his daughter, as she passed. It was doubtless to be added, from flushing a little at the receipt of. They amounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless smile, but the smile was a soft shake of the twisted silken rope, and Maggie's translation of it, held in her breast till she got well away, came out only as if it might have been overheard when some door was closed behind her. Yes, you see, I lead her now by the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she doesn't so much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her heart, which, if you had the chances to apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear a thump and thump and thump. She thinks it may be her doom, the awful place over there, awful for her, but she's afraid to ask, don't you see, just as she's afraid of not asking, just as she's afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied round her now as portents and betrayals, she'll know, however, when she does know. Charlotte's one opportunity, meanwhile, for the air of confidence she had formerly worn so well, and then agreed so with her firm and charming type, was the presence of visitors, never, as a season advanced, wholly intermitted, rather, in fact, so constant with all the people who turned up for luncheon and for tea and to see the house, now replete, now famous, that Maggie grew to think again of this large element of company as of a kind of renewed water supply for the tank in which, like a party of panting goldfish, they kept afloat. It helped them unmistakably with each other, weakening the emphasis of so many of the silences of which their intimate intercourse would otherwise have consisted. Beautiful and wonderful for her even, at times, was the effect of these interventions, their effect above all in bringing home to each the possible heroism of perfunctory things. They learned fairly to live in the perfunctory. They remained in it as many hours of the day as might be. It took on, finally, the likeness of some spacious central chamber and a haunted house, a great overarched and overglazed rotunda where gaiety might reign, with the doors of which opened into sinister circular passages. Here they turned up for each other, as they said, with the blank faces that denied any uneasiness felt in the approach. Here they closed numerous doors carefully behind them, all saved the door that connected the place, as by a straight tinted corridor, with the outer world, and, encouraging thus the eruption of society, imitated the aperture through which the bedisen performers of the circus are poured into the ring. The great part Mrs. Verver had socially played came luckily, Maggie could make out, to her assistance. She had personal friends, Charlotte's personal friends had ever been in London at the two houses, one of the most convenient pleasantries, who actually tempered at this crisis her aspect of isolation. And it wouldn't have been hard to guess that her best moments were those in which she suffered no fear of becoming a bore to restrain her appeal to their curiosity. Their curiosity might be vague, but their clever hostess was distinct, and she marched them about, sparing them nothing, as if she counted each day on a harvest of half-crowns. Maggie met her again in the gallery at the oddest hours with the party she was entertaining. Heard her draw out the lesson, insist upon the interest, snub even the particular presumption, and smile for the general bewilderment, inevitable features, these latter of almost any occasion, in a manner that made our young woman, herself incurably dazzled, marvel of fresh at the mystery by which a creature who could be in some connections so earnestly right could be in others so perversely wrong. When her father, vaguely circulating, was attended by his wife, it was always Charlotte who seemed to bring up the rear, but he hung in the background when she did Ciceroan, and it was then perhaps that moving mildly and modestly to and fro on the skirts of the exhibition, his appearance of weaving his spell was, for the initiated conscience, least to be resisted. Brilliant women turned to him in vague emotion, but his response scarce committed him more than if he had been the person employed to see that, after the invading wave was spent, the cabinets were all locked and the cemeteries all restored. There was a morning wind during the hour before luncheon and shortly after the arrival of a neighborly contingent, neighborly from ten miles off, whom Mrs. Verver had taken in charge, Maggie paused on the threshold of the gallery through which she had been about to pass, faltered there for the very impression of his face as it met her from an opposite door. Charlotte, half way down the vista, held together as if by something almost austere in the grace of her authority, the men I scared, now that they were there, not of her visitors, who, since they had announced themselves by telegram as yearning to inquire and admire, saw themselves restricted to this consistency. Her voice, high and clear and a little hard, reached her husband and her stepdaughter while she thus placed beyond doubt her cheerful submission to duty. Her words, addressed to the largest publicity, rang for some minutes through the place. Everyone is quiet to listen as if it had been a church ablaze with tapers, and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise. Fanny Asingham looked wrapped in devotion. Fanny Asingham, who forsook this other friend as little as she forsook either her host, or the princess, or the prince, or the principino. She supported her in slow revolutions and murmurous attestations of presence at all such times, and Maggie, advancing after her first hesitation, was not to fail of noting her solemn inscrutable attitude. Her eyes attentively lifted, so that she might escape being provoked to betray an impression. She betrayed one, however, as Maggie approached, dropping her gaze to the latter's level long enough to seem to adventure, marvelously on a mute appeal. You understand, don't you, that if she didn't do this there would be no knowing what she might do. This light Mrs. Asingham richly launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain again, and then, not too much to show it, or rather positively to conceal it and to conceal something more as well, turned short round to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. The largest of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands, looped round it, which, as you see, are the finest possible Vusax, are not of the same origin or period, or even wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They've been put on at a later time by a process of which there are very few examples, and none so important as this, which is really quite unique, so that, though the whole thing is a little baroque, its value as a specimen is, I believe, almost inestimable. So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads of gaping neighbors, so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing, as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the faith with which she was honored. Maggie, meanwhile, at the window, knew the strangest thing to be happening. She had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it, the lighted square before her all blurred and dim. The high voice went on. Its quaver was doubtless for concious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse, so that Maggie felt herself the next thing, turn with a start to her father. Can't she be stopped? Hasn't she done it enough? Some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that across half the gallery, for he had not moved from where she had first seen him, he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. Poor thing, poor thing, it reached straight. Isn't she, for once, credit on the swagger? After which, as held thus together, they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divine anguish even so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away. The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air. So much for deep guesses on her own side, too, it gave her to think of. There was honestly an awful mixture in things, and it was not close to her aftersense of such passages, we have already, indeed, in other cases seen it open, that the deepest depth of all, and a perceived penalty, was that you couldn't be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn't show for ridiculous. Amorigo that morning, for instance, had been as absent as he at this juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being. He had gone to London for the day and the night, a necessity that now frequently rose for him, and that he had more than once suffered to operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated. It had never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at last a high-dim August dawn when she couldn't sleep, and when, creeping restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded acres, she found the faint flush of the East Marsh with the perception of that other almost equal prodigy. It rosely colored her vision that, even such as he was, yes, her husband could on occasion sin by excess of candor. He wouldn't otherwise have given as his reason for going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging books there. He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others, a large number sent from Rome. Wonders of old print in which her father had been interested. But when her imagination tracked him to the dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a caretaker and a kitchen maid were alone in possession, it wasn't to see him in his shirt sleeves unpacking battered boxes. She saw him in truth less easily beguiled, saw him wander in the closed dusky rooms from place to place, or else for long periods, recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes. She made him out as liking better than anything in the world just now to be alone with his thoughts. Being herself connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with her. She made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory to which he was exposed at Fonz, and she was accessible to the impression of the almost beggard aspect of this alternative. It was like he's doing pennants in sordid ways, being sent to prison or being kept without money. It wouldn't have taken much to make her think of him as really kept without food. He might have broken away, might easily have started to travel. He had a right, thought wonderful Maggie now, to so many more freedoms than he took. His secret was, of course, that at Fonz he all the while winced, was all the while in presence in respect to which he had thrown himself back with a hard pressure, on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that mourning while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure of the ground on which he would have had to snatch at pretext for absence. It all came to her there. He got off to escape from a sound. The sound was in her own ears still, that of Charlotte's high coerced quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery. The voice by which she herself had been pierced the day before is by that of a creature in anguish, and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the tears had been forced into her eyes. Her comprehension soared so high that the wonder for her became really his not feeling the need of wider intervals and thicker walls. Before that admiration she also meditated. Consider as she might now she kept reading not less into what he omitted than into what he performed a beauty of intention that touched her fairly the more by being obscure. It was like hanging over a garden in the dark. Nothing was to be made of the confusion of growing things, but one felt they were folded flowers, and their vague sweetness made the whole air their medium. He had to turn away, but he wasn't at least a coward. He would wait on the spot for the issue of what he had done on the spot. She sank to her knees with her arm on the ledge of her window-seat, where she blinded her eyes from the full glare of seeing that his idea could only be to wait whatever might come at her side.  Though after a while, when the strange wail of the gallery began to repeat its inevitable echo, she was conscious of how that brought out his pale hard grimace. CHAPTER XXXIX The resemblance had not been present to her on first coming out into the hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon. Only the second Sunday of all the summer, when the Party of Six, the Party of Seven, including the Principino, had practically been without assessions or invasions. But within sight of Charlotte, seated far away, very much where she had expected to find her, the princess fell to wondering if her friend wouldn't be affected quite as she herself had been that night on the terrace, under Mrs. Verver's perceptive pursuit. The relation today had turned itself round. Charlotte was seeing her come, through patches of lingering noon, quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through the starless dark. And there was a moment that of her waiting a little as they thus met across the distance, when the interval was bridged by recognition not less soundless, and to all appearance not less charged with strange meanings than that of the other occasion. The point, however, was that they had changed places. Maggie had from her window seen her stepmother leave the house at so unlikely an hour, three o'clock of a conicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove, and had thereupon felt her impulse determined with the same sharpness that had made the spring of her companions three weeks before. It was the hottest day of the season, and the shaded siesta, for people all at their ease, would certainly rather have been prescribed. But our young woman had perhaps not yet felt it so fully brought home that such refinements of repose among them constituted the empty chair at the feast. This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great bedempt dining room, the cool ceremonious semblance of luncheon, had just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had been represented but by the plea of a bad headache, not reported to the rest of the company by her husband, but offered directly to Mr. Verver himself on their having assembled by her maid, deputed for the effect and solemnly producing it. Maggie had sat down with the others, to vions artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions. Poor Fanny Asingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn. A consensus of langer, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene. Relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and advisor, who had taken for a week or two the light-neighboring bliss, local rites flourishing under Maggie's munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the house. He, conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell, conversed mainly with the indefinite wandering smile of the entertainers, and the princess's power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having, from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his guidance. She asked herself at times, if he suspected how more than subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes that he had guessed nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been so urbanely filling up gaps at present, for the very reason that his instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently served him, made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension round about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. Some day, in some happier season, she would confess to him that she hadn't confessed, though taking so much on her conscience. But just now she was carrying, in her weak, stiffened hand, a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself, and in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression. Something grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her choice of suppositions. Her heart stood still when she wondered, above all, if the cord mightn't at last have snapped between her husband and her father.  Find out for yourself, she had thrown to Amorigo, for her last word, on the question of who else knew that night of the breaking of the bowl, and she flattered herself that she hadn't since then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she had given him all these weeks to be busy with, and she had again and again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his uncertainty, ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity. She had handed him over to an ignorance that couldn't even try to become indifferent, and that yet wouldn't project itself either into the cleared air of conviction. In proportion, as he was generous, it had bitten into his spirit, and more than once she had said to herself, that to break the spell she had cast upon him, and that the polished old ivory of her father's inattachable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit some mistake or some violence, smash some windowpane for air, fail even of one of his blessed inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he would have put himself in the wrong, fighting by a single false step the perfection of his outward show. These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled, with other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions, to the idea in particular of a change, such a change as she didn't dare to face, and the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities, as it seemed to Maggie. There were always too many, and all of them things of evil when one's nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do, had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predicament of the night watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of any one. Anything almost of poor Bob Asingham condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father's wine. Anything verily yes of the good priest, as he finally sat back with fat-folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert. He eyed them half obliquely, as if they might have met him today, for conversation better than any one present. But the princess had her fancy at last about that, too. She was in the midst of a passage before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte. Some approach he would have attempted with her that very morning, perhaps, to the circumstance of an apparent detachment recently noted in her from any practice of devotion. He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference, taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble, and pointed naturally the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed contrition. He had, at any rate, quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her at her also deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses. The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do. She could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive, whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence. She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption, so that wouldn't there have been, fairly, in any explicit concerns of Father Mitchell's depths of practical derision of her success? The question was provisionally answered at all events by the time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse, with Maggie's version of Mrs. Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest's eyes before they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her an abysmal softness.  You go. You'll find that you can help her. This didn't come, however. Nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candor of reference to the hand employed at fawns for mayonnaise of salmon. Nothing came but the receding backs of each of the others, her father's slightly bent shoulders and a special, which seemed to weave his spell by the force of habit not less patiently than if his wife had been present. Her husband, indeed, was present to feel anything there might be to feel, which was perhaps exactly why this personages was moved promptly to emulate so definite an example of sloping. He had his occupations, books drew a range perhaps even at fawns, the idea of the siesta moreover and all the conditions had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie was, in the event, left alone for a minute with Mrs. Asingham, who, after waiting for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage of talking over had long passed for them. When they communicated now it was on quite ultimate facts. But Fanny desired to testify to the existence on her part of an attention that nothing escaped. She was like the kind of lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the overworked little tropeasist girl, the acrobatic support presumably of embarrassed and exacting parents, and gives her, as an obscure and meritorious artist, assurance of benevolent interest. What was clearest always than our young woman's imaginings was the sense of being herself left, for any occasion, in the breach. She was essentially there to bear the burden in the last resort of surrounding omissions and evasions, and it was eminently to that office she had been to-day abandoned, with this one alleviation as appeared, of Mrs. Asingham's keeping up with her. Mrs. Asingham suggested that she, too, was still on the ramparts, though her gallantry proved, indeed, after a moment to consist not a little of her curiosity. She had looked about and seen their companions beyond earshot. Don't you really want us to go? Maggie found a faint smile. Do you really want to? It made her friend color. Well, then, no. But we would, you know, at a look from you. We'd pack up and be off, as a sacrifice. Ah, make no sacrifice, said Maggie. See me through. That's it. That's all I want. I should be to base. Besides—fanny went on—you're too splendid. Splendid? Splendid.  You've done it, said Mrs. Asingham. But Maggie only half took it from her. What does it strike you that I've done? What you wanted—they're going. Maggie continued to look at her. Is that what I wanted? Oh, it wasn't for you to say. That was his business. My father's? Maggie asked, after an hesitation. Your father's. He has chosen, and now she knows. She sees it all before her, and she can't speak or resist or move a little finger. That's what's the matter with her, said Fanny Asingham. It made a picture somehow for the Princess, as they stood there—the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own. She saw, round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature, saw Charlotte somewhere in it, virtually at bay, and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off somewhere, all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate. Has she told you? She then asked. Her companion smiled superior. I don't need to be told, either. I see something thank God every day. And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance, I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, state after state, which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day, and step by step at the far end, and I see them never coming back. But never, simply. I see the extraordinary interesting place, which I've never been to, you know, when you have, in the exact degree in which she will be expected to be interested. She will be, Maggie presently replied, expected, interested. For a little after this their eyes met on it, at the end of which Fanny said, she'll be, yes, what she'll have to be, and it will be, won't it, for ever and ever. She spoke as a bounding in her friend's sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her. These were large words and large visions, all the more that now, really, they spread and spread. In the midst of them, however, Mrs. Asingham had soon enough continued. When I talk of knowing, indeed, I don't mean it as you would have a right to do. You know, because you see, and I don't see him. I don't make him out. She almost crudely confessed. Maggie again hesitated. You mean you don't make out Amorigo? But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one's intelligence, the making out of Amorigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her illusion and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Asingham had taken that, without delay, from her eyes, with a discretion still that fell short but by an inch. You know how he feels. Maggie at this then slowly matched her head shake. I know nothing. You know how you feel. But again she denied it. I know nothing. If I did— Well, if you did, Fanny asked as she faltered. She had had enough, however. I should die, she said as she turned away. She went to her room through the quiet house. She roamed there a moment, picking up pointlessly a different fan, and then took her way to the shaded apartments in which at this hour the Principino would be enjoying his nap. He passed through the first empty room, the day nursery, and paused at an open door. The inner room, large, dim and cool, was equally calm. Her boy's ample antique historical royal crib, consecrated reputedly by the guarded rest of air's apparent, and a gift, early in his career from his grandfather, ruled the scene from the center, in the stillness of which she could almost hear the child's soft breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside him. Her father sat there with his little motion, with head thrown back and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine foot that was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the other knee, with the unfathomable heart folded in the constant flawless freshness of the white waistcoat that could always receive in its armholes the firm prehensile thumbs. Mrs. Noble had majestically melted, and the whole place signed her temporary abdication. Yet the actual situation was regular, and Maggie lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the top of which was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her father really slept or if aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet. Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this, this forbearance from any question, only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events for a minute watched his immobility, then as if once more renewing her total submission returned without a sound to her own quarters. A strange impulse was sharpened her, but it was not for her part the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could have slept that morning, days before, when she had watched the first dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back, and the charm she always found in her seemingly perched position as of her outlook from above the high terraces was that of some castle tower mounted on a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods, all of which drowsed below her at this hour in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim, the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have appeared to stir in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, had not caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. It passed down from the terrace, receding at a distance from sight, and carried naturally so as to conceal the head and back of its bearer. But Maggie had quickly recognized the white dress and the particular motion of this adventurer, had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had chosen the glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens, and that she could be butaking herself only to some unvisited quarter deep in them or beyond them, that she had already marked as a superior refuge. The princess kept her for a few minutes in sight, watched her long enough to feel her by the mere betrayal of her pace and direction, driven in a kind of flight, and then understood for herself why the act of sitting still had become impossible to either of them. There came to her confusedly some echo of an ancient fable, some vision of Io goaded by the gadfly, or of Ariadne, roaming the lone sea-strand. It brought with it all the sense of her own intention and desire. She too might have been, for the hour, some far-off harassed heroine, only with a part to play for which she knew exactly no inspiring precedent. She knew but that all the while, all the while of her sitting there among the others without her, she had wanted to go straight to this detached member of the party and make somehow for her support the last demonstration. A pretext was all that was needful, and Maggie after another instant had found one. She had caught a glimpse before Mrs. Verver disappeared of her carrying a book, made out half lost in the folds of her white dress, the dark cover of a volume that was to explain her purpose in case of her being met with surprise, and the mate of which precisely now lay on Maggie's table. The book was an old novel that the princess had a couple of days before mentioned having brought down from Portland Place in the charming original form of its three volumes. Charlotte had hailed, with a specious glitter of interests, the opportunity to read it, and our young woman had, thereupon, on the morrow, directed her maid to carry it to Mrs. Verver's apartments. She was afterwards to observe that this messenger, unintelligent or inadvertent, had removed but one of the volumes, which happened not to be the first. Still possessed accordingly of the first, while Charlotte going out fantastically at such an hour to cultivate romance in an arbor, was helplessly armed with the second, Maggie prepared on the spot to sally forth with succor. The right volume, with the parasol, was all she required, in addition that is to the bravery of her general idea. She passed again through the house, unchallenged, and emerged upon the terrace, which she followed, hugging the shade, with that consciousness of turning the tables on her friend, which we have already noted. But so far as she went, after descending into the open and beginning to explore the grounds, Mrs. Verver had gone still further, with the increase of the oddity, moreover, of her having exchanged the protection of her room for these exposed and shining spaces. It was not fortunately, however, at last that by persisting in pursuit one didn't arrive at regions of admirable shade. This was the asylum, presumably, that the poor wandering woman had had in view. Several wide alleys in particular of great length, densely overarched with the climbing rows and the honeysuckle, and converging and separate green vistas at a sort of umbrageous temple, an ancient rotunda, pillored and statued, niched and roofed, yet with its uncorrected antiquity, like that of everything else at fawns, conscious hitherto of no violence from the present, and no menace from the future.  The place was a conceivable retreat, and she was staring before her from the seat to which she appeared to have sunk, all unwittingly, as Maggie stopped at the beginning of one of the perspectives. It was a repetition more than ever then of the evening on the terrace. The distance was too great to assure her she had been immediately seen, but the princess waited, with her intention, as Charlotte on the other occasion had waited, allowing, O, allowing, for the difference of the intention. Maggie was full of the sense of that, so full that it made her whereupon she moved forward a little, placing herself in range of the eyes that had been looking off elsewhere, but that she had suddenly called to recognition. Charlotte had evidently not dreamed of being followed, and instinctively with her pale stare she stiffened herself for protest. Maggie could make that out, as well as further, however, that her second impression of her friend's approach had an instant effect on her attitude. The princess came nearer, gravely and in silence, but fairly paused again to give her time for whatever she would. Whatever she would, whatever she could, was what Maggie wanted, wanting above all to make it as easy for her as the case permitted. That was not what Charlotte had wanted the other night, but this never mattered. The great thing was to allow her, was fairly to produce in her, the sense of highly choosing. At first, clearly, she had been frightened. She had not been pursued, it had quickly struck her without some design on the part of her pursuer, and what might she not be thinking of in addition but the way she had, when herself the pursuer, made her stepdaughter take in her spirit and her purpose. It had sunk into Maggie at the time, that hard insistence, and Mrs. Verver had felt it and seen it and heard it sink. Which wonderful remembrance of pressure successfully applied had naturally till now remained with her. But her stare was like a projected fear that the buried treasure, so dishonestly come by, for which her companion still countenance at the hour and afterwards, had consented to serve as the deep soil, might have worked up again to the surface to be thrown back upon her hands. Yes, it was positive that during one of these minutes the princess had the vision of her particular alarm. It's her lie. It's her lie that has mortally disagreed with her. She can keep down no longer her rebellion at it, and she has come to retract it, to disown it and denounce it, to give me full in my face the truth instead. This, for a concentrated instant, Maggie felt her helplessly gasp, but only to let it bring home the indignity, the pity of her state. She herself could but tentatively hover, place in view the book she carried, look as little dangerous, look as abjectly mild as possible, remind herself really of people she had read about in stories of the Wild West, people who threw up their hands on certain occasions as a sign they weren't carrying revolvers. She could almost have smiled at last, troubled as she yet knew herself, to show how richly she was harmless. She held up her volume, which was so weak a weapon, and while she continued, for consideration, to keep her distance, she explained with a squinch to quaver as possible. I saw you come out, saw you from my window, and couldn't bear to think you should find yourself here without the beginning of your book. This is the beginning, you've got the wrong volume, and I've brought you out the right. She remained after she had spoken. It was like holding a parley with a possible adversary, and her intents, her exalted little smile, asked for formal leave. May I come nearer now? She seemed to say, as to which, however, the next minute, she saw Charlotte's reply lose itself in a strange process, a thing of several sharp stages which she could stand there and trace. The dread after a minute had dropped from her face, though discernibly enough she still couldn't believe in her having, in so strange a fashion, been deliberately made up to. If she had been made up to, at least, it was with an idea, the idea that it struck her at first as necessarily dangerous. That it wasn't, insistently wasn't, this shown from Maggie with a force finally not to be resisted. And on that perception, on the immense relief so constituted, everything had by the end of three minutes extraordinarily changed.  And in the very sight of her uncontrollable, her blinded physical quest of a peace not to be grasped, something of Mrs. Asingham's picture of her as thrown, for a grim future, beyond the great sea and the great continent, had at first found fulfillment. She had got away in this fashion, burning behind her almost the ships of disguise, to let her horror of what was before her play up without witnesses. And even after Maggie's approach had presented an innocent front, it was still not to be mistaken that she bristled with the signs of her extremity. It was not to be said for them, either, that they were draped at this hour in any of her usual graces. Unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the princess, in spite of the dissimulation that, with the return of comparative confidence, was so promptly to operate. How tragic, in essence, the very change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride, this for possible defense, if not for possible aggression. Pride indeed, the next moment, had become the mantle caught up for protection and perversity. She flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her freedom. To be doomed was, in her situation, to have extravagantly incurred a doom, so that to confess to wretchedness was, by the same stroke, to confess to falsity. She wouldn't confess, she didn't, a thousand times no. She only cast about her, and quite frankly and fiercely, for something else that would give color to her having burst her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she invoked it, and the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she could only help her to it. She presently got up, which seemed to mean, oh, stay if you like. And when she had moved about a while at random, looking away, looking at anything, at everything but her visitor, when she had spoken of the temperature and declared that she reveled in it, when she had uttered her thanks for the book, which, a little incoherently, with her second volume, she perhaps found less clever than she expected. When she had let Maggie approach sufficiently closer to lay untouched, the tribute in question on a bench, and take up obligingly its superfluous mate, when she had done these things, she sat down in another place, more or less visibly in possession of her part. Our young woman was to have passed in all her adventure no stranger moments, for she not only now saw her companion fairly agree to take her then for the poor little person she was finding it so easy to appear, but fell in a secret response of ecstasy to wondering if there were not some supreme objection with which she might be inspired. Vague, but increasingly brighter, this possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung their adequately plain to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to, as they said, grovel. And that truly made the stage large. It had absolutely within the time taken on the dazzling merit of being large for each of them alike. I'm glad to see you alone. There's something I've been wanting to say to you. I'm tired, said Mrs. Verver. I'm tired. Tired? It had dropped the next thing. It couldn't all come at once, but Maggie had already guessed what it was, and the flush of recognition was in her face. Tired of this life, the one we've been leading. You like it. I know, but I've dreamed another dream.  She was finding she was following her way. Maggie, by the same influence, sat inside of it. There was something she was saving, some quantity of which she herself was judge, and it was for a long moment, even with the sacrifice the Princess had come to make, a good deal like watching her from the solid shore plunge into uncertain and to possibly treacherous depths. I see something else, she went on. I have an idea that greatly appeals to me. I've had it for a long time. It has come over me that we're wrong. Our real life isn't here. Maggie held her breath. Hours? My husband's in mine. I'm not speaking for you.  I'm speaking for ourselves. I'm speaking, Charlotte brought out, for him. I see for my father, for your father, for whom else? They looked at each other hard now, but Maggie's face took refuge in the intensity of her interest.  I must risk your thinking me selfish, for of course you know what it involves. Let me admit it. I am selfish. I place my husband first. Well, said Maggie, smiling and smiling. Yes, that's where I place mine. You mean you'll have no quarrel with me? So much the better, then, for— Charlotte went on with a higher and higher flight. My plan is completely formed. Maggie waited. Her glimmer had deepened. Her chance somehow was at hand. The only danger was her spoiling it. She felt herself skirting an abyss. What then may I ask is your plan? It hung fire but ten seconds. It came out sharp. To take him home to his real position and not to wait. Do you mean this season? I mean immediately, and I may as well tell you now I mean for my own time. I want, Charlotte said, to have him at last a little to myself. I want, strange as it may seem to you. And she gave it all its weight. To keep the man I've married and to do so I see I must act. Maggie, with the effort still to follow the right line, felt herself color to the eyes. Immediately, she thoughtfully echoed. As soon as we can get off, the removal of everything is, after all, but a detail that can always be done, with money as he spends it everything can. What I asked for, Charlotte declared, is the definite break, and I wish it now. With which her head, like her voice, rose higher. Oh, she added, I know my difficulty. Far down below the level of attention, and she could scarce have said what sacred depths, these inspiration had come, and it had trembled the next moment into sound. Do you mean I'm your difficulty? You and he together, since it's always with you that I've had to see him. But it's the difficulty that I'm facing if you wish to know, that I've already faced, that I propose to myself to surmount. The struggle with it, none too pleasant, hasn't been for me, as you may imagine, in itself charming. I felt in it at times, if I must tell you all, too great and too strange an ugliness. Yet I believe it may succeed. She had risen with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved, for the emphasis of it, a few steps away, while Maggie, motionless at first, but sat and looked at her. You want to take my father from me? The sharp, successful, almost primitive wail, and it made Charlotte turn, and this movement attested for the Princess the felicity of her deceit. Something in her throbbed, as it had throbbed the night she stood in the drawing-room and denied that she had suffered. She was ready to lie again if her companion would but give her the opening. Then she should know she had done all. Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare her face with her note of resentment, and Maggie, feeling this, met it with the signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of defeat. I want really to possess him, said Mrs. Verver. I happen also to feel that he's worth it. Maggie rose as if to receive her. Oh, worth it!  The tone she instantly saw again had its effect. The flame deloft might truly have been believing in her passionate parade. You've thought you've known what he's worth? Indeed, then, my dear, I believe I have, as I believe I still do. She had given it Maggie straight back, and again it had not missed. Charlotte for another moment only looked at her, then broke into the words Maggie had known they would come, of which she had pressed the spring. How I see that you loathed our marriage. Do you ask me? Maggie after an instant demanded. Charlotte had looked about her, picked up the parasol she had laid on a bench, possessed herself mechanically of one of the volumes of the relegated novel, and then more consciously flung it down again. She was in presence visibly of her last word. She opened her sunshade with a click. She twirled it on her shoulder in her pride. Ask you? Do I need? How I see, she broke out, that you've worked against me. Oh, oh, oh! The Princess exclaimed. Her companion leaving her had reached one of the archways, but on this turned round with a flair. You haven't worked against me? Maggie took it and for a moment kept it, held it with closed eyes, as if it had been some captured fluttering bird pressed by both hands to her breast. Then she opened her eyes to speak. What does it matter if I've failed? You recognize, then, that you've failed? asked Charlotte from the threshold. Maggie waited. She looked, as her companion had done a moment before, at the two books on the seat. She put them together and laid them down. Then she made up her mind. I've failed. She sounded out before Charlotte, having given her time, walked away. She watched her, splendid and erect, float down the long vista. Then she sank upon a seat. Yes, she had done all. End of chapter 39.