ed it--that had 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 Lutches--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
past, 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 spectres 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 Castledeans. The Castledeans 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.

Sharp 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 neighbours, would do beautifully
without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into
some boat and paddled off from the shore where