all, if she was
guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must
have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in
a flash, seen daylight for herself--most of all had she tasted, by
communication, of the high profit involved for her companion. She
FELT, in all her pulses, Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been
required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement. It was the added
touch, and now nothing was wanting--which, to do her stepmother
justice, Mrs. Verver had appeared but to desire, from that evening, to
show, with the last vividness, that she recognised. Maggie lived over
again the minutes in question--had found herself repeatedly doing so; to
the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as
a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had
for instance--animated the four with just the right restlessness too,
had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their
game of bridge--however abysmal a face it had worn for her--give way,
precisely, to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate
Charlotte's impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached
detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness
and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.

If Mrs. Verver meanwhile, then, had struck her as determined in a
certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had
flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail of appreciating the truth
that she 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--seen her decide that the right way for this would be to
prove that the reassurance she had extorted there, under the high, cool
lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of crystal and silver, 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 veracious 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