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 occasion 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 people with
images--again 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 Wagnerian
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, all so pitifully, their precious
confidence. Therefore, though there was in these days, for her, with
Amerigo, 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 active 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 w