sence of visitors, never, as the 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 gold-fish, 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 in a haunted house, a great overarched and overglazed rotunda,
where gaiety might reign, but 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 save the door
that connected the place, as by a straight tented corridor, with the
outer world, and, encouraging thus the irruption of society, imitated
the aperture through which the bedizened 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, her