self incurably
dazzled, marvel afresh at the mystery by which a creature who could be
in some connexions 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 cicerone, 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 symmetries all restored.

There was a morning when, during the hour before luncheon and shortly
after the arrival of a neighbourly contingent--neighbourly 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
semi-scared (now that they were there!) knot 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 step-daughter
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, every one as 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 Assingham looked rapt in devotion--Fanny Assingham 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, in murmurous attestations of presence, at all such times,
and Maggie, advancing after a 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, marvellously, on a mute
appeal. "You u