stance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the
imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses.
The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do--she
could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the
failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her
everything, and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence.
She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the
justice and felicity of her exemption--so that wouldn't there have
been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell's, depths of
practical derision of her success?

The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the time the
party at luncheon had begun to disperse--with Maggie's version of Mrs.
Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as
a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest's eyes before
they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such
wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of
saying to her, in abysmal softness: "Go to Mrs. Verver, my child--YOU
go: you'll find that you can help her." This didn't come, however;
nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied
stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the
hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon. Nothing came but
the receding backs of each of the others--her father's slightly bent
shoulders, in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the force of
habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been present. Her husband
indeed was present to feel anything there might be to feel--which was
perhaps exactly why this personage was moved promptly to emulate so
definite an example of "sloping." He had his occupations--books to
arrange perhaps even at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all
the conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie, was, in the
event, left alone for a minute with Mrs. Assingham, who, after waiting
for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage
of "talking over" had long passed for them; when they communicated now
it was on quite ultimate facts; but Fanny desired to testify to the
existence, on her part, of an attention that nothing escaped. She was
like the kind lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the
rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls i