compare hours and appearances, to weigh the idea of whether there
hadn't been moments, during these days, when an assignation, in easy
conditions, a snatched interview, in an air the season had so cleared
of prying eyes, mightn't perfectly work. But the very reason of this was
partly that, haunted with the vision of the poor woman carrying off
with such bravery as she found to her hand the secret of her not being
appeased, she was conscious of scant room for any alternative image.
The alternative image would have been that the secret covered up was the
secret of appeasement somehow obtained, somehow extorted and cherished;
and the difference between the two kinds of hiding was too great to
permit of a mistake. Charlotte was hiding neither pride nor joy--she
was hiding humiliation; and here it was that the Princess's passion,
so powerless for vindictive flights, most inveterately bruised its
tenderness against the hard glass of her question.

Behind the glass lurked the WHOLE history of the relation she had so
fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrate--the glass Mrs. Verver
might, at this stage, have been frantically tapping, from within, by
way of supreme, irrepressible entreaty. Maggie had said to herself
complacently, after that last passage with her stepmother in the garden
of Fawns, that there was nothing left for her to do and that she could
thereupon fold her hands. But why wasn't it still left to push further
and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel lower?--why wasn't
it still left to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to
him their friend's anguish and convincing him of her need?

She could thus have translated Mrs. Verver's tap against the glass, as I
have called it, into fifty forms; could perhaps have translated it most
into the form of a reminder that would pierce deep. "You don't know what
it is to have been loved and broken with. You haven't been broken with,
because in your RELATION what can there have been, worth speaking of, to
break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with
the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better
meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your
hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why
condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame--oh,
the golden flame!--a mere handful of black ashes?" Our young woman
so yielded, at moments, t