o what was insidious in these foredoomed
ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the
weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her--the duty of speaking
before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some
benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object
of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and
negotiable some day in the market of misery.

This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help herself was
one of the traps set for Maggie's spirit at every turn of the road;
the click of which, catching and holding the divine faculty fast, was
followed inevitably by a flutter, by a struggle of wings and even, as
we may say, by a scattering of fine feathers. For they promptly enough
felt, these yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy, the
concussion that couldn't bring them down--the arrest produced by the so
remarkably distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was
constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any
watched perspective. Whoever knew, or whoever didn't, whether or to what
extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled
other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of
quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made
his own. It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his
white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands in his pockets, of the
detachment of the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his
secure pince-nez. The thing that never failed now as an item in the
picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife's immaterial
tether, so marked to Maggie's sense during her last month in the
country. Mrs. Verver's straight neck had certainly not slipped it;
nor had the other end of the long cord--oh, quite conveniently
long!--disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with
his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have
recognised, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might
inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension
subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its
office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the
Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her
father knew that she even yet didn't!

All this, at present, with Mrs. Assingham, passed through h