"I shall make it my own," he answered. "I shall tell her I lied to her."

"Ah no!" she returned.

"And I shall tell her you did."

She shook her head again. "Oh, still less!"

With which therefore they stood at difference, he with his head erect
and his happy idea perched, in its eagerness, on his crest. "And how
then is she to know?"

"She isn't to know."

"She's only still to think you don't--?"

"And therefore that I'm always a fool? She may think," said Maggie,
"what she likes."

"Think it without my protest--?"

The Princess made a movement. "What business is it of yours?"

"Isn't it my right to correct her--?"

Maggie let his question ring--ring long enough for him to hear it
himself; only then she took it up. "'Correct' her?"--and it was her own
now that really rang. "Aren't you rather forgetting who she is?" After
which, while he quite stared for it, as it was the very first clear
majesty he had known her to use, she flung down her book and raised a
warning hand. "The carriage. Come!"

The "Come!" had matched, for lucid firmness, the rest of her speech,
and, when they were below, in the hall, there was a "Go!" for him,
through the open doors and between the ranged servants, that matched
even that. He received Royalty, bareheaded, therefore, in the persons of
Mr. and Mrs. Verver, as it alighted on the pavement, and Maggie was at
the threshold to welcome it to her house. Later on, upstairs again, she
even herself felt still more the force of the limit of which she
had just reminded him; at tea, in Charlotte's affirmed presence--as
Charlotte affirmed it--she drew a long breath of richer relief. It was
the strangest, once more, of all impressions; but what she most felt,
for the half-hour, was that Mr. and Mrs. Verver were making the occasion
easy. They were somehow conjoined in it, conjoined for a present effect
as Maggie had absolutely never yet seen them; and there occurred, before
long, a moment in which Amerigo's look met her own in recognitions that
he couldn't suppress. The question of the amount of correction to which
Charlotte had laid herself open rose and hovered, for the instant, only
to sink, conspicuously, by its own weight; so high a pitch she seemed
to give to the unconsciousness of questions, so resplendent a show of
serenity she succeeded in making. The shade of the official, in her
beauty and security, never for a moment dropped; it was a cool, high
refuge, like the deep, arched r