of human furniture required, esthetically, by
such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements,
their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and
admirable; though, to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than
the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete
attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in
the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his
thought stopped? "Le compte y est. You've got some good things."

Maggie met it afresh--"Ah, don't they look well?" Their companions, at
the sound of this, gave them, in a spacious intermission of slow talk,
an attention, all of gravity, that was like an ampler submission to the
general duty of magnificence; sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as
a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of
Madame Tussaud. "I'm so glad--for your last look."

With which, after Maggie--quite in the air--had said it, the note was
struck indeed; the note of that strange accepted finality of relation,
as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by
not attempting a gloss. Yes, this was the wonder, that the occasion
defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it
dealt--so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting.
To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question
its grounds--which was why they remained, in fine, the four of them, in
the upper air, united in the firmest abstention from pressure. There was
no point, visibly, at which, face to face, either Amerigo or Charlotte
had pressed; and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie
scarce needed to remember. That her father wouldn't, by the tip of a
toe--of that she was equally conscious: the only thing was that, since
he didn't, she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead.
When, at the end of three minutes more, he had said, with an effect of
suddenness, "Well, Mag--and the Principino?" it was quite as if that
were, by contrast, the hard, the truer voice.

She glanced at the clock. "I 'ordered' him for half-past five--which
hasn't yet struck. Trust him, my dear, not to fail you!"

"Oh, I don't want HIM to fail me!" was Mr. Verver's reply; yet uttered
in so explicitly jocose a relation to the possibilities of failure that
even when, just afterwards, he wandered in his impatience to one of th