f more sophisticated, tastes.

However that might be, the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily
recognised--and not least by herself--as filling in the intimate little
circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she
had taken, with her kind, melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible
engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that
sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of
leisure. It naturally led her position in the household, as, she called
it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good
couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form
of protest. She was there to keep him quiet--it was Amerigo's own
description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more
visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit.
Fanny herself limited indeed, she minimised, her office; you didn't
need a jailor, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink
ribbon. This was not an animal to be controlled--it was an animal to
be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was
educative--which Maggie was so aware that she herself, inevitably,
wasn't; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge
of was his mere intelligence. This left, goodness knew, plenty of
different calls for Maggie to meet--in a case in which so much pink
ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature.
What it all amounted to, at any rate, was that Mrs. Assingham would be
keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out
their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less
neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with them
there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first
time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he
was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of people, strange
English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so little
as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was
practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she hadn't
yet learned to see him as meeting such exposure in her absence. How did
he move and talk, how above all did he, or how WOULD he, look--he who,
with his so nobly handsome face, could look such wonderful things--in
case of being left alone with some of the subjects of