his wonder?
There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie
herself had her own odd way--which didn't moreover the least irritate
him--of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her
as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused himself with
declaring, this love of chinoiseries; but she actually this evening
didn't mind--he might deal with her Chinese as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener
occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs. Assingham's, a
word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory
which we have just found in our path. It wasn't that the Princess could
be indebted to another person, even to so clever a one as this friend,
for seeing anything in her husband that she mightn't see unaided; but
she had ever, hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude
any better description of a felt truth than her little limits--terribly
marked, she knew, in the direction of saying the right things--enabled
her to make. Thus it was, at any rate, that she was able to live more
or less in the light of the fact expressed so lucidly by their common
comforter--the fact that the Prince was saving up, for some very
mysterious but very fine eventual purpose, all the wisdom, all the
answers to his questions, all the impressions and generalisations, he
gathered; putting them away and packing them down because he wanted his
great gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to let it
off. He wanted first to make sure of the whole of the subject that was
unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he had
collected would find their use. He knew what he was about---trust him
at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big noise. And Mrs.
Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was about. It was the happy
form of this assurance that had remained with Maggie; it could always
come in for her that Amerigo knew what he was about. He might at moments
seem vague, seem absent, seem even bored: this when, away from her
father, with whom it was impossible for him to appear anything but
respectfully occupied, he let his native gaiety go in outbreaks of
song, or even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of
intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at times
reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was
for a g