awls. The entertainment
offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he
were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not
insistently incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note
of this almost Arcadian optimism: a large, bright, dull, murmurous,
mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland,
though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable
couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by
a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince
knew, Maggie's anxiety had conferred with Charlotte's ingenuity and both
had supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr. Verver's solvency.

The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the foot of
the social ladder, and with the Colonel's wife, in spite of her humility
of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other
person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because, in the
first place, she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where
so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and
the standard of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the
second, the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence
of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially,
well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It was not indistinguishable
to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in
perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so
visibly to simplify itself--and this, he knew, in spite of any desire
she entertained--to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the
felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew,
as well, the other things of which her appearance was at any time--and
in Eaton Square especially--made up: her resemblance to her father, at
times so vivid, and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions,
like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had
hit it off for her once in Rome, in the first flushed days, after their
engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement
but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench;
her approximation, finally--for it was analogy, somehow, more than
identity--to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative
propriety that made up, in his long line, the aver