spread
about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its
ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns--which
was much to the point--in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore
were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have
been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost
effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final
irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary
substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at
so contented a view of his conduct and course--a state of mind that was
positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on
his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this
wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to
himself. It wasn't that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything
monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they
said, to "happen"; there were only odd moments when the breath of the
day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke
out with all the hilarity of "What indeed would THEY have made of it?"
"They" were of course Maggie and her father, moping--so far as they
ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the
belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were
in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely
nothing on earth worth speaking of--whether beautifully or cynically;
and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would
only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn't one of their
needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.
They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good
children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently
of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the
trio.

The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in
particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense
of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or
even that her father's wife, should prove to have been made, for the
long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one
was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham;
whereas if one wasn't one had no business there on the particular
ter