. She knew at this moment, without a question, with the fullest
surrender, how he had brought off, in her, by scarce more than a single
allusion, a perfect flutter of tenderness. If he had come back tired,
tired from his long day, the exertion had been, literally, in her
service and her father's. They two had sat at home at peace, the
Principino between them, the complications of life kept down, the bores
sifted out, the large ease of the home preserved, because of the way
the others held the field and braved the weather. Amerigo never
complained--any more than, for that matter, Charlotte did; but she
seemed to see to-night as she had never yet quite done that their
business of social representation, conceived as they conceived it,
beyond any conception of her own, and conscientiously carried out, was
an affair of living always in harness. She remembered Fanny Assingham's
old judgment, that friend's description of her father and herself as not
living at all, as not knowing what to do or what might be done for them;
and there came back to her with it an echo of the long talk they had
had together, one September day at Fawns, under the trees, when she put
before him this dictum of Fanny's.

That occasion might have counted for them--she had already often made
the reflection--as the first step in an existence more intelligently
arranged. It had been an hour from which the chain of causes and
consequences was definitely traceable--so many things, and at the head
of the list her father's marriage, having appeared to her to flow from
Charlotte's visit to Fawns, and that event itself having flowed from
the memorable talk. But what perhaps most came out in the light of these
concatenations was that it had been, for all the world, as if Charlotte
had been "had in," as the servants always said of extra help, because
they had thus suffered it to be pointed out to them that if their family
coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking its complement of
wheels. Having but three, as they might say, it had wanted another, and
what had Charlotte done from the first but begin to act, on the spot,
and ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth? Nothing had been,
immediately, more manifest than the greater grace of the movement of the
vehicle--as to which, for the completeness of her image, Maggie was now
supremely to feel how every strain had been lightened for herself. So
far as SHE was one of the wheels she had but to keep in