k the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but
an instant to sound, at any risk, the note she had been privately
practising. If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on
Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs. Verver,
and it immensely helped her, for that matter, to be able at once to
speak of the Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her
curiosity. Frankly and gaily she had come to ask--to ask what, in their
unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved. She had got out of
her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the
persons who answered such questions ideally. He had only made her more
curious, and she had arrived early, this way, in order to miss as little
as possible of Charlotte's story.

"Wives, papa," she said; "are always much better reporters--though I
grant," she added for Charlotte, "that fathers are not much better than
husbands. He never," she smiled, "tells me more than a tenth of what you
tell him; so I hope you haven't told him everything yet, since in that
case I shall probably have lost the best part of it." Maggie went, she
went--she felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who had
been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage,
before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the
text. It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept
her up, made her rise higher: just as it was the sense of action that
logically involved some platform--action quite positively for the
first time in her life, or, counting in the previous afternoon, for the
second. The platform remained for three or four days thus sensibly under
her feet, and she had all the while, with it, the inspiration of quite
remarkably, of quite heroically improvising. Preparation and practice
had come but a short way; her part opened out, and she invented from
moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art--to
keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for
a week how far that would take her. She said to herself, in her
excitement, that it was perfectly simple: to bring about a difference,
touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all
her father, so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they
would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn't
ready with a reason--not, that is, with what she would ha