he couldn't not have shown--that she had arrived
with an idea; quite exactly as she had shown her husband, the night
before, that she was awaiting him with a sentiment. This analogy in the
two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of a kinship of
expression in the two faces in respect to which all she as yet
professed to herself was that she had affected them, or at any rate the
sensibility each of them so admirably covered, in the same way. To make
the comparison at all was, for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood
upon it, to extract from it the last dregs of its interest--to play with
it, in short, nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played
with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait
and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness that no
effort would ever snap. The miniatures were back to back, but she saw
them forever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other
she found in Charlotte's eyes the gleam of the momentary "What does she
really want?" that had come and gone for her in the Prince's. So again,
she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland
Place and in Eaton Square, as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted
no harm--wanted no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in
that she meant to go out with her. She had been present at that process
as personally as she might have been present at some other domestic
incident--the hanging of a new picture, say, or the fitting of the
Principino with his first little trousers.

She remained present, accordingly, all the week, so charmingly and
systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome her company. Charlotte had
but wanted the hint, and what was it but the hint, after all, that,
during the so subdued but so ineffaceable passage in the breakfast-room,
she had seen her take? It had been taken moreover not with resignation,
not with qualifications or reserves, however bland; it had been taken
with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of gentleness that supplanted
explanations. The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed
have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter--as if
it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and
had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these
caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that
the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, t