,
operated slightly overmuch as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb
her at the very hour of her husband's showing her that, to be all
there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required--as one of the other
phrases was too--the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the
straight tip, in his moods of amusement at English slang, in his
remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes
and higher inspirations; and he had taken it from her, at need, in a way
that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval
seem large. Then, however, immediately, and even though superficially,
there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was,
once more, practically a little sacrificed. "I must do everything," she
had said, "without letting papa see what I do--at least till it's done!"
but she scarce knew how she proposed, even for the next few days, to
blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly
enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her stepmother
had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been
rather snatched again thereby from her husband's side, so, on the
other hand, this had, with as little delay, entailed some very charming
assistance for her in Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte,
from whatever happy demonstration, for the benefit of the world in which
they supposed themselves to live, that there was no smallest reason why
their closer association shouldn't be public and acclaimed--at these
times she regularly found that Amerigo had come either to sit with his
father-in-law in the absence of the ladies, or to make, on his side,
precisely some such display of the easy working of the family life as
would represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte. Under
this particular impression it was that everything in Maggie most
melted and went to pieces--every thing, that is, that belonged to
her disposition to challenge the perfection of their common state. It
divided them again, that was true, this particular turn of the tide--cut
them up afresh into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the
equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power of insistence;
quite as if Amerigo himself were all the while, at bottom, equally
thinking of it and watching it. But, as against that, he was making her
father not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of them a more
exc