ellent service. He was acting in short on a cue, the cue given him
by observation; it had been enough for him to see the shade of change
in her behaviour; his instinct for relations, the most exquisite
conceivable, prompted him immediately to meet and match the difference,
to play somehow into its hands. That was what it was, she renewedly
felt, to have married a man who was, sublimely, a gentleman; so that,
in spite of her not wanting to translate ALL their delicacies into the
grossness of discussion, she yet found again and again, in Portland
Place, moments for saying: "If I didn't love you, you know, for
yourself, I should still love you for HIM." He looked at her, after
such speeches, as Charlotte looked, in Eaton Square, when she called HER
attention to his benevolence: through the dimness of the almost musing
smile that took account of her extravagance, harmless though it might
be, as a tendency to reckon with. "But my poor child," Charlotte might
under this pressure have been on the point of replying, "that's the way
nice people ARE, all round--so that why should one be surprised about
it? We're all nice together--as why shouldn't we be? If we hadn't been
we wouldn't have gone far--and I consider that we've gone very far
indeed. Why should you 'take on' as if you weren't a perfect dear
yourself, capable of all the sweetest things?--as if you hadn't in fact
grown up in an atmosphere, the atmosphere of all the good things that
I recognised, even of old, as soon as I came near you, and that you've
allowed me now, between you, to make so blessedly my own." Mrs. Verver
might in fact have but just failed to make another point, a point
charmingly natural to her as a grateful and irreproachable wife. "It
isn't a bit wonderful, I may also remind you, that your husband should
find, when opportunity permits, worse things to do than to go about with
mine. I happen, love, to appreciate my husband--I happen perfectly to
understand that his acquaintance should be cultivated and his company
enjoyed."

Some such happily-provoked remarks as these, from Charlotte, at the
other house, had been in the air, but we have seen how there was also
in the air, for our young woman, as an emanation from the same source,
a distilled difference of which the very principle was to keep down
objections and retorts. That impression came back--it had its hours of
doing so; and it may interest us on the ground of its having prompted
in Maggie a final