a journey abroad with her father
would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own,
to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of
the idea, in fact, had been in some such sublimity. Day after day
she put off the moment of "speaking," as she inwardly and very
comprehensively, called it--speaking, that is, to her father; and all
the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as to his himself
breaking silence. She gave him time, gave him, during several days, that
morning, that noon, that night, and the next and the next and the next;
even made up her mind that if he stood off longer it would be proof
conclusive that he too wasn't at peace. They would then have been, all
successfully, throwing dust in each other's eyes; and it would be at
last as if they must turn away their faces, since the silver mist that
protected them had begun to grow sensibly thin. Finally, at the end of
April, she decided that if he should say nothing for another period of
twenty-four hours she must take it as showing that they were, in her
private phraseology, lost; so little possible sincerity could there be
in pretending to care for a journey to Spain at the approach of a summer
that already promised to be hot. Such a proposal, on his lips, such an
extravagance of optimism, would be HIS way of being consistent--for that
he didn't really want to move, or to move further, at the worst, than
back to Fawns again, could only signify that he wasn't, at heart,
contented. What he wanted, at any rate, and what he didn't want were, in
the event, put to the proof for Maggie just in time to give her a fresh
wind. She had been dining, with her husband, in Eaton Square, on the
occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady
Castledean. The propriety of some demonstration of this sort had been
for many days before our group, the question reduced to the mere issue
of which of the two houses should first take the field. The issue had
been easily settled--in the manner of every issue referred in any degree
to Amerigo and Charlotte: the initiative obviously belonged to Mrs.
Verver, who had gone to Matcham while Maggie had stayed away, and the
evening in Eaton Square might have passed for a demonstration all the
more personal that the dinner had been planned on "intimate" lines. Six
other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matcham,
made up the company, and each of these p