ersons had for Maggie the
interest of an attested connection with the Easter revels at that
visionary house. Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly
left behind it an ineffaceable charm--this air of beatific reference,
less subdued in the others than in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them,
together, an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman's
imagination broke in a small vain wave.

It wasn't that she wished she had been of the remembered party and
possessed herself of its secrets; for she didn't care about its
secrets--she could concern herself at present, absolutely, with no
secret but her own. What occurred was simply that she became aware, at a
stroke, of the quantity of further nourishment required by her own, and
of the amount of it she might somehow extract from these people; whereby
she rose, of a sudden, to the desire to possess and use them, even to
the extent of braving, of fairly defying, of directly exploiting, of
possibly quite enjoying, under cover of an evil duplicity, the felt
element of curiosity with which they regarded her. Once she was
conscious of the flitting wing of this last impression--the perception,
irresistible, that she was something for their queer experience, just as
they were something for hers--there was no limit to her conceived design
of not letting them escape. She went and went, again, to-night, after
her start was taken; went, positively, as she had felt herself going,
three weeks before, on the morning when the vision of her father and
his wife awaiting her together in the breakfast-room had been so
determinant. In this other scene it was Lady Castledean who was
determinant, who kindled the light, or at all events the heat, and who
acted on the nerves; Lady Castledean whom she knew she, so oddly, didn't
like, in spite of reasons upon reasons, the biggest diamonds on the
yellowest hair, the longest lashes on the prettiest, falsest eyes,
the oldest lace on the most violet velvet, the rightest manner on the
wrongest assumption. Her ladyship's assumption was that she kept, at
every moment of her life, every advantage--it made her beautifully soft,
very nearly generous; so she didn't distinguish the little protuberant
eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range, from
the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings. Maggie had liked,
in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she
had thought it right to fear, right eve