their function--had, in
short, startled and impressed, abandoned their post. "They're paralysed,
they're paralysed!" she commented, deep within; so much it helped her
own apprehension to hang together that they should suddenly lose their
bearings.

Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion to her view of
causes; but it came to her then and there that if she could only get the
facts of appearance straight, only jam them down into their place, the
reasons lurking behind them, kept uncertain, for the eyes, by their
wavering and shifting, wouldn't perhaps be able to help showing. It
wasn't of course that the Prince and Mrs. Verver marvelled to see her
civil to their friends; it was rather, precisely, that civil was just
what she wasn't: she had so departed from any such custom of delicate
approach--approach by the permitted note, the suggested "if," the
accepted vagueness--as would enable the people in question to put
her off if they wished. And the profit of her plan, the effect of the
violence she was willing to let it go for, was exactly in their BEING
the people in question, people she had seemed to be rather shy of before
and for whom she suddenly opened her mouth so wide. Later on, we may
add, with the ground soon covered by her agitated but resolute step, it
was to cease to matter what people they were or weren't; but meanwhile
the particular sense of them that she had taken home to-night had done
her the service of seeming to break the ice where that formation was
thickest. Still more unexpectedly, the service might have been the same
for her father; inasmuch as, immediately, when everyone had gone, he did
exactly what she had been waiting for and despairing of--and did it, as
he did everything, with a simplicity that left any purpose of sounding
him deeper, of drawing him out further, of going, in his own frequent
phrase, "behind" what he said, nothing whatever to do. He brought it out
straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea
of what they should lose by breaking the charm: "I guess we won't go
down there after all, will we, Mag?--just when it's getting so pleasant
here." That was all, with nothing to lead up to it; but it was done
for her at a stroke, and done, not less, more rather, for Amerigo and
Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost
breathlessly measured it, was prodigious. Everything now so fitted for
her to everything else that she co