, visibly, had patched itself together for her that
the dear woman had somehow, from the early time, had a hand in ALL
their fortunes, so that there was no turn of their common relations
and affairs that couldn't be traced back in some degree to her original
affectionate interest. On this affectionate interest the good lady's
young friend now built, before her eyes--very much as a wise, or even
as a mischievous, child, playing on the floor, might pile up blocks,
skilfully and dizzily, with an eye on the face of a covertly-watching
elder.

When the blocks tumbled down they but acted after the nature of blocks;
yet the hour would come for their rising so high that the structure
would have to be noticed and admired. Mrs. Assingham's appearance of
unreservedly giving herself involved meanwhile, on her own side, no
separate recognitions: her face of almost anxious attention was directed
altogether to her young friend's so vivid felicity; it suggested that
she took for granted, at the most, certain vague recent enhancements of
that state. If the Princess now, more than before, was going and going,
she was prompt to publish that she beheld her go, that she had always
known she WOULD, sooner or later, and that any appeal for participation
must more or less contain and invite the note of triumph. There was a
blankness in her blandness, assuredly, and very nearly an extravagance
in her generalising gaiety; a precipitation of cheer particularly marked
whenever they met again after short separations: meetings during the
first flush of which Maggie sometimes felt reminded of other looks in
other faces; of two strangely unobliterated impressions above all, the
physiognomic light that had played out in her husband at the shock--she
had come at last to talk to herself of the "shock"--of his first vision
of her on his return from Matcham and Gloucester, and the wonder of
Charlotte's beautiful bold wavering gaze when, the next morning in Eaton
Square, this old friend had turned from the window to begin to deal with
her.

If she had dared to think of it so crudely she would have said that
Fanny was afraid of her, afraid of something she might say or do, even
as, for their few brief seconds, Amerigo and Charlotte had been--which
made, exactly, an expressive element common to the three. The difference
however was that this look had in the dear woman its oddity of a
constant renewal, whereas it had never for the least little instant
again