at we SHALL feel." She was
splendid with her "ours"; she flared up with this prophecy. "It will be
Maggie herself who will mete it out."

"Maggie--?"

"SHE'LL know--about her father; everything. Everything," she repeated.
On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the
presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. "But she'll never
tell us."

XXXII

If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her
good friend or to any one else, more than she meant about her father,
she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the
week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned
to Fawns for the summer. This was because of the odd element of the
unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by
the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto. She was used,
herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she
dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it
was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone
with them. She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him
as alone with Charlotte--and this, strangely enough, even while fixing
her sense to the full on his wife's power of preserving, quite of
enhancing, every felicitous appearance. Charlotte had done that--under
immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed--during the numerous months of
their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful
reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the
virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs. Verver's stepdaughter
at least, such remarkable fruit. It was the present so much briefer
interval, in a situation, possibly in a relation, so changed--it was the
new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte's art. The Princess
could pull herself up, repeatedly, by remembering that the real
"relation" between her father and his wife was a thing that she knew
nothing about and that, in strictness, was none of her business; but she
none the less failed to keep quiet, as she would have called it, before
the projected image of their ostensibly happy isolation. Nothing could
have had less of the quality of quietude than a certain queer wish that
fitfully flickered up in her, a wish that usurped, perversely, the place
of a much more natural one. If Charlotte, while she was about it, could