only have been WORSE!--that idea Maggie fell to invoking instead of the
idea that she might desirably have been better. For, exceedingly odd as
it was to feel in such ways, she believed she mightn't have worried so
much if she didn't somehow make her stepmother out, under the beautiful
trees and among the dear old gardens, as lavish of fifty kinds of
confidence and twenty kinds, at least, of gentleness. Gentleness and
confidence were certainly the right thing, as from a charming woman to
her husband, but the fine tissue of reassurance woven by this lady's
hands and flung over her companion as a light, muffling veil, formed
precisely a wrought transparency through which she felt her father's
eyes continually rest on herself. The reach of his gaze came to her
straighter from a distance; it showed him as still more conscious, down
there alone, of the suspected, the felt elaboration of the process of
their not alarming or hurting him. She had herself now, for weeks and
weeks, and all unwinkingly, traced the extension of this pious effort;
but her perfect success in giving no sign--she did herself THAT
credit--would have been an achievement quite wasted if Mrs. Verver
should make with him those mistakes of proportion, one set of them too
abruptly, too incoherently designed to correct another set, that she had
made with his daughter. However, if she HAD been worse, poor woman, who
should say that her husband would, to a certainty, have been better?

One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not
even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her
in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry
which would tend, by his calculation, to brush private criticism from
its last perching-place. The truth was, in this connection, that she
had different sorts of terrors, and there were hours when it came to
her that these days were a prolonged repetition of that night-drive, of
weeks before, from the other house to their own, when he had tried to
charm her, by his sovereign personal power, into some collapse that
would commit her to a repudiation of consistency. She was never alone
with him, it was to be said, without her having sooner or later to ask
herself what had already become of her consistency; yet, at the same
time, so long as she breathed no charge, she kept hold of a remnant of
appearance that could save her from attack. Attack, real attack, from
him, as he wou