uld represent him as in opposition--
was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of
alarm. Should he guess they were having, in their so occult manner,
a HIGH fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed
stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high--in the event of
his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.

The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that
observation, in him, there, would inevitably find some of its directness
diverted. This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain
of her father's placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some
larger part of his attention. Besides which there would be always
Charlotte herself to draw him off. Charlotte would help him again,
doubtless, to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic;
but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute, in
its degree, to protect the secret of her own fermentation. It is not
even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that
was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince's spirit, on his
nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects,
the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver's too perfect competence.
What it would most come to, after all, she said to herself, was a
renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch her. Very
well, then: with the elements after all so mixed in him, how long would
he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act? For she had by
this time made up her mind that in Charlotte's company he deferred to
Charlotte's easier art of mounting guard. Wouldn't he get tired--to put
it only at that--of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant,
with her lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to
and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? Maggie had gone far, truly
for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she was not
incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her
chickens before they were hatched. How sure she should have to be of
so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo's
expression and a logic in his weariness!

One of her dissimulated arts for meeting their tension, meanwhile,
was to interweave Mrs. Assingham as plausibly as possible with the
undulations of their surface, to bring it about that she should join
them,