ter the
occasion had come and gone she was confirmed in her optimism; she made
out, in the evening, that the hour spent among the projected lights, the
annals and illustrations, the parchments and portraits, the emblazoned
volumes and the murmured commentary, had been for the Princess enlarging
and inspiring. Maggie had said to her some days before, very sweetly but
very firmly, "Invite us to dine, please, for Friday, and have any one
you like or you can--it doesn't in the least matter whom;" and the pair
in Cadogan Place had bent to this mandate with a docility not in the
least ruffled by all that it took for granted.

It provided for an evening--this had been Maggie's view; and she lived
up to her view, in her friend's eyes, by treating the occasion, more or
less explicitly, as new and strange. The good Assinghams had feasted in
fact at the two other boards on a scale so disproportionate to the scant
solicitations of their own that it was easy to make a joke of seeing how
they fed at home, how they met, themselves, the question of giving to
eat. Maggie dined with them, in short, and arrived at making her husband
appear to dine, much in the manner of a pair of young sovereigns who
have, in the frolic humour of the golden years of reigns, proposed
themselves to a pair of faithfully-serving subjects. She showed an
interest in their arrangements, an inquiring tenderness almost for their
economies; so that her hostess not unnaturally, as they might have
said, put it all down--the tone and the freedom of which she set the
example--to the effect wrought in her afresh by one of the lessons
learned, in the morning, at the altar of the past. Hadn't she picked it
up, from an anecdote or two offered again to her attention, that there
were, for princesses of such a line, more ways than one of being a
heroine? Maggie's way to-night was to surprise them all, truly, by
the extravagance of her affability. She was doubtless not positively
boisterous; yet, though Mrs. Assingham, as a bland critic, had never
doubted her being graceful, she had never seen her put so much of it
into being what might have been called assertive. It was all a tune
to which Fanny's heart could privately palpitate: her guest was happy,
happy as a consequence of something that had occurred, but she was
making the Prince not lose a ripple of her laugh, though not perhaps
always enabling him to find it absolutely not foolish. Foolish, in
public, beyond a certain p