thing but peace--an extravagant, expressive, aggressive peace, not
incongruous, after all, with the solid calm of the place; a kind of
helmetted, trident-shaking pax Britannica.

The peace, it must be added, had become, as the days elapsed, a peace
quite generally animated and peopled--thanks to that fact of the
presence of "company" in which Maggie's ability to preserve an
appearance had learned, from so far back, to find its best resource. It
was not inconspicuous, it was in fact striking, that this resource, just
now, seemed to meet in the highest degree every one's need: quite as if
every one were, by the multiplication of human objects in the scene, by
the creation, by the confusion, of fictive issues, hopeful of escaping
somebody else's notice. It had reached the point, in truth, that the
collective bosom might have been taken to heave with the knowledge of
the descent upon adjacent shores, for a short period, of Mrs. Rance and
the Lutches, still united, and still so divided, for conquest: the sense
of the party showed at least, oddly enough, as favourable to the fancy
of the quaint turn that some near "week-end" might derive from their
reappearance. This measured for Maggie the ground they had all travelled
together since that unforgotten afternoon of the none so distant year,
that determinant September Sunday when, sitting with her father in the
park, as in commemoration of the climax both of their old order and of
their old danger, she had proposed to him that they should "call
in" Charlotte,--call her in as a specialist might be summoned to an
invalid's chair. Wasn't it a sign of something rather portentous, their
being ready to be beholden, as for a diversion, to the once despised
Kitty and Dotty? That had already had its application, in truth, to her
invocation of the Castledeans and several other members, again, of
the historic Matcham week, made before she left town, and made, always
consistently, with an idea--since she was never henceforth to approach
these people without an idea, and since that lurid element of their
intercourse grew and grew for her with each occasion. The flame with
which it burned afresh during these particular days, the way it held up
the torch to anything, to everything, that MIGHT have occurred as the
climax of revels springing from traditions so vivified--this by itself
justified her private motive and reconsecrated her diplomacy. She had
already produced by the aid of these peopl