e something of the effect she
sought--that of being "good" for whatever her companions were good for,
and of not asking either of them to give up anyone or anything for her
sake. There was moreover, frankly, a sharpness of point in it that she
enjoyed; it gave an accent to the truth she wished to illustrate--the
truth that the surface of her recent life, thick-sown with the flower of
earnest endeavour, with every form of the unruffled and the undoubting,
suffered no symptom anywhere to peep out. It was as if, under her
pressure, neither party could get rid of the complicity, as it might be
figured, of the other; as if, in a word, she saw Amerigo and Charlotte
committed, for fear of betrayals on their own side, to a kind of wan
consistency on the subject of Lady Castledean's "set," and this latter
group, by the same stroke, compelled to assist at attestations the
extent and bearing of which they rather failed to grasp and which left
them indeed, in spite of hereditary high spirits, a trifle bewildered
and even a trifle scared.

They made, none the less, at Fawns, for number, for movement, for
sound--they played their parts during a crisis that must have hovered
for them, in the long passages of the old house, after the fashion
of the established ghost, felt, through the dark hours as a constant
possibility, rather than have menaced them in the form of a daylight
bore, one of the perceived outsiders who are liable to be met in the
drawing-room or to be sat next to at dinner. If the Princess, moreover,
had failed of her occult use for so much of the machinery of diversion,
she would still have had a sense not other than sympathetic for the
advantage now extracted from it by Fanny Assingham's bruised philosophy.
This good friend's relation to it was actually the revanche, she
sufficiently indicated, of her obscured lustre at Matcham, where she had
known her way about so much less than most of the others. She knew it
at Fawns, through the pathless wild of the right tone, positively
better than any one, Maggie could note for her; and her revenge had the
magnanimity of a brave pointing out of it to every one else, a wonderful
irresistible, conscious, almost compassionate patronage. Here was a
house, she triumphantly caused it to be noted, in which she so bristled
with values that some of them might serve, by her amused willingness to
share, for such of the temporarily vague, among her fellow-guests, such
of the dimly disconcer