arlier, to Fanny Assingham. She had known it in advance,
had warned herself of it while the house was full: Charlotte had designs
upon her of a nature best known to herself, and was only waiting for the
better opportunity of their finding themselves less companioned.
This consciousness had been exactly at the bottom of Maggie's wish
to multiply their spectators; there were moments for her, positively,
moments of planned postponement, of evasion scarcely less disguised
than studied, during which she turned over with anxiety the different
ways--there being two or three possible ones--in which her young
stepmother might, at need, seek to work upon her. Amerigo's not having
"told" her of his passage with his wife gave, for Maggie, altogether a
new aspect to Charlotte's consciousness and condition--an aspect
with which, for apprehension, for wonder, and even, at moments,
inconsequently enough, for something like compassion, the Princess had
now to reckon. She asked herself--for she was capable of that--what he
had MEANT by keeping the sharer of his guilt in the dark about a matter
touching her otherwise so nearly; what he had meant, that is, for this
unmistakably mystified personage herself. Maggie could imagine what he
had meant for her--all sorts of thinkable things, whether things of mere
"form" or things of sincerity, things of pity or things of prudence: he
had meant, for instance, in all probability, primarily, to conjure away
any such appearance of a changed relation between the two women as his
father-in-law might notice and follow up. It would have been open to him
however, given the pitch of their intimacy, to avert this danger by some
more conceivable course with Charlotte; since an earnest warning, in
fact, the full freedom of alarm, that of his insisting to her on the
peril of suspicion incurred, and on the importance accordingly of
outward peace at any price, would have been the course really most
conceivable. Instead of warning and advising he had reassured and
deceived her; so that our young woman, who had been, from far back,
by the habit, if her nature, as much on her guard against sacrificing
others as if she felt the great trap of life mainly to be set for one's
doing so, now found herself attaching her fancy to that side of the
situation of the exposed pair which involved, for themselves at least,
the sacrifice of the least fortunate.

She never, at present, thought of what Amerigo might be intending,
wi