h periodical, she was to fail,
for refreshment, even of that sip of independence.

There was no question for her, as she found, of closing her eyes and
getting away; they strayed back to life, in the stillness, over the top
of her Review; she could lend herself to none of those refinements of
the higher criticism with which its pages bristled; she was there, where
her companions were, there again and more than ever there; it was as if,
of a sudden, they had been made, in their personal intensity and their
rare complexity of relation, freshly importunate to her. It was the
first evening there had been no one else. Mrs. Rance and the Lutches
were due the next day; but meanwhile the facts of the situation were
upright for her round the green cloth and the silver flambeaux; the fact
of her father's wife's lover facing his mistress; the fact of her
father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between them; the fact of
Charlotte keeping it up, keeping up everything, across the table, with
her husband beside her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature,
placed opposite to the three and knowing more about each, probably, when
one came to think, than either of them knew of either. Erect above all
for her was the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group,
individually and collectively, to herself--herself so speciously
eliminated for the hour, but presumably more present to the attention of
each than the next card to be played.

Yes, under that imputation, to her sense, they sat--the imputation of
wondering, beneath and behind all their apparently straight play, if she
weren't really watching them from her corner and consciously, as might
be said, holding them in her hand. She was asking herself at last how
they could bear it--for, though cards were as nought to her and she
could follow no move, so that she was always, on such occasions, out of
the party, they struck her as conforming alike, in the matter of gravity
and propriety, to the stiff standard of the house. Her father, she
knew, was a high adept, one of the greatest--she had been ever, in her
stupidity, his small, his sole despair; Amerigo excelled easily, as he
understood and practised every art that could beguile large leisure;
Mrs. Assingham and Charlotte, moreover, were accounted as "good"
as members of a sex incapable of the nobler consistency could be.
Therefore, evidently, they were not, all so up to their usual form,
merely passing it off, whe