She remained present accordingly all the week, so charmingly and systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome her company. Charlotte had but wanted the hint, and what was it but the hint after all that during the so subdued but so ineffaceable passage in the breakfast-room she had seen her take? It had been taken moreover not with resignation, not with qualifications or reserves, however bland; it had been taken with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of gentleness that supplanted explanations. The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter--as if it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere (37) should, till the fit had changed, become the sign unfailingly of the advent of the other; and it was emblazoned in rich colour on the bright face of this period that Mrs. Verver only wished to know on any occasion what was expected of her, only held herself there for instructions, in order even to better them if possible. The two young women, while the passage lasted, became again very much the companions of other days, the days of Charlotte's prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the days when equality of condition for them had been all the result of the latter's native vagueness about her own advantages. The earlier elements flushed into life again, the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of accompanying expression--appreciation, endearment, confidence; the rarer charm produced in each by this active contribution to the felicity of the other: all enhanced furthermore--enhanced or qualified, who should say which?--by a new note of diplomacy, almost of anxiety, just sensible on Charlotte's part in particular; of intensity of observance, in the matter of appeal and response, in the matter of making sure the Princess might be disposed or gratified, that resembled an attempt to play again, with more refinement, at disparity of relation. Charlotte's attitude had in short its moments of flowering into pretty excesses of civility, self-effacements in the presence of others, sudden little formalisms of suggestion and recognition, that might have represented her sense of the duty of not "losing sight" of a social distinction. This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves (38) to regard, and when her companion's inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established favourite, safe in her position, a little queen, however good-natured, was always a little queen and might with small warning remember it.
And yet another of these concomitants of feverish success all the while was the perception that in another quarter too things were being made easy.
Charlotte's alacrity in meeting her had in one sense operated slightly overmuch as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb her at the very hour of her husband's showing her that to be all there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required--as one of the other phrases was too--the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the straight tip in his moods of amusement at English slang, in his remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes and higher inspirations; and he had taken it from her at need in a way that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval seem large. Then, however immediately, and even though superficially, there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was, once more, practically a little sacrificed. "I must do everything," she had said, "without letting papa see what I do--at least till it's done!" but she scarce knew how she proposed even for the next few days to (39) blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her stepmother had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been rather snatched again thereby from her husband's side, so on the other hand this had with as little delay entailed some very charming assistance for her in Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte, from whatever happy demonstration, for the benefit of the world in which they supposed themselves to live, that there was no smallest reason why their closer association should n't be public and acclaimed--at these times she regularly found that Amerigo had come either to sit with his father-in-law in the absence of the ladies or to make on his side precisely some such display of the easy working of the family life as would represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte. Under this particular impression it was that everything in Maggie most melted and went to pieces--everything, that is, that belonged to her disposition to challenge the perfection of their common state. It divided them again, that was true, this particular turn of the tide--cut them up afresh into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power of insistence; quite as if Amerigo himself were all the while at bottom equally thinking of it and watching it. But as against that he was making her father not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of them a more excellent service.
