There had been from far back--that is from the Christmas-time on--a plan that the parent and the child should "do something lovely" together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought it up theoretically, though without as yet quite allowing it to put its feet to the ground.
The most it had done was to try a few steps on the drawing-room carpet with much attendance on either side, much holding up and guarding, much anticipation in fine of awkwardness or accident. Their companions, by the same token, had constantly assisted at the performance, following the experiment with sympathy and gaiety, and never so full of applause, Maggie now made out for herself, as when the infant project had kicked its little legs most wildly--kicked them, for all the world, across the Channel and half the Continent, kicked them over the Pyrenees and innocently crowed out some rich Spanish name. She asked herself at present if it had been a "real" belief that they were but wanting, for some such adventure, to snatch their moment; whether either had at any instant seen it as workable, save in the form of a toy to dangle before the other, that they should take flight, without wife or husband, for one more look, "before they died," at the Madrid pictures, as well as for a drop of further weak delay in respect to three or four possible prizes, privately offered, rarities of the first water, (47) responsibly reported on and profusely photographed still patiently awaiting their noiseless arrival in retreats to which the clue had not otherwise been given away. The vision dallied with during the duskier days in Eaton Square had stretched to the span of three or four weeks of springtime for the total adventure, three or four weeks in the very spirit, after all, of their regular life, as their regular life had been persisting; full of shared mornings, afternoons, evenings walks, drives, "looks-in" at old places on vague chances; full also in especial of that purchased social ease, the sense of the comfort and credit of their house, which had essentially the perfection of something paid for, but which "came" on the whole so cheap that it might have been felt as costing--as costing the parent and child--nothing. It was for Maggie to wonder at present if she had been sincere about their going, to ask herself whether she would have stuck to their plan even if nothing had happened.
Her view of the impossibility of sticking to it now may give us the measure of her sense that everything had happened. A difference had been made in her relation to each of her companions, and what it compelled her to say to herself was that to behave as she might have behaved before would be to act for Amerigo and Charlotte with the highest hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own, to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of the idea in fact had been in some such sublimity. Day after day she put off the moment of "speaking," as she (48) inwardly and very comprehensively called it--speaking, that is, to her father; and all the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as to his himself breaking silence. She gave him time, gave him, during several days, that morning, that noon, that night, and the next and the next and the next; even made up her mind that if he stood off longer it would be proof conclusive that he too was n't at peace. They would then have been all successfully throwing dust in each other's eyes; and it would be at last as if they must turn away their faces, since the silver mist that protected them had begun to grow sensibly thin. Finally, at the end of April, she decided that if he should say nothing for another period of twenty-four hours she must take it as showing that they were, in her private phraseology, lost; so little possible sincerity could there be in pretending to care for a journey to Spain at the approach of a summer that already promised to be hot. Such a proposal on his lips, such an extravagance of optimism, would be HIS way of being consistent--for that he did n't really want to move, or to move further, at the worst, than back to Fawns again, could only signify that he was n't contented at heart. What he wanted at any rate and what he did n't want were in the event put to the proof for Maggie just in time to give her a fresh wind. She had been dining, with her husband, in Eaton Square on the occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady Castledean. The propriety of some demonstration of this sort had been for many days before our group, the question reduced to the mere issue of which of the two houses should first take (49) the field. The issue had been easily settled--in the manner of every issue referred in any degree to Amerigo and Charlotte: the initiative obviously belonged to Mrs. Verver, who had gone to Matcham while Maggie had stayed away, and the evening in Eaton Square might have passed for a demonstration all the more personal that the dinner had been planned on "intimate" lines. Six other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matcham, made up the company, and each of these persons had for Maggie the interest of an attested connexion with the Easter revels at that visionary house. Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly left behind it an ineffaceable charm--this air of beatific reference, less subdued in the others than in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them, together, an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman's imagination broke in a small vain wave.
It was n't that she wished she had been of the remembered party and possessed herself of its secrets; for she did n't care about its secrets--she could concern herself at present absolutely with no secret but her own.
