She could n't definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself for the first time in her career living up to the public and popular (71) notion of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round; rather wondering inwardly too while she did so at that strange mixture in things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by such supposedly great ones of the earth as the Castledeans and their kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been there at all events, like one of the assistants in the ring at the circus, to keep up the pace of the sleek revolving animal on whose back the lady in short spangled skirts should brilliantly caper and posture. That was all, doubtless: Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be the little Princess on anything like the scale open to her; but now that the collective hand had been held out to her with such alacrity, so that she might skip up into the light even, as seemed to her modest mind, with such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving, under arched eyebrows, where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later hours after her dinner a fresh contingent, the whole list of her apparent London acquaintance--which was again a thing in the manner of little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though there were latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she was having to-night an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Castledean, who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity. The perception of this high result (72) caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend from moment to moment quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had in some marvellous sudden supersubtle way become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully divinely retributive.
The intensity of the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so practised at the same time on Amerigo and Charlotte--with only the drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly practised perhaps still more on her father.
This last was a danger indeed that for much of the ensuing time had its hours of strange beguilement--those at which her sense for precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with him more intimate than any other. It COULD n't but pass between them that something singular was happening--so much as this she again and again said to herself; whereby the comfort of it was there after all to be noted just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of the couple they formed together as groping, with sealed lips but with mutual looks that had never been so tender, for some freedom, some fiction, some figured bravery, under which they might safely talk of it. The moment was to come--and it finally came with an effect as penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric button--when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation she had created. The merely specious description of their case would have been that, after being for a long time, as (73) a family, delightfully, uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover; a felicity for which, blessedly, her father's appetite and her own in particular had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at; very much as if he had said to her in default of her breaking silence first: "Everything's remarkably pleasant, is n't it?--but WHERE for it after all are we? up in a balloon and whirling through space or down in the depths of the earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold-mine?" The equilibrium, the precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted and triumphed: all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden, face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a test. If they balanced they balanced--she had to take that; it deprived her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what he thought.
