This for a concentrated instant Maggie felt her helplessly gasp--but only to let it bring home the indignity, the pity of her state. She herself could but tentatively hover, place in view the book she carried, look as little dangerous, look as abjectly mild, as possible; remind herself really of-people she had read about in stories of the wild west, people who threw up their hands on certain occasions for a sign they were n't carrying (311) revolvers. She could almost have smiled at last, troubled as she yet knew herself, to show how richly she was harmless; she held up her volume, which was so weak a weapon, and while she continued, for consideration, to keep her distance, explained with as quenched a quaver as possible. "I saw you come out--saw you from my window and could n't bear to think you should find yourself here without the beginning of your book. THIS is the beginning; you've got the wrong volume and I've brought you out the right."
She remained after she had spoken; it was like holding a parley with a possible adversary, and her intense, her exalted little smile requested formal leave. "May I come nearer now?" she seemed to say--as to which however, the next minute, she saw Charlotte's reply lose itself in a strange process, a thing of several sharp stages, which she could stand there and trace.
The dread, after this space, had dropped from her face; though she still discernibly enough could n't believe in her having in so strange a fashion been deliberately made up to. If she had been made up to at least it was with an idea--the idea that had struck her at first as necessarily dangerous.
That it was n't, insistently was n't, this shone from Maggie with a force finally not to be resisted; and on that perception, on the immense relief so constituted, everything had by the end of three minutes extraordinarily changed. Maggie had come out to her really because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation that was like a knife in her heart; and in the very sight of her uncontrollable, her blinded (312) physical quest of a peace not to be grasped, something of Mrs. Assingham's picture of her as thrown for a grim future beyond the great sea and the great continent had at first found fulfilment. She had got away in this fashion--burning behind her almost the ships of disguise--to let her horror of what was before her play up without witnesses; and even after Maggie's approach had presented an innocent front it was still not to be mistaken that she bristled with the signs of her extremity. It was n't to be said for them either that they were draped at this hour in any of her usual graces; unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess in spite of the dissimulation that with the return of comparative confidence was so promptly to operate.
How tragic in essence the very change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride--this for possible defence if not for possible aggression.
Pride indeed had the next moment become the mantle caught up for protection and perversity; she flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her freedom.
To be doomed was in her situation to have extravagantly incurred a doom, so that to confess to wretchedness was by the same stroke to confess to falsity. She would n't confess, she did n't--a thousand times no; she only cast about her, and quite frankly and fiercely, for something else that would give colour to her having burst her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she invoked it, and the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she could only help her to it. She presently got up--which seemed to mean "Oh stay if you like!"--and when she had (313) moved about a while at random, looking away, looking at anything, at everything but her visitor; when she had spoken of the temperature and declared that she revelled in it; when she had uttered her thanks for the book, which, a little incoherently, with her second volume, she perhaps found less clever than she expected; when she had let Maggie approach sufficiently closer to lay untouched the tribute in question on a bench and take up obligingly its superfluous mate: when she had done these things she sat down in another place, more or less visibly in possession of her part. Our young woman was to have passed, in all her adventure, no stranger moments; for she not only now saw her companion fairly agree to take her then for the poor little person she was finding it so easy to appear, but fell, in a secret responsive ecstasy, to wondering if there were n't some supreme abjection with which she might be inspired. Vague but increasingly brighter this possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung there adequately plain to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to (as they said) grovel; and that truly made the stage large. It had absolutely, within the time, taken on the dazzling merit of being large for each of them alike.
"I'm glad to see you alone--there's something I've been wanting to say to you. I'm tired," said Mrs. Verver, "I'm tired--!"
"'Tired'--?" It had dropped, the next thing; it could n't all come at once; but Maggie had already guessed what it was, and the flush of recognition was in her face. (314) "Tired of this life--the one we've been leading.
