Maggie was to feel after this passage how they had both been helped through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught a few nights before in the familiar embrace of her father's wife. His return to the saloon had chanced to coincide exactly with this demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by the Assinghams, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the billiard-room with him. She had been conscious enough at the time of what such an impression, received by the others, might in that extended state do for her case; and none the less that, as no one had appeared to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on perceptibly the special shade of consecration conferred by unanimities of silence. The effect, she might have considered, had been almost awkward--the promptitude of her separation from Charlotte, as if they had been discovered in some absurdity, on her becoming aware of spectators.
The spectators on the other hand--that was the appearance--might n't have supposed them, in the existing relation, addicted to mutual endearments; and yet, hesitating with a fine scruple between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt that almost any spoken or laughed comment could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding beyond any permitted measure intelligent.
They had evidently looked, the two young wives, like a pair of (277) women "making up" effusively, as women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply on her father's part, on Amerigo's and on Fanny Assingham's, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference. There had been something in the incident, there had been but too much, for each observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without seeming essentially to say:
"See, see, the dear things--their quarrel is blissfully over!" "Our quarrel?
What quarrel?" the dear things themselves would necessarily in that case have demanded; and the wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of exercise. No one had been equal to the flight of producing off-hand a fictive reason for any estrangement--to take, that is, the place of the true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air; and every one accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was pretending immediately after to have remarked nothing that any one else had n't.
Maggie's own measure had remained all the same full of the reflexion caught from the total inference; which had acted virtually by enabling every one present--and oh Charlotte not least!--to draw a long breath.
The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it re-enforced--re-enforced even immensely--the genera! effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter.
Supremely however. while this glass was held up to her, (278) had Maggie's sense turned to the quality of the success constituted on the spot for Charlotte. Most of all, if she was guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in a flash, seen daylight for herself--most of all had she tasted, by communication, of the high profit involved for her companion.
She FELT in all her pulses Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement. It was the added touch, and now nothing was wanting--which, to do her stepmother justice, Mrs.
Verver had appeared but to desire from that evening to show with the last vividness that she recognised. Maggie lived over again the minutes in question--had found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had for instance animated the four with just the right restlessness too, had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their game of bridge--however abysmal a face it had worn for her--give way precisely to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate Charlotte's impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.
If Mrs. Verver meanwhile then had struck her as determined in a certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail of appreciating the truth that she (279) had n't after all been put at ease with absolute permanence. Maggie had seen her unmistakeably desire to rise to the occasion and be magnificent--seen her decide that the right way for this would be to prove that the reassurance she had extorted there, under the high cool lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of crystal and silver, had n't only poured oil on the troubled waters of their question, but had fairly drenched their whole intercourse with that lubricant. She had exceeded the limit of discretion in this insistence on her capacity to repay in proportion a service she acknowledged as handsome.