and coloured her wonderments of detail; the question, for instance, of how Amerigo, in snatched opportunities of conference, put the haunted creature off with false explanations, met her particular challenges and evaded—­if that was what he did do!—­her particular demands.  Even the conviction that Charlotte was but awaiting some chance really to test her trouble upon her lover’s wife left Maggie’s sense meanwhile open as to the sight of gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself.  The cage was the deluded condition, and Maggie, as having known delusion—­rather!—­understood the nature of cages.  She walked round Charlotte’s—­cautiously and in a very wide circle; and when, inevitably, they had to communicate she felt herself, comparatively, outside, on the breast of nature, and saw her companion’s face as that of a prisoner looking through bars.  So it was that through bars, bars richly gilt, but firmly, though discreetly, planted, Charlotte finally struck her as making a grim attempt; from which, at first, the Princess drew back as instinctively as if the door of the cage had suddenly been opened from within.

XXXVI

They had been alone that evening—­alone as a party of six, and four of them, after dinner, under suggestion not to be resisted, sat down to “bridge” in the smoking-room.  They had passed together to that apartment, on rising from table, Charlotte and Mrs. Assingham alike indulgent, always, to tobacco, and in fact practising an emulation which, as Fanny said, would, for herself, had the Colonel not issued an interdict based on the fear of her stealing his cigars, have stopped only at the short pipe.  Here cards had with inevitable promptness asserted their rule, the game forming itself, as had often happened before, of Mr. Verver with Mrs. Assingham for partner and of the Prince with Mrs. Verver.  The Colonel, who had then asked of Maggie license to relieve his mind of a couple of letters for the earliest post out on the morrow, was addressing himself to this task at the other end of the room, and the Princess herself had welcomed the comparatively hushed hour—­for the bridge-players were serious and silent—­much in the mood of a tired actress who has the good fortune to be “off,” while her mates are on, almost long enough for a nap on the property sofa in the wing.  Maggie’s nap, had she been able to snatch forty winks, would have been of the spirit rather than of the sense; yet as she subsided, near a lamp, with the last salmon-coloured French periodical, she was to fail, for refreshment, even of that sip of independence.