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—­mightn’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 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, there had been but too much, in the incident, for each observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without seeming essentially to say:  “See, see, the dear things—­their quarrel’s 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 hadn’t.

Maggie’s own measure had remained, all the same, full of the reflection 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 reinforced—­reinforced even immensely—­the general 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