the matter.  Supremely, however, while this glass was held up to her, 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 had not been put at ease, after all, with absolute permanence.  Maggie had seen her, unmistakably, 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 not only poured oil upon 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.  “Why handsome?” Maggie would have been free to ask; since if she had been veracious the service assuredly would not have been huge.  It would in that case have come up vividly, and for each of them alike, that the truth, on the Princess’s lips, presented no difficulty.  If the latter’s mood, in fact, could have turned itself at all to private gaiety it might have failed to resist the diversion of seeing so clever a creature so beguiled.  Charlotte’s theory of a generous manner was manifestly to express that her stepdaughter’s word, wiping out, as she might have said, everything, had restored them to the serenity of a relation without a cloud.  It had been, in short, in this light,