by good fortune, to an altogether dazzling person?  That was an old, old story, but the truth of it shone out to her like the beauty of some family picture, some mellow portrait of an ancestor, that she might have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long intermission.  The dazzling person was upstairs and she was down, and there were moreover the other facts of the selection and decision that this demonstration of her own had required, and of the constant care that the equilibrium involved; but she had, all the same, never felt so absorbingly married, so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate.  He could do what he would with her; in fact what was actually happening was that he was actually doing it.  “What he would,” what he really would—­only that quantity itself escaped perhaps, in the brightness of the high harmony, familiar naming and discussing.  It was enough of a recognition for her that, whatever the thing he might desire, he would always absolutely bring it off.  She knew at this moment, without a question, with the fullest surrender, how he had brought off, in her, by scarce more than a single allusion, a perfect flutter of tenderness.  If he had come back tired, tired from his long day, the exertion had been, literally, in her service and her father’s.  They two had sat at home at peace, the Principino between them, the complications of life kept down, the bores sifted out, the large ease of the home preserved, because of the way the others held the field and braved the weather.  Amerigo never complained—­any more than, for that matter, Charlotte did; but she seemed to see to-night as she had never yet quite done that their business of social representation, conceived as they conceived it, beyond any conception of her own, and conscientiously carried out, was an affair of living always in harness.  She remembered Fanny Assingham’s old judgment, that friend’s description of her father and herself as not living at all, as not knowing what to do or what might be done for them; and there came back to her with it an echo of the long talk they had had together, one September day at Fawns, under the trees, when she put before him this dictum of Fanny’s.

That occasion might have counted for them—­she had already often made the reflection—­as the first step in an existence more intelligently arranged.  It had been an hour from which the chain of causes and consequences was definitely traceable—­so many things, and at the head of the list her father’s marriage, having appeared to her to flow from Charlotte’s visit to Fawns, and that event itself having flowed from the memorable talk.  But what perhaps most came out in the light of these concatenations was that it had been, for all the world, as if Charlotte had been “had in,” as the servants always said of extra help, because they had thus suffered it to be pointed out to them that if their family coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking its complement of wheels.  Having but three, as