after acceptance of the pass-word, have departed without irrelevant and, in strictness, unsoldierly gossip.  This was not, none the less, what happened; inasmuch as if our young woman had been floated over her first impulse to break the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but an instant to sound, at any risk, the note she had been privately practising.  If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs. Verver, and it immensely helped her, for that matter, to be able at once to speak of the Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her curiosity.  Frankly and gaily she had come to ask—­to ask what, in their unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved.  She had got out of her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the persons who answered such questions ideally.  He had only made her more curious, and she had arrived early, this way, in order to miss as little as possible of Charlotte’s story.

“Wives, papa,” she said; “are always much better reporters—­ though I grant,” she added for Charlotte, “that fathers are not much better than husbands.  He never,” she smiled, “tells me more than a tenth of what you tell him; so I hope you haven’t told him everything yet, since in that case I shall probably have lost the best part of it.”  Maggie went, she went—­she felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text.  It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise higher:  just as it was the sense of action that logically involved some platform—­action quite positively for the first time in her life, or, counting in the previous afternoon, for the second.  The platform remained for three or four days thus sensibly under her feet, and she had all the while, with it, the inspiration of quite remarkably, of quite heroically improvising.  Preparation and practice had come but a short way; her part opened out, and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do.  She had but one rule of art—­to keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for a week how far that would take her.  She said to herself, in her excitement, that it was perfectly simple:  to bring about a difference, touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all her father, so much as suspect her hand.  If they should suspect they would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn’t ready with a reason—­not, that is, with what she would have called a reasonable one.  She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt, all her life, at her father’s side and by his example, only in reasonable reasons; and what she would really have been most ashamed of would be to produce for him, in this line, some