inferior substitute.  Unless she were in a position to plead, definitely, that she was jealous she should be in no position to plead, decently, that she was dissatisfied.  This latter condition would be a necessary implication of the former; without the former behind it it would have to fall to the ground.  So had the case, wonderfully, been arranged for her; there was a card she could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be to end the game.  She felt herself—­as at the small square green table, between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged counters—­her father’s playmate and partner; and what it constantly came back to, in her mind, was that for her to ask a question, to raise a doubt, to reflect in any degree on the play of the others, would be to break the charm.  The charm she had to call it, since it kept her companion so constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so contentedly occupied.  To say anything at all would be, in fine, to have to say why she was jealous; and she could, in her private hours, but stare long, with suffused eyes, at that impossibility.

By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially, with her morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily greater than her consciousness of anything else; and I must add, moreover, that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming.  Charlotte’s response to the experiment of being more with her ought, as she very well knew, to have stamped the experiment with the feeling of success; so that if the success itself seemed a boon less substantial than the original image of it, it enjoyed thereby a certain analogy with our young woman’s aftertaste of Amerigo’s own determined demonstrations.  Maggie was to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste, and if I have spoken of the impressions fixed in her as soon as she had, so insidiously, taken the field, a definite note must be made of her perception, during those moments, of Charlotte’s prompt uncertainty.  She had shown, no doubt—­she couldn’t not have shown—­that she had arrived with an idea; quite exactly as she had shown her husband, the night before, that she was awaiting him with a sentiment.  This analogy in the two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of a kinship of expression in the two faces in respect to which all she as yet professed to herself was that she had affected them, or at any rate the sensibility each of them so admirably covered, in the same way.  To make the comparison at all was, for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood upon it, to extract from it the last dregs of its interest—­to play with it, in short, nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness