that no effort would ever snap.  The miniatures were back to back, but she saw them forever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other she found in Charlotte’s eyes the gleam of the momentary “What does she really want?” that had come and gone for her in the Prince’s.  So again, she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland Place and in Eaton Square, as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted no harm—­wanted no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in that she meant to go out with her.  She had been present at that process as personally as she might have been present at some other domestic incident—­ the hanging of a new picture, say, or the fitting of the Principino with his first little trousers.

She remained present, accordingly, all the week, so charmingly and systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome her company.  Charlotte had but wanted the hint, and what was it but the hint, after all, that, during the so subdued but so ineffaceable passage in the breakfast-room, she had seen her take?  It had been taken moreover not with resignation, not with qualifications or reserves, however bland; it had been taken with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of gentleness that supplanted explanations.  The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter—­as if it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these caprices for law.  The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the fit had changed, become the sign, unfailingly, of the advent of the other; and it was emblazoned, in rich colour, on the bright face of this period, that Mrs. Verver only wished to know, on any occasion, what was expected of her, only held herself there for instructions, in order even to better them if possible.  The two young women, while the passage lasted, became again very much the companions of other days, the days of Charlotte’s prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the days when equality of condition for them had been all the result of the latter’s native vagueness about her own advantages.  The earlier elements flushed into life again, the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of accompanying expression—­appreciation, endearment, confidence; the rarer charm produced in each by this active contribution to the felicity of the other:  all enhanced, furthermore—­enhanced or qualified, who should say which?—­by a new note of diplomacy, almost of anxiety, just sensible on Charlotte’s part in particular; of intensity of observance, in the matter of appeal and response, in the matter of making sure the Princess might be disposed or gratified, that resembled an attempt to play again, with more refinement, at disparity of relation.  Charlotte’s attitude had, in short, its moments of flowering into pretty excesses