They had got her into the bath and, for consistency with themselves—­ which was with each other—­must keep her there.  In that condition she wouldn’t interfere with the policy, which was established, which was arranged.  Her thought, over this, arrived at a great intensity—­had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to take afterwards a further and lighter spring.  The ground was well-nigh covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement.  Policy or no policy, it was they themselves who were arranged.  She must be kept in position so as not to DISarrange them.  It fitted immensely together, the whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had hitherto not imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her own.  Of course they were arranged—­all four arranged; but what had the basis of their life been, precisely, but that they were arranged together?  Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she—­to confine the matter only to herself—­was arranged apart.  It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, she felt very much alone.

XXVII

There had been, from far back—­that is from the Christmas time on—­a plan that the parent and the child should “do something lovely” together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought it up theoretically, though without as yet quite allowing it to put its feet to the ground.  The most it had done was to try a few steps on the drawing-room carpet, with much attendance, on either side, much holding up and guarding, much anticipation, in fine, of awkwardness or accident.  Their companions, by the same token, had constantly assisted at the performance, following the experiment with sympathy and gaiety, and never so full of applause, Maggie now made out for herself, as when the infant project had kicked its little legs most wildly—­kicked them, for all the world, across the Channel and half the Continent, kicked them over the Pyrenees and innocently crowed out some rich Spanish name.  She asked herself at present if it had been a “real” belief that they were but wanting, for some such adventure, to snatch their moment; whether either had at any instant seen it as workable, save in the form of a toy to dangle before the other, that they should take flight, without wife or husband, for one more look, “before they died,” at the Madrid pictures as well as for a drop of further weak delay in respect to three or four possible prizes, privately offered, rarities of the first water, responsibly reported on and profusely photographed, still patiently awaiting their noiseless arrival in retreats to which the clue