the occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady Castledean.  The propriety of some demonstration of this sort had been for many days before our group, the question reduced to the mere issue of which of the two houses should first take the field.  The issue had been easily settled—­in the manner of every issue referred in any degree to Amerigo and Charlotte:  the initiative obviously belonged to Mrs. Verver, who had gone to Matcham while Maggie had stayed away, and the evening in Eaton Square might have passed for a demonstration all the more personal that the dinner had been planned on “intimate” lines.  Six other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matcham, made up the company, and each of these persons had for Maggie the interest of an attested connection with the Easter revels at that visionary house.  Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly left behind it an ineffaceable charm—­ this air of beatific reference, less subdued in the others than in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them, together, an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman’s imagination broke in a small vain wave.

It wasn’t that she wished she had been of the remembered party and possessed herself of its secrets; for she didn’t care about its secrets—­she could concern herself at present, absolutely, with no secret but her own.  What occurred was simply that she became aware, at a stroke, of the quantity of further nourishment required by her own, and of the amount of it she might somehow extract from these people; whereby she rose, of a sudden, to the desire to possess and use them, even to the extent of braving, of fairly defying, of directly exploiting, of possibly quite enjoying, under cover of an evil duplicity, the felt element of curiosity with which they regarded her.  Once she was conscious of the flitting wing of this last impression—­the perception, irresistible, that she was something for their queer experience, just as they were something for hers—­there was no limit to her conceived design of not letting them escape.  She went and went, again, to-night, after her start was taken; went, positively, as she had felt herself going, three weeks before, on the morning when the vision of her father and his wife awaiting her together in the breakfast-room had been so determinant.  In this other scene it was Lady Castledean who was determinant, who kindled the light, or at all events the heat, and who acted on the nerves; Lady Castledean whom she knew she, so oddly, didn’t like, in spite of reasons upon reasons, the biggest diamonds on the yellowest hair, the longest lashes on the prettiest, falsest eyes, the oldest lace on the most violet velvet, the rightest manner on the wrongest assumption.  Her ladyship’s assumption was that she kept, at every moment of her life, every advantage—­it made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous; so she didn’t distinguish the little protuberant eyes of smaller social insects,