Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion to her view of causes; but it came to her then and there that if she could only get the facts of appearance straight, only jam them down into their place, the reasons lurking behind them, kept uncertain, for the eyes, by their wavering and shifting, wouldn’t perhaps be able to help showing.  It wasn’t of course that the Prince and Mrs. Verver marvelled to see her civil to their friends; it was rather, precisely, that civil was just what she wasn’t:  she had so departed from any such custom of delicate approach—­approach by the permitted note, the suggested “if,” the accepted vagueness—­as would enable the people in question to put her off if they wished.  And the profit of her plan, the effect of the violence she was willing to let it go for, was exactly in their being the people in question, people she had seemed to be rather shy of before and for whom she suddenly opened her mouth so wide.  Later on, we may add, with the ground soon covered by her agitated but resolute step, it was to cease to matter what people they were or weren’t; but meanwhile the particular sense of them that she had taken home to-night had done her the service of seeming to break the ice where that formation was thickest.  Still more unexpectedly, the service might have been the same for her father; inasmuch as, immediately, when everyone had gone, he did exactly what she had been waiting for and despairing of—­and did it, as he did everything, with a simplicity that left any purpose of sounding him deeper, of drawing him out further, of going, in his own frequent phrase, “behind” what he said, nothing whatever to do.  He brought it out straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea of what they should lose by breaking the charm:  “I guess we won’t go down there after all, will we, Mag?—­just when it’s getting so pleasant here.”  That was all, with nothing to lead up to it; but it was done for her at a stroke, and done, not less, more rather, for Amerigo and Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost breathlessly measured it, was prodigious.  Everything now so fitted for her to everything else that she could feel the effect as prodigious even while sticking to her policy of giving the pair no look.  There were thus some five wonderful minutes during which they loomed, to her sightless eyes, on either side of her, larger than they had ever loomed before, larger than life, larger than thought, larger than any danger or any safety.  There was thus a space of time, in fine, fairly vertiginous for her, during which she took no more account of them than if they were not in the room.