as not attaching an excessive importance to their repudiation of the general practice that had rested only a few weeks before on such a consecrated rightness.  Repudiations, surely, were not in the air—­they had none of them come to that; for wasn’t she at this minute testifying directly against them by her own behaviour?  When she should confess to fear of being alone with her father, to fear of what he might then—­ah, with such a slow, painful motion as she had a horror of!—­say to her, then would be time enough for Amerigo and Charlotte to confess to not liking to appear to foregather.

She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a particular question from him and of being able to check, yes even to disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent manner of receiving it, any restless imagination he might have about its importance.  The day, bright and soft, had the breath of summer; it made them talk, to begin with, of Fawns, of the way Fawns invited—­Maggie aware, the while, that in thus regarding, with him, the sweetness of its invitation to one couple just as much as to another, her humbugging smile grew very nearly convulsive.  That was it, and there was relief truly, of a sort, in taking it in:  she was humbugging him already, by absolute necessity, as she had never, never done in her life—­doing it up to the full height of what she had allowed for.  The necessity, in the great dimly-shining room where, declining, for his reasons, to sit down, he moved about in Amerigo’s very footsteps, the necessity affected her as pressing upon her with the very force of the charm itself; of the old pleasantness, between them, so candidly playing up there again; of the positive flatness of their tenderness, a surface all for familiar use, quite as if generalised from the long succession of tapestried sofas, sweetly faded, on which his theory of contentment had sat, through unmeasured pauses, beside her own.  She knew, from this instant, knew in advance and as well as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove that there was nothing the matter with her.  She saw, of a sudden, everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from it with any number of remote matters, struck herself, for instance, as acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in the exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season, for a turn in the Regent’s Park.  This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already proceeded there under high attendance:  all of which considerations were defensive for Maggie, all of which became, to her mind, part of the business of cultivating continuity.