“Oh, I don’t think it would have been for Amerigo himself.  Amerigo and I,” Maggie had said, “perfectly rub on together.”

“Well then, there we are.”

“I see”—­and she had again, with sublime blandness, assented.  “There we are.”

“Charlotte and I too,” her father had gaily proceeded, “perfectly rub on together.”  And then he had appeared for a little to be making time.  “To put it only so,” he had mildly and happily added—­“to put it only so!” He had spoken as if he might easily put it much better, yet as if the humour of contented understatement fairly sufficed for the occasion.  He had played then, either all consciously or all unconsciously, into Charlotte’s hands; and the effect of this was to render trebly oppressive Maggie’s conviction of Charlotte’s plan.  She had done what she wanted, his wife had—­which was also what Amerigo had made her do.  She had kept her test, Maggie’s test, from becoming possible, and had applied instead a test of her own.  It was exactly as if she had known that her stepdaughter would be afraid to be summoned to say, under the least approach to cross-examination, why any change was desirable; and it was, for our young woman herself, still more prodigiously, as if her father had been capable of calculations to match, of judging it important he shouldn’t be brought to demand of her what was the matter with her.  Why otherwise, with such an opportunity, hadn’t he demanded it?  Always from calculation—­that was why, that was why.  He was terrified of the retort he might have invoked:  “What, my dear, if you come to that, is the matter with you?” When, a minute later on, he had followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to conjure away the ghost of the anomalous, at that climax verily she would have had to be dumb to the question.  “There seems a kind of charm, doesn’t there? on our life—­and quite as if, just lately, it had got itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed.  A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner, left over, of my old show.  That’s the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid—­lying like gods together, all careless of mankind.”

“Do you consider that we’re languid?”—­that form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness.  “Do you consider that we are careless of mankind?—­living as we do in the biggest crowd in the world, and running about always pursued and pursuing.”

It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he came up again, as she might have said, smiling.  “Well, I don’t know.  We get nothing but the fun, do we?”

“No,” she had hastened to declare; “we certainly get nothing but the fun.”

“We do it all,” he had remarked, “so beautifully.”

“We do it all so beautifully.”  She hadn’t denied this for a moment.  “I see what you mean.”