house, and thereby was Charlotte’s; it was her own and Amerigo’s only so far as its proper master and mistress should profusely place it at their disposal.  Maggie felt of course that she saw no limit to her father’s profusion, but this couldn’t be even at the best the case with Charlotte’s, whom it would never be decent, when all was said, to reduce to fighting for her preferences.  There were hours, truly, when the Princess saw herself as not unarmed for battle if battle might only take place without spectators.

This last advantage for her, was, however, too sadly out of the question; her sole strength lay in her being able to see that if Charlotte wouldn’t “want” the Assinghams it would be because that sentiment too would have motives and grounds.  She had all the while command of one way of meeting any objection, any complaint, on his wife’s part, reported to her by her father; it would be open to her to retort to his possible “What are your reasons, my dear?” by a lucidly-produced “What are hers, love, please?—­isn’t that what we had better know?  Mayn’t her reasons be a dislike, beautifully founded, of the presence, and thereby of the observation, of persons who perhaps know about her things it’s inconvenient to her they should know?” That hideous card she might in mere logic play—­being by this time, at her still swifter private pace, intimately familiar with all the fingered pasteboard in her pack.  But she could play it only on the forbidden issue of sacrificing him; the issue so forbidden that it involved even a horror of finding out if he would really have consented to be sacrificed.  What she must do she must do by keeping her hands off him; and nothing meanwhile, as we see, had less in common with that scruple than such a merciless manipulation of their yielding beneficiaries as her spirit so boldly revelled in.  She saw herself, in this connexion, without detachment—­saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality.  If she could face the awkwardness of the persistence of her friends at Fawns in spite of Charlotte, she somehow looked to them for an inspiration of courage that would improve upon her own.  They were in short not only themselves to find a plausibility and an audacity, but were somehow by the way to pick up these forms for her, Maggie, as well.  And she felt indeed that she was giving them scant time longer when, one afternoon in Portland Place, she broke out with an irrelevance that was merely superficial.

“What awfulness, in heaven’s name, is there between them?  What do you believe, what do you know?”