The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation, in him, there, would inevitably find some of its directness diverted.  This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father’s placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention.  Besides which there would be always Charlotte herself to draw him off.  Charlotte would help him again, doubtless, to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic; but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute, in its degree, to protect the secret of her own fermentation.  It is not even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince’s spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver’s too perfect competence.  What it would most come to, after all, she said to herself, was a renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch her.  Very well, then:  with the elements after all so mixed in him, how long would he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act?  For she had by this time made up her mind that in Charlotte’s company he deferred to Charlotte’s easier art of mounting guard.  Wouldn’t he get tired—­ to put it only at that—­of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west?  Maggie had gone far, truly for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she was not incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her chickens before they were hatched.  How sure she should have to be of so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo’s expression and a logic in his weariness!

One of her dissimulated arts for meeting their tension, meanwhile, was to interweave Mrs. Assingham as plausibly as possible with the undulations of their surface, to bring it about that she should join them, of an afternoon, when they drove together or if they went to look at things—­looking at things being almost as much a feature of their life as if they were bazaar-opening royalties.  Then there were such combinations, later in the day, as her attendance on them, and the Colonel’s as well, for such whimsical matters as visits to the opera no matter who was singing, and sudden outbreaks of curiosity about the British drama.  The good couple from Cadogan Place could always unprotestingly dine with them and “go on” afterwards to such publicities as the Princess cultivated the boldness of now perversely preferring.  It may be said of her that, during these passages, she plucked her sensations by the way, detached, nervously, the small wild blossoms of her dim forest, so that she could smile over them at least with the spacious appearance, for her companions, for her husband above all, of bravely, of altogether