to mutual endearments; and yet, hesitating with a fine scruple between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt that almost any spoken or laughed comment could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding, beyond any permitted measure, intelligent.  They had evidently looked, the two young wives, like a pair of women “making up” effusively, as women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply, on her father’s part, on Amerigo’s, and on Fanny Assingham’s, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference.  There had been something, there had been but too much, in the incident, for each observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without seeming essentially to say:  “See, see, the dear things—­their quarrel’s blissfully over!” “Our quarrel?  What quarrel?” the dear things themselves would necessarily, in that case, have demanded; and the wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of exercise.  No one had been equal to the flight of producing, off-hand, a fictive reason for any estrangement—­to take, that is, the place of the true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air; and every one, accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was pretending, immediately after, to have remarked nothing that any one else hadn’t.

Maggie’s own measure had remained, all the same, full of the reflection caught from the total inference; which had acted, virtually, by enabling every one present—­and oh Charlotte not least!—­to draw a long breath.  The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced—­reinforced even immensely—­the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter.  Supremely, however, while this glass was held up to her, had Maggie’s sense turned to the quality of the success constituted, on the spot, for Charlotte.  Most of all, if she was guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in a flash, seen daylight for herself—­most of all had she tasted, by communication, of the high profit involved for her companion.  She felt, in all her pulses, Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement.  It was the added touch, and now nothing was wanting—­ which, to do her stepmother justice, Mrs. Verver had appeared but to desire, from that evening, to show, with the last vividness, that she recognised.  Maggie lived over again the minutes in question—­had found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had for instance—­animated the four with just the right restlessness too, had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their game of bridge—­however abysmal a face it had worn for her—­give way, precisely, to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate Charlotte’s impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.