to getting his rare moments with himself by feigning a cynicism.  His real inability to maintain the pretence, however, had perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day—­his acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter-of-an hour, of that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must reckon.  A quarter-of-an-hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, usually got.  Mrs. Rance opened the door—­more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more briskly on seeing him than he had been moved to do on seeing nobody.  Then, with force, it came home to him that he had, definitely, a week before, established a precedent.  He did her at least that justice—­it was a kind of justice he was always doing someone.  He had on the previous Sunday liked to stop at home, and he had exposed himself thereby to be caught in the act.  To make this possible, that is, Mrs. Rance had only had to like to do the same—­the trick was so easily played.  It had not occurred to him to plan in any way for her absence—­which would have destroyed, somehow, in principle, the propriety of his own presence.  If persons under his roof hadn’t a right not to go to church, what became, for a fair mind, of his own right?  His subtlest manoeuvre had been simply to change from the library to the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his daughter’s, or the guest of the Miss Lutches—­he scarce knew in which light to regard her—­had then, and not unnaturally, of course, joined him.  It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence would already have got itself enacted.  She had spent the whole morning with him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back—­thanks to her having been tepid about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a turn outside.  It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of subterfuge—­almost as a form of disloyalty.  Yet what was it she had in mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made, a patient, punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly invited?—­so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the more on one’s conscience.  The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the middle West, were there as friends of Maggie’s, friends of the earlier time; but Mrs. Rance was there—­ or at least had primarily appeared—­only as a friend of the Miss Lutches.