felicities the liability to which was so far from having even yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more bored than boring (with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but none to be persuadedly indebted to others for,) what did such a false face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged?  If she had questioned or challenged or interfered—­if she had reserved herself that right—­she wouldn’t have been pledged; whereas there were still, and evidently would be yet a while, long, tense stretches during which their case might have been hanging, for every eye, on her possible, her impossible defection.  She must keep it up to the last, mustn’t absent herself for three minutes from her post:  only on those lines, assuredly, would she show herself as with him and not against him.

It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to make of being, of truly having been at any time, “with” his wife:  that reflection she was not exempt from as they now, in their suspense, supremely waited—­a reflection under the brush of which she recognised her having had, in respect to him as well, to “do all,” to go the whole way over, to move, indefatigably, while he stood as fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers.  The meaning of it would seem to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he had a place, and that this was an attribute somehow indefeasible, unquenchable, which laid upon others—­from the moment they definitely wanted anything of him—­ the necessity of taking more of the steps that he could, of circling round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the mountain to Mahomet.  It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amerigo’s was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie’s own had come to show simply as that improvised “post”—­a post of the kind spoken of as advanced—­with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous bead-work to sell.  Maggie’s own, in short, would have been sought in vain in the most rudimentary map of the social relations as such.  The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions.  The “end” that the Prince was at all events holding out for was represented to expectation by his father-in-law’s announced departure for America with Mrs. Verver; just as that prospective event had originally figured as advising, for discretion, the flight of the younger couple, to say nothing of the withdrawal of whatever other importunate company, before the great upheaval of Fawns.  This residence was to be peopled for a month by porters, packers and hammerers, at whose operations it had become peculiarly public—­public