These assumptions might certainly be baseless—inasmuch
as there were hours and hours of Amerigo’s time
that there was no habit, no pretence of his accounting
for; inasmuch too as Charlotte, inevitably, had had
more than once, to the undisguised knowledge of the
pair in Portland Place, been obliged to come up to
Eaton Square, whence so many of her personal possessions
were in course of removal. She didn’t come
to Portland Place—didn’t even come
to ask for luncheon on two separate occasions when
it reached the consciousness of the household there
that she was spending the day in London. Maggie
hated, she scorned, to compare hours and appearances,
to weigh the idea of whether there hadn’t been
moments, during these days, when an assignation, in
easy conditions, a snatched interview, in an air the
season had so cleared of prying eyes, mightn’t
perfectly work. But the very reason of this was
partly that, haunted with the vision of the poor woman
carrying off with such bravery as she found to her
hand the secret of her not being appeased, she was
conscious of scant room for any alternative image.
The alternative image would have been that the secret
covered up was the secret of appeasement somehow obtained,
somehow extorted and cherished; and the difference
between the two kinds of hiding was too great to permit
of a mistake. Charlotte was hiding neither pride
nor joy—she was hiding humiliation; and
here it was that the Princess’s passion, so
powerless for vindictive flights, most inveterately
bruised its tenderness against the hard glass of her
question.
Behind the glass lurked the whole history of
the relation she had so fairly flattened her nose
against it to penetrate—the glass Mrs.
Verver might, at this stage, have been frantically
tapping, from within, by way of supreme, irrepressible
entreaty. Maggie had said to herself complacently,
after that last passage with her stepmother in the
garden of Fawns, that there was nothing left for her
to do and that she could thereupon fold her hands.
But why wasn’t it still left to push further
and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel
lower?—why wasn’t it still left to
offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting
to him their friend’s anguish and convincing
him of her need?
She could thus have translated Mrs. Verver’s
tap against the glass, as I have called it, into fifty
forms; could perhaps have translated it most into
the form of a reminder that would pierce deep.
“You don’t know what it is to have been
loved and broken with. You haven’t been
broken with, because in your relation what can
there have been, worth speaking of, to break?
Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to
the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it
was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that
such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your
hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for
deception? why condemned after a couple of short years