Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/353

THE PRINCE presence, her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame and that had in fact kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father's party and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the importance of his importance; so that sympathy created for her a visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled with filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression, movement, tone. It was all unmistakeable, and as pretty as possible, if one would, and even as funny; but it put the pair so together as undivided by the marriage of each that the Princess—il n'y avait pas a dire—might sit where she liked: she would still always in that house be irremediably Maggie Verver. The Prince found himself at this hour so beset with the perception we speak of that its natural complement for him would really have been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of the same impression in the recorded cases of his having dined with his daughter.

This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would have been easily arrested; for it was at present to come over Amerigo as never before that his remarkable father-in-law was the man in the world least equipped with different appearances for different times. He was simple, he was a revelation of simplicity, and that was the end of him so far as he consisted of an appearance at all—a question that might verily, for a weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man, who was taking his 323