Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/115

THE PRINCESS affect her father. She wondered how she should enjoy on his part such a take-up as she but just succeeded from day to day in sparing Mrs. Assingham, and that made for her trying to be as easy with this associate as Mr. Verver, blessed man, all indulgent but all inscrutable, was with his daughter. She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte's view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.

Fanny stood off from that proposition as visibly to the Princess, and as consciously to herself, as she might have backed away from the edge of a chasm into which she feared to slip; a truth that contributed again to keep before our young woman her own constant danger of advertising subtle processes. That Charlotte should have begun to be restrictive about the Assinghams—which she had never, and for a hundred obviously good reasons, been before—this in itself was a fact of the highest value for Maggie, and of a value enhanced by the silence in which Fanny herself so much too unmistakeably dressed it. What gave it quite thrillingly its price was exactly the circumstance that it thus opposed her to her stepmother more actively—if she was to back up her friends for holding out—than she had ever yet been opposed; though of course with the involved result of the fine chance given Mrs. Verver to ask her husband for explanations. Ah 105