Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/153

THE PRINCESS their so occult manner a high fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high—in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.

The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation in him there would inevitably find some of its directness diverted. This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father's placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention. Besides which there would be always Charlotte herself to draw him off. Charlotte would help him again doubtless to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic; but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute in its degree to protect the secret of her own fermentation. It isn't even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince's spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver's too perfect competence. What it would most come to after all, she said to herself, was a renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch her. Very well then: with the elements really so mixed in him how long would he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act? For she had by this time made up her mind that in Charlotte's company he deferred to Charlotte's easier art of mounting guard. Wouldn't he get tired—to put it only at that—of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her 143