Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/236

THE GOLDEN BOWL rejoicing that he had been able to make up to her for not having been quite "square" over their little business by rendering her so unexpectedly the service of this information. His joy moreover was—as much as Amerigo would!—a matter of the personal interest with which her kindness, gentleness, grace, her charming presence and easy humanity and familiarity, had inspired him. All of which while, in thought, Maggie went over it again and again—oh over any imputable rashness of her own immediate passion and pain as well as over the rest of the straight little story she had after all to tell—might very conceivably make a long sum for the Prince to puzzle out. There were meanwhile, after the Castledeans and those invited to meet them had gone and before Mrs. Rance and the Lutches had come, three or four days during which she was to learn the full extent of her need not to be penetrable; and then it was indeed that she felt all the force and threw herself upon all the help of the truth she had confided several nights earlier to Fanny Assingham. She had known it in advance, had warned herself of it while the house was full: Charlotte had designs upon her of a nature best known to herself and was only waiting for the better opportunity of their finding themselves less companioned. This consciousness had been exactly at the bottom of Maggie's wish to multiply their spectators; there were moments for her positively, moments of planned postponement, of evasion scarcely less disguised than studied, during which she turned over with anxiety the different ways—there being two or three possible ones—in which her young stepmother 226