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By Root 7216 0

have been expected to articulate with a rare imitation of nature, ‘Oh yes, I’m here all the while; I’m also in my way a solid little fact and I cost originally a great deal of money: cost, that is, my father, for my outfit, and let in my husband for an amount of pains – toward my training – that money would scarce represent.’ Well, she would meet them in some such way, and she translated her idea into action, after dinner, before they dispersed, by engaging them all unconventionally, almost violently, to dine with her in Portland Place just as they were, if they didn’t mind the same party, which was the party she wanted. Oh she was going, she was going – she could feel it afresh; it was a good deal as if she had sneezed ten times or had suddenly burst into a comic song. There were breaks in the connexion, as there would be hitches in the process; she didn’t yet wholly see what they would do for her, nor quite how herself she should handle them; but she was dancing up and down, beneath her propriety, with the thought that she had at least begun something – she so fairly liked to feel that she was a point for convergence of wonder. It wasn’t after all either that their wonder so much signified – that of the cornered six whom it glimmered before her that she might still live to drive about like a flock of sheep: the intensity of her consciousness, its sharpest savour, was in the theory of her having diverted, having, as they said, captured, the attention of Amerigo and Charlotte, at neither of whom all the while did she so much as once look. She had pitched them in with the six, for that matter, so far as they themselves were concerned; they had dropped, for the succession of minutes, out of contact with their function – had in short, startled and impressed, abandoned their post. ‘They’re paralysed, they’re paralysed!’ she commented deep within; so much it helped her own apprehension to hang together that they should suddenly lose their bearings.

Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion to her view of causes; but it came to her then and there that if she could only get the facts of appearance straight, only jam them down into their place, the reasons lurking behind them, kept uncertain for the eyes by their wavering and shifting, wouldn’t perhaps be able to help showing. It wasn’t of course that the Prince and Mrs Verver marvelled to see her civil to their friends; it was rather precisely that civil was just what she wasn’t: she had so departed from any such custom of delicate approach – approach by the permitted note, the suggested ‘if’, the accepted vagueness – as would enable the people in question to put her off if they wished. And the profit of her plan, the effect of the violence she was willing to let it go for, was exactly in their being the people in question, people she had seemed to be rather shy of before and for whom she suddenly opened her mouth so wide. Later on, we may add, with the ground soon covered by her agitated but resolute step, it was to cease to matter what people they were or weren’t; but meanwhile the particular sense of them that she had taken home to-night had done her the service of seeming to break the ice where that formation was thickest. Still more unexpectedly, the service might have been the same for her father; inasmuch as immediately, when every one had gone, he did exactly what she had been waiting for and despairing of – and did it, as he did everything, with a simplicity that left any purpose of sounding him deeper, of drawing him out further, of going, on his own frequent phrase, ‘behind’ what he said, nothing whatever to do. He brought it out straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea of what they should lose by breaking the charm: ‘I guess we won’t go down there after all, will we, Mag? – just when it’s getting so pleasant here.’ That was all, with nothing to lead up to it; but it was done for her at a stroke, and done not less, more rather, for Amerigo and Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost breathlessly