The Golden Bowl - Henry James [190]
lull, by the side-wind of all the rest of the motion, and giving our young woman, so far at least as Fanny was concerned, the sense of some special intention of encouragement and applause. Fanny, who hadn’t been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show at this one in new orange-coloured velvet with multiplied turquoises, not less than with a confidence as different as possible, her hostess inferred, from her too-marked betrayal of a belittled state at Matcham. Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this balance – which seemed for the hour part of a general rectification; she liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland Place, a spot exempt on all sorts of grounds from jealous jurisdictions, her friend could feel as ‘good’ as any one and could in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the lustre of the little Princess. Mrs Assingham produced on her the impression of giving her constantly her cue for this; and it was in truth partly by her help, intelligently, quite gratefully accepted, that the little Princess in Maggie was drawn out and emphasised. She couldn’t definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself for the first time in her career living up to the public and popular notion of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round; rather wondering inwardly too while she did so at that strange mixture in things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by such supposedly great ones of the earth as the Castledeans and their kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been there at all events, like one of the assistants in the ring at the circus, to keep up the pace of the sleek revolving animal on whose back the lady in short spangled skirts should brilliantly caper and posture. That was all, doubtless: Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be the little Princess on anything like the scale open to her; but now that the collective hand had been held out to her with such alacrity, so that she might skip up into the light even, as seemed to her modest mind, with such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving, under arched eyebrows, where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later hours after her dinner a fresh contingent, the whole list of her apparent London acquaintance – which was again a thing in the manner of little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though there were latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she was having to-night an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Castledean, who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity. The perception of this high result caused Mrs Assingham fairly to flush with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend from moment to moment quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had in some marvellous sudden supersubtle way become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully divinely retributive. The intensity of the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so practised at the same time on Amerigo and Charlotte – with only the drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly practised perhaps still more on her father.
This last was a danger indeed that for much of the ensuing time had its hours of strange beguilement – those at which her sense for precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with him more intimate than any other. It couldn’t but pass between them that something singular was happening – so much as this she again and again said