view, in her friend’s eyes, by treating the occasion, more or less explicitly, as new and strange. The good Assinghams had feasted in fact at the two other boards on a scale so disproportionate to the scant solicitations of their own that it was easy to make a joke of seeing how they fed at home, how they met, themselves, the question of giving to eat. Maggie dined with them, in short, and arrived at making her husband appear to dine, much in the manner of a pair of young sovereigns who have, in the frolic humour of the golden years of reigns proposed themselves to a pair of faithfully-serving subjects. She showed an interest in their arrangements, an enquiring tenderness almost for their economies; so that her hostess not unnaturally, as they might have said, put it all down – the tone and the freedom of which she set the example – to the effect wrought in her afresh by one of the lessons learned in the morning at the altar of the past. Hadn’t she picked it up from an anecdote or two offered again to her attention that there were for princesses of such a line more ways than one of being a heroine? Maggie’s way to-night was to surprise them all, truly, by the extravagance of her affability. She was doubtless not positively boisterous; yet, though Mrs Assingham, as a bland critic, had never doubted her being graceful, she had never seen her put so much of it into being what might have been called assertive. It was all a tune to which Fanny’s heart could privately palpitate: her guest was happy, happy as a consequence of something that had occurred, but she was making the Prince not lose a ripple of her laugh, though not perhaps always enabling him to find it absolutely not foolish. Foolish in public beyond a certain point he was scarce the man to brook his wife’s being thought to be; so that there hovered before their friend the possibility of some subsequent scene between them, in the carriage or at home, of slightly sarcastic enquiry, of promptly invited explanation; a scene that according as Maggie should play her part in it might or mightn’t precipitate developments. What made these appearances practically thrilling meanwhile was this mystery – a mystery, it was clear, to Amerigo himself – of the incident or the influence that had so peculiarly determined them.
The lady of Cadogan Place was to read deeper, however, within three days, and the page was turned for her on the eve of her young confidant’s leaving London. The awaited migration to Fawns was to take place on the morrow, and it was known meanwhile to Mrs Assingham that their party of four were to dine that night, at the American Embassy, with another and a larger party; so that the elder woman had a sense of surprise on receiving from the younger, under date of six o’clock, a telegram requesting her immediate attendance. ‘Please come to me at once; dress early, if necessary, so that we shall have time: the carriage, ordered for us, will take you back first.’ Mrs Assingham, on quick deliberation, dressed, though not perhaps with full lucidity, and by seven o’clock was in Portland Place, where her friend, ‘upstairs’, and described to her on her arrival as herself engaged in dressing, instantly received her. She knew on the spot, poor Fanny, as she was afterwards to declare to the Colonel, that her feared crisis had popped up as at the touch of a spring, that her impossible hour was before her. Her impossible hour was the hour of its coming out that she had known of old so much more than she had ever said; and she had often put it to herself in apprehension, she tried to think even in preparation, that she should recognise the approach of her doom by a consciousness akin to that of the blowing open of a window on some night of the highest wind and the lowest thermometer. It would be all in vain to have crouched so long by the fire; the glass would have been smashed, the icy air would fill the place. If the air in Maggie’s room then, on her going up, wasn’t as yet quite the polar blast she had expected, it was none the less perceptibly such an atmosphere as they