almost the ships of disguise – to let her horror of what was before her play up without witnesses; and even after Maggie’s approach had presented an innocent front it was still not to be mistaken that she bristled with the signs of her extremity. It wasn’t to be said for them either that they were draped at this hour in any of her usual graces; unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess in spite of the dissimulation that with the return of comparative confidence was so promptly to operate. How tragic in essence the very change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride – this for possible defence if not for possible aggression. Pride indeed had the next moment become the mantle caught up for protection and perversity; she flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her freedom. To be doomed was in her situation to have extravagantly incurred a doom, so that to confess to wretchedness was by the same stroke to confess to falsity. She wouldn’t confess, she didn’t – a thousand times no; she only cast about her, and quite frankly and fiercely, for something else that would give colour to her having burst her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she invoked it, and the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she could only help her to it. She presently got up – which seemed to mean ‘Oh stay if you like!’ – and when she had moved about a while at random, looking away, looking at anything, at everything but her visitor; when she had spoken of the temperature and declared that she revelled in it; when she had uttered her thanks for the book, which, a little incoherently, with her second volume, she perhaps found less clever than she expected; when she had let Maggie approach sufficiently closer to lay untouched the tribute in question on a bench and take up obligingly its superfluous mate: when she had done these things she sat down in another place, more or less visibly in possession of her part. Our young woman was to have passed, in all her adventure, no stranger moments; for she not only now saw her companion fairly agree to take her then for the poor little person she was finding it so easy to appear, but fell, in a secret responsive ecstasy, to wondering if there weren’t some supreme abjection with which she might be inspired. Vague but increasingly brighter this possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung there adequately plain to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to (as they said) grovel; and that truly made the stage large. It had absolutely, within the time, taken on the dazzling merit of being large for each of them alike.
‘I’m glad to see you alone – there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you. I’m tired,’ said Mrs Verver, ‘I’m tired –!’
‘ “Tired” –?’ It had dropped, the next thing; it couldn’t all come at once; but Maggie had already guessed what it was, and the flush of recognition was in her face.
‘Tired of this life – the one we’ve been leading. You like it, I know, but I’ve dreamed another dream.’ She held up her head now; her lighted eyes more triumphantly rested; she was finding, she was following her way. Maggie, by the same influence, sat in sight of it; there was something she was saving, some quantity of which she herself was judge; and it was for a long moment, even with the sacrifice the Princess had come to make, a good deal like watching her from the solid shore plunge into uncertain, into possibly treacherous depths. ‘I see something else,’ she went on; ‘I’ve an idea that greatly appeals to me – I’ve had it for a long time. It has come over me that we’re wrong. Our real life isn’t here.’
Maggie held her breath. ‘ “Ours” –?’
‘My husband’s and mine. I’m not speaking for you.’
‘Oh!’ said Maggie, only praying not to be, not even to appear, stupid.
‘I’m speaking for ourselves. I’m speaking,’ Charlotte brought out, ‘for him.’
‘I see. For my father.’
‘For your father. For whom else?’ They looked at each other hard now, but Maggie’s face took refuge in the intensity of her interest. She wasn’t at all events so stupid as to treat