The great part Mrs. Verver had socially played came luckily, Maggie could make out, to her assistance; she had "personal friends"--Charlotte's personal friends had ever been, in London, at the two houses, one of the most convenient pleasantries--who actually tempered at this crisis her aspect of isolation; and it would n't have been hard to guess that her best moments were those in which she suffered no fear of becoming a bore to restrain her appeal to their curiosity. Their curiosity might be vague, but their clever hostess was distinct, and she marched them about sparing them nothing, as if she counted each day on a harvest of half-crowns. Maggie met her again, in the gallery, at the oddest hours, with the party she was entertaining; heard her draw out the lesson, insist on the interest, snub, even, the particular presumption and smile for the general bewilderment--inevitable features these latter of almost any occasion--in a manner that made our young woman, herself incureably dazzled, marvel afresh at the mystery by which a creature who could be in some connexions so earnestly right could be in others so perversely wrong When her father, vaguely circulating, was attended by his wife, it was always Charlotte who seemed to (290) bring up the rear; but he hung in the background when she did cicerone, and it was then perhaps that, moving mildly and modestly to and fro on the skirts of the exhibition, his appearance of weaving his spell was for the initiated conscience least to be resisted. Brilliant women turned to him in vague emotion, but his response scarce committed him more than if he had been the person employed to see that after the invading wave was spent the cabinets were all locked and the symmetries all restored.
There was a morning when, during the hour before luncheon and shortly after the arrival of a neighbourly contingent--neighbourly from ten miles off--whom Mrs. Verver had taken in charge, Maggie paused on the threshold of the gallery through which she had been about to pass, faltering there for the very impression of his face as it met her from an opposite door.
Charlotte, halfway down the vista, held together, as if by something almost austere in the grace of her authority, the semi-scared (now that they were there!) knot of her visitors, who, since they had announced themselves by telegram as yearning to enquire and admire, saw themselves restricted to this consistency. Her voice, high and clear and a little hard, reached her husband and her stepdaughter while she thus placed beyond doubt her cheerful submission to duty. Her words, addressed to the largest publicity, rang for some minutes through the place, every one as quiet to listen as if it had been a church ablaze with tapers and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise. Fanny Assingham looked rapt in devotion--Fanny Assingham who forsook this other friend as little as (291) she forsook either her host or the Princess or the Prince or the Principino; she supported her, in slow revolutions, in murmurous attestations of presence, at all such times, and Maggie, advancing after a first hesitation, was not to fail of noting her solemn inscrutable attitude, her eyes attentively lifted, so that she might escape being provoked to betray an impression. She betrayed one however as Maggie approached, dropping her gaze to the latter's level long enough to seem to adventure, marvellously, on a mute appeal. "You understand, don't you, that if she did n't do this there would be no knowing what she might do?" This light Mrs. Assingham richly launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain again, and then, not too much to show it--or rather positively to conceal it and to conceal something more as well--turned short round to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. "The largest of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands looped round it, which as you see are the finest possible vieux Saxe, are n't of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They've been put on at a later time by a process known through very few examples, and through none so important as this, which is really quite unique--so that though the whole thing is a little its value as a specimen is I believe almost inestimable."