Whoever knew, or whoever did n't, whether or to what extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made his own. It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands in his pockets, (331) of the detachment of the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his secure pince-nez. The thing that never failed now as an item in the picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife's immaterial tether, so marked to Maggie's sense during her last month in the country. Mrs. Verver's straight neck had certainly not slipped it; nor had the other end of the long cord--oh quite conveniently long!--disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have recognised, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her father knew that she even yet did n't!
All this at present with Mrs. Assingham passed through her in quick vibrations. She had expressed while the revolution of her thought was incomplete the idea of what Amerigo "ought" on his side, in the premises, to be capable of, and then had felt her companion s answering stare. But she insisted on what she had meant. "He ought to wish to see her--and I mean in some protected and independent way, as he used to--in case of her being herself able to manage it. That," said Maggie with the courage of her conviction, "he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy, he ought to feel himself sworn--little as it is for the end of such a history!--to take from her. It's as if he wished to get off without taking anything."
(332) Mrs. Assingham deferentially mused. "But for what purpose is it your idea that they should again so intimately meet?"
"For any purpose they like. That's THEIR affair."
Fanny Assingham sharply laughed, then irrepressibly fell back to her constant position. "You're splendid--perfectly splendid." To which, as the Princess, shaking an impatient head, would n't have it again at all, she subjoined: "Or if you're not it's because you're so sure. I mean sure of HIM."
"Ah I'm exactly NOT sure of him. If I were sure of him I should n't doubt--!" But Maggie cast about her.
"Doubt what?" Fanny pressed as she waited.
"Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays--and how that ought to keep her present to him."
This in its turn after an instant Mrs. Assingham could meet with a smile.
"Trust him, my dear, to keep her present! But trust him also to keep himself absent. Leave him his own way."
"I'll leave him everything," said Maggie. "Only--you know it's my nature--I THINK."
"It's your nature to think too much," Fanny Assingham a trifle coarsely risked.
This but quickened however in the Princess the act she reprobated. "That may be. But if I had n't thought--!"
"You would n't, you mean, have been where you are?"
"Yes, because they on their side thought of everything BUT that. They thought of everything but that I might think."
(333) "Or even," her friend too superficially concurred, "that your father might!"
As to this, at all events, Maggie discriminated. "No, that would n't have prevented them; for they knew his first care would be not to make me do so. As it is," Maggie added, "that has had to become his last."