ght
not to go to church, what became, for a fair mind, of his own right?
His subtlest manoeuvre had been simply to change from the library to
the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his
daughter's, or the guest of the Miss Lutches--he scarce knew in which
light to regard her--had then, and not unnaturally, of course, joined
him. It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she
had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence would
already have got itself enacted. She had spent the whole morning with
him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back--thanks
to her having been tepid about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a
turn outside. It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of
subterfuge--almost as a form of disloyalty. Yet what was it she had in
mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made,
a patient, punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived
much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly
invited?--so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the
MORE on one's conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the middle
West, were there as friends of Maggie's, friends of the earlier time;
but Mrs. Rance was there--or at least had primarily appeared--only as a
friend of the Miss Lutches.

This lady herself was not of the middle West--she rather insisted on
it--but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and
most intimate States: he couldn't remember which, though she insisted
too on that. It was not in him--we may say it for him--to go so far as
to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of
her own; and this partly because she had struck him, verily, rather
as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the
actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such
connection as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided
substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing
it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep
his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if
the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was
doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His
greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in
finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he