he were able to
transport, as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to
one of his exhibitory halls; while Maggie had induced her husband,
not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the
somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it
happened to be, of the faith--her own as it had been her mother's, and
as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be
taken for his--without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm
and smooth, the drama of her marriage might not have been acted out.

What at last appeared to have happened, however, was that the divided
parties, coming back at the same moment, had met outside and then
drifted together, from empty room to room, yet not in mere aimless quest
of the pair of companions they had left at home. The quest had carried
them to the door of the billiard-room, and their appearance, as it
opened to admit them, determined for Adam Verver, in the oddest way in
the world, a new and sharp perception. It was really remarkable: this
perception expanded, on the spot, as a flower, one of the strangest,
might, at a breath, have suddenly opened. The breath, for that matter,
was more than anything else, the look in his daughter's eyes--the look
with which he SAW her take in exactly what had occurred in her absence:
Mrs. Rance's pursuit of him to this remote locality, the spirit and
the very form, perfectly characteristic, of his acceptance of the
complication--the seal set, in short, unmistakably, on one of Maggie's
anxieties. The anxiety, it was true, would have been, even though not
imparted, separately shared; for Fanny Assingham's face was, by the
same stroke, not at all thickly veiled for him, and a queer light, of
a colour quite to match, fairly glittered in the four fine eyes of the
Miss Lutches. Each of these persons--counting out, that is, the Prince
and the Colonel, who didn't care, and who didn't even see that the
others did--knew something, or had at any rate had her idea; the idea,
precisely, that this was what Mrs. Rance, artfully biding her time,
WOULD do. The special shade of apprehension on the part of the Miss
Lutches might indeed have suggested the vision of an energy supremely
asserted. It was droll, in truth, if one came to that, the position
of the Miss Lutches: they had themselves brought, they had guilelessly
introduced Mrs. Rance, strong in the fact of Mr. Rance's having been
literally beheld