the elements definitely presented to each
in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing
allusive, nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or
immediately after luncheon--except indeed so far as their failure soon
again to meet might be itself an accident charged with reference. The
hour or two after luncheon--and on Sundays with especial rigour, for
one of the domestic reasons of which it belonged to Maggie quite
multitudinously to take account--were habitually spent by the Princess
with her little boy, in whose apartment she either frequently found her
father already established or was sooner or later joined by him. His
visit to his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his
day, against all interventions, and this without counting his grandson's
visits to HIM, scarcely less ordered and timed, and the odd bits, as he
called them, that they picked up together when they could--communions
snatched, for the most part, on the terrace, in the gardens or the park,
while the Principino, with much pomp and circumstance of perambulator,
parasol, fine lace over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance,
took the air. In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great
house the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily
accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the small
child an heir-apparent--in the nursery of nurseries the talk, at these
instituted times, was always so prevailingly with or about the master
of the scene that other interests and other topics had fairly learned to
avoid the slighting and inadequate notice there taken of them. They came
in, at the best, but as involved in the little boy's future, his past,
or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead
their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing perhaps, in
truth, had done more than this united participation to confirm in the
elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more
deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver's
behalf, we have made some mention. It was of course an old story and a
familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link
between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every
ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma
and a grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process,
might have become, b