ion.

Mr. Verver met his young friend, at certain hours, in the day-nursery,
very much as he had regularly met the child's fond mother--Charlotte
having, as she clearly considered, given Maggie equal pledges and
desiring never to fail of the last word for the daily letter she had
promised to write. She wrote with high fidelity, she let her companion
know, and the effect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself
didn't write. The reason of this was partly that Charlotte "told all
about him"--which she also let him know she did--and partly that
he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was generally, quite
systematically, eased and, as they said, "done" for. Committed, as it
were, to this charming and clever young woman, who, by becoming for him
a domestic resource, had become for him practically a new person--and
committed, especially, in his own house, which somehow made his sense of
it a deeper thing--he took an interest in seeing how far the connection
could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and in thus putting to the
test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said, at the
last, about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making
one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one,
though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been, so
usefully, for Fanny--no Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help
her to be felt, according to Fanny's diagnosis, as real. She was real,
decidedly, from other causes, and Mr. Verver grew in time even a little
amused at the amount of machinery Mrs. Assingham had seemed to see
needed for pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on
a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than
during those--at which we have just glanced--when Mrs. Noble made
them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the
queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated
on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal
court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the
petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended
with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability,
to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded
insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such
snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among
china lap-dogs.

Eve