frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much
he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at
tea-time, during the same period, in Portland Place; though they had
little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had
outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs.
Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; her latest view of her
utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent
field. It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the
Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the
interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the
only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been
all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte's aid, so very
considerably lived into it--it would have been all indescribably
remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on
the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged
from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by
this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about
Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss
that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed of
course on finding her so absent from her home--just as this particular
phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind,
best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons, "shy" of
Portland Place itself--this was appreciable; so that she might well,
after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte's
appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the
account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came
to this) of the head of that house. There was always, to cover all
ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of
Mrs. Verver's day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all
reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation
in charge of the "social relations" of the family, literally of those of
the two households; as to her genius for representing which in the
great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more
accumulated. It had been established in the two households at an early
stage, and with the highest good-humour, that Charlotte was a, was THE,
"social success," whereas the Princess, though kind, though punct