bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast
to transfer it to his pocket. The Prince's shining star may, no doubt,
having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but
whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of
sight--amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory
and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather momentously
occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old
friend: his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she
had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on--and he could
scarce have said why--a sharpness of importance: she had never lied
to him before--if only because it had never come up for her, properly,
intelligibly, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the
question of what he would do--by which she meant of what Charlotte would
also do--in that event of Maggie's and Mr. Verver's not embracing the
proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as
soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so
left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of
at all too directly prying had become marked in her. Betrayed by the
solicitude of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a
view, she had been obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly,
a reason for her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not
without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet
remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he had on
the spot, in his friendliness, invented one for her use, presenting it
to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up, to hand
back to her, a dropped flower. "You ask if I'm likely also to back
out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel
decide?"--he had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting her
to assent, though not having had his impression, from any indication
offered him by Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question
for the large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that
the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe themselves
on the golden roll; an exertion of a sort that, to do her justice,
he had never before observed Fanny to make. This last passage of the
chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she
would.

Once launched, himself, at any ra