ve called a
reasonable one. She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as
having dealt, all her life, at her father's side and by his example,
only in reasonable reasons; and what she would really have been most
ashamed of would be to produce for HIM, in this line, some inferior
substitute. Unless she were in a position to plead, definitely, that she
was jealous she should be in no position to plead, decently, that she
was dissatisfied. This latter condition would be a necessary implication
of the former; without the former behind it it would HAVE to fall to the
ground. So had the case, wonderfully, been arranged for her; there was a
card she could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be
to end the game. She felt herself--as at the small square green table,
between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged
counters--her father's playmate and partner; and what it constantly came
back to, in her mind, was that for her to ask a question, to raise a
doubt, to reflect in any degree on the play of the others, would be
to break the charm. The charm she had to call it, since it kept
her companion so constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so
contentedly occupied. To say anything at all would be, in fine, to have
to say WHY she was jealous; and she could, in her private hours, but
stare long, with suffused eyes, at that impossibility.

By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially, with her
morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her
consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily
greater than her consciousness of anything else; and I must add,
moreover, that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what
else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming.
Charlotte's response to the experiment of being more with her OUGHT, as
she very well knew, to have stamped the experiment with the feeling of
success; so that if the success itself seemed a boon less substantial
than the original image of it, it enjoyed thereby a certain analogy with
our young woman's aftertaste of Amerigo's own determined demonstrations.
Maggie was to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste,
and if I have spoken of the impressions fixed in her as soon as she had,
so insidiously, taken the field, a definite note must be made of her
perception, during those moments, of Charlotte's prompt uncertainty. She
had shown, no doubt--s