ps on the
drawing-room carpet, with much attendance, on either side, much holding
up and guarding, much anticipation, in fine, of awkwardness or accident.
Their companions, by the same token, had constantly assisted at the
performance, following the experiment with sympathy and gaiety, and
never so full of applause, Maggie now made out for herself, as when the
infant project had kicked its little legs most wildly--kicked them, for
all the world, across the Channel and half the Continent, kicked them
over the Pyrenees and innocently crowed out some rich Spanish name. She
asked herself at present if it had been a "real" belief that they were
but wanting, for some such adventure, to snatch their moment; whether
either had at any instant seen it as workable, save in the form of a toy
to dangle before the other, that they should take flight, without
wife or husband, for one more look, "before they died," at the Madrid
pictures as well as for a drop of further weak delay in respect to three
or four possible prizes, privately offered, rarities of the first water,
responsibly reported on and profusely photographed, still patiently
awaiting their noiseless arrival in retreats to which the clue had not
otherwise been given away. The vision dallied with during the duskier
days in Eaton Square had stretched to the span of three or four weeks
of springtime for the total adventure, three or four weeks in the very
spirit, after all, of their regular life, as their regular life had
been persisting; full of shared mornings, afternoons, evenings, walks,
drives, "looks-in," at old places, on vague chances; full also, in
especial, of that purchased social ease, the sense of the comfort and
credit of their house, which had essentially the perfection of something
paid for, but which "came," on the whole, so cheap that it might have
been felt as costing--as costing the parent and child--nothing. It was
for Maggie to wonder, at present, if she had been sincere about their
going, to ask herself whether she would have stuck to their plan even if
nothing had happened.

Her view of the impossibility of sticking to it now may give us the
measure of her sense that everything had happened. A difference had been
made in her relation to each of her companions, and what it compelled
her to say to herself was that to behave as she might have behaved
before would be to act, for Amerigo and Charlotte, with the highest
hypocrisy. She saw in these days that