ainly pleasant, as pleasant
as Amerigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings,
quite for shared adventures, for its always turning out, amusingly, that
they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the
same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact
that the father and daughter, for so long, had expressed so few positive
desires; yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amerigo and
Charlotte HAD at last got a little tired of each other's company they
should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level
of their companions as in wishing to pull the latter into the train
in which they so constantly moved. "We're in the train," Maggie mutely
reflected after the dinner in Eaton Square with Lady Castledean; "we've
suddenly waked up in it and found ourselves rushing along, very much
as if we had been put in during sleep--shoved, like a pair of labelled
boxes, into the van. And since I wanted to 'go' I'm certainly going,"
she might have added; "I'm moving without trouble--they're doing it
all for us: it's wonderful how they understand and how perfectly
it succeeds." For that was the thing she had most immediately to
acknowledge: it seemed as easy for them to make a quartette as it had
formerly so long appeared for them to make a pair of couples--this
latter being thus a discovery too absurdly belated. The only point
at which, day after day, the success appeared at all qualified was
represented, as might have been said, by her irresistible impulse
to give her father a clutch when the train indulged in one of its
occasional lurches. Then--there was no denying it--his eyes and her own
met; so that they were themselves doing active violence, as against
the others, to that very spirit of union, or at least to that very
achievement of change, which she had taken the field to invoke.

The maximum of change was reached, no doubt, the day the Matcham party
dined in Portland Place; the day, really perhaps, of Maggie's maximum of
social glory, in the sense of its showing for her own occasion, her
very own, with every one else extravagantly rallying and falling in,
absolutely conspiring to make her its heroine. It was as if her father
himself, always with more initiative as a guest than as a host, had
dabbled too in the conspiracy; and the impression was not diminished by
the presence of the Assinghams, likewise very much caught-up, now, after
something