hen--ah, with such a slow, painful
motion as she had a horror of!--say to her, THEN would be time enough
for Amerigo and Charlotte to confess to not liking to appear to
foregather.

She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a
particular question from him and of being able to check, yes even to
disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent manner of receiving it, any
restless imagination he might have about its importance. The day, bright
and soft, had the breath of summer; it made them talk, to begin with, of
Fawns, of the way Fawns invited--Maggie aware, the while, that in thus
regarding, with him, the sweetness of its invitation to one couple just
as much as to another, her humbugging smile grew very nearly convulsive.
That was it, and there was relief truly, of a sort, in taking it in:
she was humbugging him already, by absolute necessity, as she had never,
never done in her life--doing it up to the full height of what she
had allowed for. The necessity, in the great dimly-shining room where,
declining, for his reasons, to sit down, he moved about in Amerigo's
very footsteps, the necessity affected her as pressing upon her with the
very force of the charm itself; of the old pleasantness, between them,
so candidly playing up there again; of the positive flatness of their
tenderness, a surface all for familiar use, quite as if generalised from
the long succession of tapestried sofas, sweetly faded, on which his
theory of contentment had sat, through unmeasured pauses, beside
her own. She KNEW, from this instant, knew in advance and as well
as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for
a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove that there was
nothing the matter with her. She saw, of a sudden, everything she might
say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from
it with any number of remote matters, struck herself, for instance, as
acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in the
exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season, for a turn in
the Regent's Park. This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland
Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already proceeded
there under high attendance: all of which considerations were defensive
for Maggie, all of which became, to her mind, part of the business of
cultivating continuity.

Upstairs, while she left him to put on something to go out in, the
thought of