Soon enough then, within the room, under the old lustres of Venice and the eyes of the several great portraits, more or less contemporary with these, that awaited on the walls of Fawns their final far migration--soon enough Maggie found herself staring, and at first all too gaspingly, at the grand total to which each separate demand Mrs.Verver had hitherto made upon her, however she had made it, now amounted.
"I've been wanting--and longer than you'd perhaps believe--to put a question to you for which no opportunity has seemed to me yet quite so good as this.

It would have been easier perhaps if you had struck me as in the least disposed ever to give me one.

I have to take it now, you see, as I find it." They stood in the centre of the immense room, and Maggie could feel that the scene of life her imagination had made of it twenty minutes before was by this time sufficiently peopled.

These few straight words filled it to its uttermost reaches, and nothing was now absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called upon to play in it.

Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich train; she rose there beautiful and free, with her whole aspect and action attuned to the firmness of her speech.