She FELT, in all her pulses, Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement.

It was the added touch, and now nothing was wanting--which, to do her stepmother justice, Mrs.Verver had appeared but to desire, from that evening, to show, with the last vividness, that she recognised.

Maggie lived over again the minutes in question--had found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had for instance--animated the four with just the right restlessness too, had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their game of bridge--however abysmal a face it had worn for her--give way, precisely, to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate Charlotte's impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.
If Mrs.Verver meanwhile, then, had struck her as determined in a certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail of appreciating the truth that she had not been put at ease, after all, with absolute permanence.
Maggie had seen her, unmistakably, desire to rise to the occasion and be magnificent--seen her decide that the right way for this would be to prove that the reassurance she had extorted there, under the high, cool lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of crystal and silver, had not only poured oil upon the troubled waters of their question, but had fairly drenched their whole intercourse with that lubricant.

She had exceeded the limit of discretion in this insistence on her capacity to repay in proportion a service she acknowledged as handsome.

"Why handsome ?" Maggie would have been free to ask; since if she had been veracious the service assuredly would not have been huge.