It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amerigo's was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie's own had come to show simply as that improvised "post"-- a post of the kind spoken of as advanced--with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous bead-work to sell.

Maggie's own, in short, would have been sought in vain in the most rudimentary map of the social relations as such.

The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions.

The "end" that the Prince was at all events holding out for was represented to expectation by his father-in-law's announced departure for America with Mrs.Verver; just as that prospective event had originally figured as advising, for discretion, the flight of the younger couple, to say nothing of the withdrawal of whatever other importunate company, before the great upheaval of Fawns.

This residence was to be peopled for a month by porters, packers and hammerers, at whose operations it had become peculiarly public--public that is for Portland Place--that Charlotte was to preside in force; operations the quite awful appointed scale and style of which had at no moment loomed so large to Maggie's mind as one day when the dear Assinghams swam back into her ken besprinkled with sawdust and looking as pale as if they had seen Samson pull down the temple.