THE PRINCESS
responsibly reported on and profusely photographed, still patiently awaiting their noiseless arrival in retreats to which the clue had not otherwise been given away. The vision dallied with during the duskier days in Eaton Square had stretched to the span of three or four weeks of springtime for the total adventure, three or four weeks in the very spirit, after all, of their regular life, as their regular life had been persisting; full of shared mornings, afternoons, evenings, walks, drives, "looks-in" at old places on vague chances; full also in especial of that purchased social ease, the sense of the comfort and credit of their house, which had essentially the perfection of something paid for, but which "came" on the whole so cheap that it might have been felt as costing—as costing the parent and child—nothing. It was for Maggie to wonder at present if she had been sincere about their going, to ask herself whether she would have stuck to their plan even if nothing had happened.
Her view of the impossibility of sticking to it now may give us the measure of her sense that everything had happened. A difference had been made in her relation to each of her companions, and what it compelled her to say to herself was that to behave as she might have behaved before would be to act for Amerigo and Charlotte with the highest hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own, to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of the idea in fact had been in some such sublimity. Day after day she put off the moment of "speaking," as she
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