THE PRINCESS
be much represented in those receptacles; against the thick locked panes of which she still liked to flatten her nose, finding in its place each time everything she had on successive anniversaries tried to believe he might pretend at her suggestion to be put off with or at least to think curious. She was now ready to try it again: they had always, with his pleasure in her pretence and her pleasure in his, with the funny betrayal of the sacrifice to domestic manners on either side, played the game so happily. To this end, on her way home, she had loitered everywhere; quite too deludedly among the old books and the old prints, which had yielded nothing to her purpose, but with a strange inconsequence in one of the other shops, that of a small antiquarian, a queer little foreign man who had shown her a number of things, shown her finally something that, struck with it as rather a rarity and thinking it would, compared to some of her ventures, quite superlatively do, she had bought—bought really, when it came to that, for a price. "It appears now it won't do at all," said Maggie; "something has happened since that puts it quite out of the question. I had only my day of satisfaction in it, but I feel at the same time, as I keep it here before me, that I wouldn't have missed it for the world." She had talked, from the first of her friend's entrance, coherently enough, even with a small quaver that overstated her calm; but she held her breath every few seconds as if for deliberation and to prove she didn't pant—all of which marked for Fanny the depth of her commotion: her reference to her thought about her father, about her chance to pick up something
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