THE PRINCESS
women "making up" effusively, as women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply on her father's part, on Amerigo's and on Fanny Assingham's, some proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference. There had been something in the incident, there had been but too much, for each observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without seeming essentially to say: "See, see, the dear things—their quarrel's blissfully over!" "Our quarrel? What quarrel?" the dear things themselves would necessarily in that case have demanded; and the wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of exercise. No one had been equal to the flight of producing off-hand a fictive reason for any estrangement—to take, that is, the place of the true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air; and every one accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was pretending immediately after to have remarked nothing that any one else hadn't.
Maggie's own measure had remained all the same full of the reflexion caught from the total inference; which had acted virtually by enabling every one present—and oh Charlotte not least!—to draw a long breath. The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it re-enforced—re-enforced even immensely—the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter. Supremely however, while this glass was held up to her,
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