第169章 Chapter 8(4)

She was to go back some day, to dive deeper, to linger and taste; in spite of which, however, Mrs. Assingham could n't recollect perceiving that the visit had been repeated. This second occasion had given way, for a long time, in her happy life, to other occasions--all testifying in their degree to the quality of her husband's blood, its rich mixture and its many remarkable references; after which, no doubt, the (148) charming piety involved had grown, on still further grounds, bewildered and faint.

It now appeared none the less that some renewed conversation with Mr.

Crichton had breathed on the faintness revivingly, and Maggie mentioned her purpose as a conception of her very own, to the success of which she designed to devote her morning. Visits of gracious ladies, under his protection, lighted up rosily, for this perhaps most flower-loving and honey-sipping member of the great Bloomsbury hive, its packed passages and cells; and though not sworn of the province toward which his friend had found herself, according to her appeal to him, yearning again, nothing was easier for him than to put her in relation with the presiding urbanities. So it had been settled, Maggie said to Mrs. Assingham, and she was to dispense with Amerigo's company. Fanny was to remember later on that she had at first taken this last fact for one of the finer notes of her young woman's detachment, imagined she must be going alone because of the shade of irony that in these ambiguous days her husband's personal presence might be felt to confer practically on any tribute to his transmitted significance. Then as the next moment she felt it clear that so much plotted freedom was virtually a refinement of reflexion, an impulse to commemorate afresh whatever might still survive of pride and hope, her sense of ambiguity happily fell and she congratulated her companion on having anything so exquisite to do and on being so exquisitely in the humour to do it. After the occasion had come and gone she was confirmed in her optimism; she made out in the evening (149) that the hour spent among the projected lights, the annals and illustrations, the parchments and portraits, the emblazoned volumes and the murmured commentary, had been for the Princess enlarging and inspiring. Maggie had said to her some days before, very sweetly but very firmly, "Invite us to dine, please, for Friday, and have any one you like or you can--it does n't in the least matter whom"; and the pair in Cadogan Place had bent to this mandate with a docility not in the least ruffled by all that it took for granted.

It provided for an evening--this had been Maggie's view; and she lived up to her view, in her friend's eyes, by treating the occasion, more or less explicitly, as new and strange. The good Assinghams had feasted in fact at the two other boards on a scale so disproportionate to the scant solicitations of their own that it was easy to make a joke of seeing how they fed at home, how they met, themselves, the question of giving to eat.