could only signify that he wasn't, at heart, contented. What he
wanted, at any rate, and what he didn't want were, in the event,
put to the proof for Maggie just in time to give her a fresh
wind. She had been dining, with her husband, in Eaton Square, on
the occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to
Lord and Lady Castledean. The propriety of some demonstration of
this sort had been for many days before our group, the question
reduced to the mere issue of which of the two houses should first
take the field. The issue had been easily settled--in the manner
of every issue referred in any degree to Amerigo and Charlotte:
the initiative obviously belonged to Mrs. Verver, who had gone to
Matcham while Maggie had stayed away, and the evening in Eaton
Square might have passed for a demonstration all the more
personal that the dinner had been planned on "intimate" lines.
Six other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of
Matcham, made up the company, and each of these persons had for
Maggie the interest of an attested connection with the Easter
revels at that visionary house. Their common memory of an
occasion that had clearly left behind it an ineffaceable charm--
this air of beatific reference, less subdued in the others than
in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them, together, an inscrutable
comradeship against which the young woman's imagination broke in
a small vain wave.

It wasn't that she wished she had been of the remembered party
and possessed herself of its secrets; for she didn't care about
its secrets--she could concern herself at present, absolutely,
with no secret but her own. What occurred was simply that she
became aware, at a stroke, of the quantity of further nourishment
required by her own, and of the amount of it she might somehow