This was because of the odd element of the unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto.

She was used, herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone with them.

She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him as alone with Charlotte--and this, strangely enough, even while fixing her sense to the full on his wife's power of preserving, quite of enhancing, every felicitous appearance.

Charlotte had done that--under immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed--during the numerous months of their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs.Verver's stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit.

It was the present so much briefer interval, in a situation, possibly in a relation, so changed--it was the new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte's art.