THE PRINCE
usually got. Mrs. Rance opened the door—more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more briskly on seeing him than he had been moved to do on seeing nobody. Then with force it came home to him that he had a week before definitely established a precedent. He did her at least that justice—it was a kind of justice he was always doing somebody. He had on the previous Sunday liked to stop at home and had exposed himself thereby to be caught in the act. To make this possible, that is, Mrs. Rance had only had to like to do the same—the trick was so easily played. It hadn't occurred to him to plan in any way for her absence—which would have destroyed somehow in principle the propriety of his own presence. If persons under his roof hadn't a right not to go to church what became, for a fair mind, of his own right? His subtlest manœuvre had been simply to change from the library to the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his daughter's, or the guest of the Miss Lutches—he scarce knew in which light to regard her—had then, and not unnaturally of course, joined him. It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence would already have got itself enacted. She had spent the whole morning with him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back—thanks to her having been tepid about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a turn outside. It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of subterfuge—almost as a form of disloyalty. Yet what
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