The Golden Bowl, Volume I by Henry James (page 2)

How will it do, how will it do?”

“It will do, I daresay, without your wringing your hands over it. When, my dear,” the Colonel pursued as he smoked, “have you ever seen anything of yours–anything that you’ve done–NOT do?”

“Ah, I didn’t do this!” It brought her answer straight. “I didn’t bring her back.”

“Did you expect her to stay over there all her days to oblige you?”

“Not a bit–for I shouldn’t have minded her coming after their marriage. It’s her coming, this way, before.” To which she added with inconsequence: “I’m too sorry for her–of course she can’t enjoy it. But I don’t see what perversity rides her. She needn’t have looked it all so in the face–as she doesn’t do it, I suppose, simply for discipline. It’s almost–that’s the bore of it–discipline to ME.”

“Perhaps then,” said Bob Assingham, “that’s what has been her idea. Take it, for God’s sake, as discipline to you and have done with it. It will do,” he added, “for discipline to me as well.”

She was far, however, from having done with it; it was a situation with such different sides, as she said, and to none of which one could, in justice, be blind. “It isn’t in the least, you know, for instance, that I believe she’s bad. Never, never,” Mrs. Assingham declared. “I don’t think that of her.”

“Then why isn’t that enough?”

Nothing was enough, Mrs. Assingham signified, but that she should develop her thought. “She doesn’t deliberately intend, she doesn’t consciously wish, the least complication. It’s perfectly true that she thinks Maggie a dear–as who doesn’t? She’s incapable of any PLAN to hurt a hair of her head. Yet here she is–and there THEY are,” she wound up.

Her husband again, for a little, smoked in silence. “What in the world, between them, ever took place?”

“Between Charlotte and the Prince? Why, nothing–except their having to recognise that nothing COULD. That was their little romance–it was even their little tragedy.”

“But what the deuce did they DO?”

“Do? They fell in love with each other–but, seeing it wasn’t possible, gave each other up.”

“Then where was the romance?”

“Why, in their frustration, in their having the courage to look the facts in the face.”

“What facts?” the Colonel went on.

“Well, to begin with, that of their neither of them having the means to marry. If she had had even a little–a little, I mean, for two–I believe he would bravely have done it.” After which, as her husband but emitted an odd vague sound, she corrected herself. “I mean if he himself had had only a little–or a little more than a little, a little for a prince. They would have done what they could”–she did them justice”–if there had been a way. But there wasn’t a way, and Charlotte, quite to her honour, I consider, understood it. He HAD to have money–it was a question of life and death. It wouldn’t have been a bit amusing, either, to marry him as a pauper–I mean leaving him one. That was what she had–as HE had–the reason to see.”

“And their reason is what you call their romance?”

She looked at him a moment. “What do you want more?”

“Didn’t HE,” the Colonel inquired, “want anything more? Or didn’t, for that matter, poor Charlotte herself?”

She kept her eyes on him; there was a manner in it that half answered. “They were thoroughly in love. She might have been his–” She checked herself; she even for a minute lost herself. “She might have been anything she liked–except his wife.”

“But she wasn’t,” said the Colonel very smokingly.

“She wasn’t,” Mrs. Assingham echoed.

The echo, not loud but deep, filled for a little the room. He seemed to listen to it die away; then he began again. “How are you sure?”

She waited before saying, but when she spoke it was definite. “There wasn’t time.”

He had a small laugh for her reason; he might have expected some other. “Does it take so much time?”

She herself, however, remained serious. “It takes more than they had.”

He was detached, but he wondered. “What was the matter with their time?” After which, as, remembering it all, living it over and piecing it together, she only considered, “You mean that you came in with your idea?” he demanded.

It brought her quickly to the point, and as if also in a measure to answer herself. “Not a bit of it–THEN. But you surely recall,” she went on, “the way, a year ago, everything took place. They had parted before he had ever heard of Maggie.”

“Why hadn’t he heard of her from Charlotte herself?”

“Because she had never spoken of her.”

“Is that also,” the Colonel inquired, “what she has told you?”

“I’m not speaking,” his wife returned, “of what she has told me. That’s one thing. I’m speaking of what I know by myself. That’s another.”

“You feel, in other words, that she lies to you?” Bob Assingham more sociably asked.

She neglected the question, treating it as gross. “She never so much, at the time, as named Maggie.”

It was so positive that it appeared to strike him. “It’s he then who has told you?”

She after a moment admitted it. “It’s he.”

“And he doesn’t lie?”

“No–to do him justice. I believe he absolutely doesn’t. If I hadn’t believed it,” Mrs. Assingham declared, for her general justification, “I would have had nothing to do with him–that is in this connection. He’s a gentleman–I mean ALL as much of one as he ought to be. And he had nothing to gain. That helps,” she added, “even a gentleman. It was I who named Maggie to him–a year from last May. He had never heard of her before.”

“Then it’s grave,” said the Colonel.

She hesitated. “Do you mean grave for me?”

“Oh, that everything’s grave for ‘you’ is what we take for granted and are fundamentally talking about. It’s grave–it WAS– for Charlotte. And it’s grave for Maggie. That is it WAS–when he did see her. Or when she did see HIM.”

“You don’t torment me as much as you would like,” she presently went on, “because you think of nothing that I haven’t a thousand times thought of, and because I think of everything that you never will. It would all,” she recognised, “have been grave if it hadn’t all been right. You can’t make out,” she contended, “that we got to Rome before the end of February.”

He more than agreed. “There’s nothing in life, my dear, that I CAN make out.”

Well, there was nothing in life, apparently, that she, at real need, couldn’t. “Charlotte, who had been there, that year, from early, quite from November, left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the 10th of April. She was to have stayed on–she was to have stayed, naturally, more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming–that is Maggie was–largely to see her, and above all to be with her THERE. It was all altered–by Charlotte’s going to Florence. She went from one day to the other–you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd, at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty was that, though I knew a little, I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know her relation with him had been, as you say, a ‘near’ thing–that is I didn’t know HOW near. The poor girl’s departure was a flight–she went to save herself.”

He had listened more than he showed–as came out in his tone. “To save herself?”

“Well, also, really, I think, to save HIM too. I saw it afterwards–I see it all now. He would have been sorry–he didn’t want to hurt her.”

“Oh, I daresay,” the Colonel laughed. “They generally don’t!”

“At all events,” his wife pursued, “she escaped–they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had taken them, it is true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known– though it was a good deal known. More, certainly,” she said, “than I then imagined–though I don’t know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done–things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven’t”–and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures–“so I haven’t, I say to myself, been a fool.”

“Well, are you trying to make out that I’ve said you have? All their case wants, at any rate,” Bob Assingham declared, “is that you should leave it well alone. It’s theirs now; they’ve bought it, over the counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours.”

“Of which case,” she asked, “are you speaking?”

He smoked a minute: then with a groan: “Lord, are there so many?”

“There’s Maggie’s and the Prince’s, and there’s the Prince’s and Charlotte’s.”

“Oh yes; and then,” the Colonel scoffed, “there’s Charlotte’s and the Prince’s.”

“There’s Maggie’s and Charlotte’s,” she went on–“and there’s also Maggie’s and mine. I think too that there’s Charlotte’s and mine. Yes,” she mused, “Charlotte’s and mine is certainly a case. In short, you see, there are plenty. But I mean,” she said, “to keep my head.”

“Are we to settle them all,” he inquired, “to-night?”

“I should lose it if things had happened otherwise–if I had acted with any folly.” She had gone on in her earnestness, unheeding of his question. “I shouldn’t be able to bear that now. But my good conscience is my strength; no one can accuse me. The Ververs came on to Rome alone–Charlotte, after their days with her in Florence, had decided about America. Maggie, I daresay, had helped her; she must have made her a present, and a handsome one, so that many things were easy. Charlotte left them, came to England, ‘joined’ somebody or other, sailed for New York. I have still her letter from Milan, telling me; I didn’t know at the moment all that was behind it, but I felt in it nevertheless the undertaking of a new life. Certainly, in any case, it cleared THAT air–I mean the dear old Roman, in which we were steeped. It left the field free–it gave me a free hand. There was no question for me of anybody else when I brought the two others together. More than that, there was no question for them. So you see,” she concluded, “where that puts me.” She got up, on the words, very much as if they were the blue daylight towards which, through a darksome tunnel, she had been pushing her way, and the elation in her voice, combined with her recovered alertness, might have signified the sharp whistle of the train that shoots at last into the open. She turned about the room; she looked out a moment into the August night; she stopped, here and there, before the flowers in bowls and vases. Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved what was needing proof, as if the issue of her operation had been, almost unexpectedly, a success. Old arithmetic had perhaps been fallacious, but the new settled the question. Her husband, oddly, however, kept his place without apparently measuring these results. As he had been amused at her intensity, so he was not uplifted by her relief; his interest might in fact have been more enlisted than he allowed. “Do you mean,” he presently asked, “that he had already forgot about Charlotte?”

She faced round as if he had touched a spring. “He WANTED to, naturally–and it was much the best thing he could do.” She was in possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. “He was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what Maggie then seemed to us.”

“She’s very nice; but she always seems to me, more than anything else, the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that’s what she especially seemed to him, you of course place the thing in your light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn’t, I grant you, have been so difficult.”

This pulled her up but for an instant. “I never said he didn’t from the first–I never said that he doesn’t more and more–like Maggie’s money.”

“I never said I shouldn’t have liked it myself,” Bob Assingham returned. He made no movement; he smoked another minute. “How much did Maggie know?”

“How much?” She seemed to consider–as if it were between quarts and gallons–how best to express the quantity. “She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her.”

“And what had Charlotte told her?”

“Very little.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Why, this–that she couldn’t tell her.” And she explained a little what she meant. “There are things, my dear–haven’t you felt it yourself, coarse as you are?–that no one could tell Maggie. There are things that, upon my word, I shouldn’t care to attempt to tell her now.”

The Colonel smoked on it. “She’d be so scandalised?”

“She’d be so frightened. She’d be, in her strange little way, so hurt. She wasn’t born to know evil. She must never know it.” Bob Assingham had a queer grim laugh; the sound of which, in fact, fixed his wife before him. “We’re taking grand ways to prevent it.”

But she stood there to protest. “We’re not taking any ways. The ways are all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage that day in Villa Borghese–the second or third of her days in Rome, when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr. Verver, and the Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man’s greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a streetcorner as we passed, that one of the Prince’s baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo: which (as you probably don’t know, however, even after a lifetime of ME), was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless breasts.”

The Colonel’s grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his wife’s not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even at the present moment not directly lighted by an inquiry that managed to be curious without being apologetic. “But where does the connection come in?”

His wife was prompt. “By the women–that is by some obliging woman, of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great–great enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is, at any rate, that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince was, from the start, helped with the dear Ververs by his wearing it. The connection became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague. ‘By that sign,’ I quite said to myself, ‘he’ll conquer’–with his good fortune, of course, of having the other necessary signs too. It really,” said Mrs. Assingham, “was, practically, the fine side of the wedge. Which struck me as also,” she wound up, “a lovely note for the candour of the Ververs.”

The Colonel took in the tale, but his comment was prosaic. “He knew, Amerigo, what he was about. And I don’t mean the OLD one.”

“I know what you mean!” his wife bravely threw off.

“The old one”–he pointed his effect “isn’t the only discoverer in the family.”

“Oh, as much as you like! If he discovered America–or got himself honoured as if he had–his successors were, in due time, to discover the Americans. And it was one of them in particular, doubtless, who was to discover how patriotic we are.”

“Wouldn’t this be the same one,” the Colonel asked, “who really discovered what you call the connection?”

She gave him a look. “The connection’s a true thing–the connection’s perfectly historic, Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind. Don’t you understand,” she asked, “that the history of such people is known, root and branch, at every moment of its course?”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Bob Assingham.

“Go to the British Museum,” his companion continued with spirit.

“And what am I to do there?”

“There’s a whole immense room, or recess, or department, or whatever, filled with books written about his family alone. You can see for yourself.”

“Have you seen for YOUR self?”

She faltered but an instant. “Certainly–I went one day with Maggie. We looked him up, so to say. They were most civil.” And she fell again into the current her husband had slightly ruffled. “The effect was produced, the charm began to work, at all events, in Rome, from that hour of the Prince’s drive with us. My only course, afterwards, had to be to make the best of it. It was certainly good enough for that,” Mrs. Assingham hastened to add, “and I didn’t in the least see my duty in making the worst. In the same situation, to-day; I wouldn’t act differently. I entered into the case as it then appeared to me–and as, for the matter of that, it still does. I LIKED it, I thought all sorts of good of it, and nothing can even now,” she said with some intensity, “make me think anything else.”

“Nothing can ever make you think anything you don’t want to,” the Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. “You’ve got a precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What happened,” he went on, “was that you fell violently in love with the Prince yourself, and that as you couldn’t get me out of the way you had to take some roundabout course. You couldn’t marry him, any more than Charlotte could–that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody else–it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to your little friend, to whom there were no objections.”

“Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive ones–and all excellent, all charming.” She spoke with an absence of all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost her nothing. “It IS always the Prince; and it IS always, thank heaven, marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be. That I could help, a year ago, most assuredly made me happy, and it continues to make me happy.”

“Then why aren’t you quiet?”

“I AM quiet,” said Fanny Assingham.

He looked at her, with his colourless candour, still in his place; she moved about again, a little, emphasising by her unrest her declaration of her tranquillity. He was as silent, at first, as if he had taken her answer, but he was not to keep it long. “What do you make of it that, by your own show, Charlotte couldn’t tell her all? What do you make of it that the Prince didn’t tell her anything? Say one understands that there are things she can’t be told–since, as you put it, she is so easily scared and shocked.” He produced these objections slowly, giving her time, by his pauses, to stop roaming and come back to him. But she was roaming still when he concluded his inquiry. “If there hadn’t been anything there shouldn’t have been between the pair before Charlotte bolted–in order, precisely, as you say, that there SHOULDN’T be: why in the world was what there HAD been too bad to be spoken of?”

Mrs. Assingham, after this question, continued still to circulate–not directly meeting it even when at last she stopped.

“I thought you wanted me to be quiet.”

“So I do–and I’m trying to make you so much so that you won’t worry more. Can’t you be quiet on THAT?”

She thought a moment–then seemed to try. “To relate that she had to ‘bolt’ for the reasons we speak of, even though the bolting had done for her what she wished–THAT I can perfectly feel Charlotte’s not wanting to do.”

“Ah then, if it HAS done for her what she wished-!” But the Colonel’s conclusion hung by the “if” which his wife didn’t take up. So it hung but the longer when he presently spoke again. “All one wonders, in that case, is why then she has come back to him.”

“Say she hasn’t come back to him. Not really to HIM.”

“I’ll say anything you like. But that won’t do me the same good as your saying it.”

“Nothing, my dear, will do you good,” Mrs. Assingham returned. “You don’t care for anything in itself; you care for nothing but to be grossly amused because I don’t keep washing my hands–!”

“I thought your whole argument was that everything is so right that this is precisely what you do.”

But his wife, as it was a point she had often made, could go on as she had gone on before. “You’re perfectly indifferent, really; you’re perfectly immoral. You’ve taken part in the sack of cities, and I’m sure you’ve done dreadful things yourself. But I DON’T trouble my head, if you like. ‘So now there!'” she laughed.

He accepted her laugh, but he kept his way. “Well, I back poor Charlotte.”

“‘Back’ her?”

“To know what she wants.”

“Ah then, so do I. She does know what she wants.” And Mrs. Assingham produced this quantity, at last, on the girl’s behalf, as the ripe result of her late wanderings and musings. She had groped through their talk, for the thread, and now she had got it. “She wants to be magnificent.”

“She is,” said the Colonel almost cynically.

“She wants”–his wife now had it fast “to be thoroughly superior, and she’s capable of that.”

“Of wanting to?”

“Of carrying out her idea.”

“And what IS her idea?”

“To see Maggie through.”

Bob Assingham wondered. “Through what?”

“Through everything. She KNOWS the Prince.”

“And Maggie doesn’t. No, dear thing”–Mrs. Assingham had to recognise it–“she doesn’t.”

“So that Charlotte has come out to give her lessons?”

She continued, Fanny Assingham, to work out her thought. “She has done this great thing for him. That is, a year ago, she practically did it. She practically, at any rate, helped him to do it himself–and helped me to help him. She kept off, she stayed away, she left him free; and what, moreover, were her silences to Maggie but a direct aid to him? If she had spoken in Florence; if she had told her own poor story; if she had, come back at any time–till within a few weeks ago; if she hadn’t gone to New York and hadn’t held out there: if she hadn’t done these things all that has happened since would certainly have been different. Therefore she’s in a position to be consistent now. She knows the Prince,” Mrs. Assingham repeated. It involved even again her former recognition. “And Maggie, dear thing, doesn’t.”

She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband’s flat common sense. “In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she’s in danger, there IS danger.”

“There WON’T be–with Charlotte’s understanding of it. That’s where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be”–the good lady by this time glowed. “So she sees it–to become, for her best friend, an element of POSITIVE safety.”

Bob Assingham looked at it hard. “Which of them do you call her best friend?”

She gave a toss of impatience. “I’ll leave you to discover!” But the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. “It’s for US, therefore, to be hers.”

“‘Hers’?”

“You and I. It’s for us to be Charlotte’s. It’s for us, on our side, to see HER through.”

“Through her sublimity?”

“Through her noble, lonely life. Only–that’s essential–it mustn’t be lonely. It will be all right if she marries.”

“So we’re to marry her?”

“We’re to marry her. It will be,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “the great thing I can do.” She made it out more and more. “It will make up.”

“Make up for what?” As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. “If everything’s so all right what is there to make up for?”

“Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a mistake.”

“You’ll make up for it by making another?” And then as she again took her time: “I thought your whole point is just that you’re sure.”

“One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always possibilities.”

“Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?”

It made her again look at him. “Where would you have been, my dear, if I hadn’t meddled with YOU?”

“Ah, that wasn’t meddling–I was your own. I was your own,” said the Colonel, “from the moment I didn’t object.”

“Well, these people won’t object. They are my own too–in the sense that I’m awfully fond of them. Also in the sense,” she continued, “that I think they’re not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round, exists–it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possible–that, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover,” she said with conviction, “all the ground.” And then as his own conviction appeared to continue as little to match: “The ground, I mean, of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty and I shan’t rest till my duty’s performed.” She had arrived by this time at something like exaltation. “I shall give, for the next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can.”

He took it at last as it came. “You hold there’s no limit to what you ‘can’?”

“I don’t say there’s no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chances–enough of them for hope. Why shouldn’t there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?”

“By after ‘all’ you mean after she’s in love with somebody else?”

The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. “She’s not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.”

“Has she told you so?”

“Not yet. It’s too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don’t require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.”

“And what truth?”

“The truth of everything I say.”

“Prove it to whom?”

“Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me–to work for her. What it will prove,” Mrs. Assingham presently went on, “will be that she’s cured. That she accepts the situation.”

He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. “The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?”

His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. “The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her her chance to be magnificent.”

He slowly emitted his smoke. “And best give you, by the same token, yours to be magnificent with her?”

“I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can.”

Bob Assingham got up. “And you call ME immoral?”

She hesitated. “I’ll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed to a certain point IS, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?” This he was unable to tell her; which left her more definitely to conclude. “Besides, it’s all, at the worst, great fun.”

“Oh, if you simply put it at THAT–!”

His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even thus he couldn’t catch her by it. “Oh, I don’t mean,” she said from the threshold, “the fun that you mean. Good-night.” In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd, short groan, almost a grunt. He HAD apparently meant some particular kind.

V

“Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.” So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. “I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this,” she repeated as, under the influence of her tone, the Prince had already come to a pause.

“For ‘this’?” He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to him–or were, rather, a quantity that couldn’t, at the most, be much.

It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it. “To have one hour alone with you.” It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her, with expression, from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed, weatherwashed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly, an American–as indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn’t, blessedly or not, to remain in America. The Prince had, by half-past ten–as also by definite appointment–called in Cadogan Place for Mrs. Assingham’s visitor, and then, after brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs. Assingham’s drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had done nothing to invalidate–everything, much rather, to place in a light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn’t have fitted that anyone should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter, to raise one, from the moment Mrs. Assingham, informed and apparently not disapproving, didn’t intervene? This the young man had asked himself–with a very sufficient sense of what would have made him ridiculous. He wasn’t going to begin–that at least was certain–by showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.

The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own wedding-guests and by Maggie’s scarce less absorbed entertainment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she had not, as wouldn’t have been convenient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had been present, with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts–he had never in his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating–whenever he had looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he had not seen even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even Maggie, nothing was more natural than that he shouldn’t have seen Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind him–so ready she assumed him to be– of what they were to do. Time pressed if they were to do it at all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations had brought wonders–how did they still have, where did they still find, such treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn’t be put off. She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie, he must remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the minute so far as to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then to risk bringing his reason out. The risk was because he might hurt her–hurt her pride, if she had that particular sort. But she might as well be hurt one way as another; and, besides, that particular sort of pride was just what she hadn’t. So his slight resistance, while they lingered, had been just easy enough not to be impossible.

“I hate to encourage you–and for such a purpose, after all–to spend your money.”

She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. “Because you think I must have so little? I’ve enough, at any rate–enough for us to take our hour. Enough,” she had smiled, “is as good as a feast! And then,” she had said, “it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor–something, precisely, that–no rich person COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.” Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. “Only, as it can’t be fine, it ought to be funny–and that’s the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself.”

He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. “‘Funny’?” “Oh, I don’t mean a comic toy–I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That’s what I call funny,” she had explained. “You used,” she had also added, “to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn’t say–the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August.”

“Ah, but I don’t understand your English buying, and I confess I find it dull.” So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. “I understood my poor dear Romans.”

“It was they who understood you–that was your pull,” she had laughed. “Our amusement here is just that they don’t understand us. We can make it amusing. You’ll see.”

If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. “The amusement surely will be to find our present.”

“Certainly–as I say.”

“Well, if they don’t come down–?”

“Then we’ll come up. There’s always something to be done. Besides, Prince,” she had gone on, “I’m not, if you come to that, absolutely a pauper. I’m too poor for some things,” she had said–yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; “but I’m not too poor for others.” And she had paused again at the top. “I’ve been saving up.”

He had really challenged it. “In America?”

“Yes, even there–with my motive. And we oughtn’t, you know,” she had wound up, “to leave it beyond to-morrow.”

That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed–he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather than magnify. Besides which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He WAS making her–she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in him, didn’t at all do. That was accordingly, in fine, how they had come to where they were: he was engaged, as hard as possible, in the policy of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making a point–and as if it were almost the whole point–that Maggie of course was not to have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she shouldn’t suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her–as Charlotte on her side would–that they had been anywhere at all together or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn’t betray her. There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs. Assingham’s and another to arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between them in Cadogan Place–though not mentioning those of Mrs. Assingham’s absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked his assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery–what had made him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough for her to notice it–was the sense of the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a “Do you want then to go and tell her?” that had somehow made them ridiculous. It had made him, promptly, fall back on minimizing it–that is on minimizing “fuss.” Apparent scruples were, obviously, fuss, and he had on the spot clutched, in the light of this truth, at the happy principle that would meet every case.

This principle was simply to be, with the girl, always simple– and with the very last simplicity. That would cover everything. It had covered, then and there, certainly, his immediate submission to the sight of what was clearest. This was, really, that what she asked was little compared to what she gave. What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced–renounced everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of their keeping their appointment to themselves. That, in exchange for “everything,” everything she gave up, was verily but a trifle. He let himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take, that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while they were still in the Park. The application in fact presently required that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position–her temporary position–still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He stood for a little before her, as if to mark the importance of not wasting time, the importance she herself had previously insisted on; but after she had said a few words it was impossible for him not to resort again to good-nature. He marked as he could, by this concession, that if he had finally met her first proposal for what would be “amusing” in it, so any idea she might have would contribute to that effect. He had consequently– in all consistency–to treat it as amusing that she reaffirmed, and reaffirmed again, the truth that was HER truth.

“I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of you–anything but this. I want to have said it– that’s all; I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour–or say for two–that’s what I have had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it BEFORE–before what you’re going to do. So, all the while, you see,” she went on with her eyes on him, “it was a question for me if I should be able to manage it in time. If I couldn’t have come now I probably shouldn’t have come at all–perhaps even ever. Now that I’m here I shall stay, but there were moments, over there, when I despaired. It wasn’t easy–there were reasons; but it was either this or nothing. So I didn’t struggle, you see, in vain. AFTER– oh, I didn’t want that! I don’t mean,” she smiled, “that it wouldn’t have been delightful to see you even then–to see you at any time; but I would never have come for it. This is different. This is what I wanted. This is what I’ve got. This is what I shall always have. This is what I should have missed, of course,” she pursued, “if you had chosen to make me miss it. If you had thought me horrid, had refused to come, I should, naturally, have been immensely ‘sold.’ I had to take the risk. Well, you’re all I could have hoped. That’s what I was to have said. I didn’t want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you”–she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice, but without the least failure of sense or sequence–“I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is, to hear. I don’t care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask nothing of you I don’t–I mayn’t–ask even so much as that. What you may think of me–that doesn’t in the least matter. What I want is that it shall always be with you–so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid of it–that I DID. I won’t say that you did–you may make as little of that as you like. But that I was here with you where we are and as we are–I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away–and perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That’s all.”

She paused as if her demonstration was complete–yet, for the moment, without moving; as if in fact to give it a few minutes to sink in; into the listening air, into the watching space, into the conscious hospitality of nature, so far as nature was, all Londonised, all vulgarised, with them there; or even, for that matter, into her own open ears, rather than into the attention of her passive and prudent friend. His attention had done all that attention could do; his handsome, slightly anxious, yet still more definitely “amused” face sufficiently played its part. He clutched, however, at what he could best clutch at–the fact that she let him off, definitely let him off. She let him off, it seemed, even from so much as answering; so that while he smiled back at her in return for her information he felt his lips remain closed to the successive vaguenesses of rejoinder, of objection, that rose for him from within. Charlotte herself spoke again at last–“You may want to know what I get by it. But that’s my own affair.” He really didn’t want to know even this–or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn’t; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally–the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction–they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, with more impersonal talk, were naturally a relief; so that he was not again, during their excursion, at a loss for the right word. The air had been, as it were, cleared; they had their errand itself to discuss, and the opportunities of London, the sense of the wonderful place, the pleasures of prowling there, the question of shops, of possibilities, of particular objects, noticed by each in previous prowls. Each professed surprise at the extent of the other’s knowledge; the Prince in especial wondered at his friend’s possession of her London. He had rather prized his own possession, the guidance he could really often give a cabman; it was a whim of his own, a part of his Anglomania, and congruous with that feature, which had, after all, so much more surface than depth. When his companion, with the memory of other visits and other rambles, spoke of places he hadn’t seen and things he didn’t know, he actually felt again–as half the effect–just a shade humiliated. He might even have felt a trifle annoyed–if it hadn’t been, on this spot, for his being, even more, interested. It was a fresh light on Charlotte and on her curious world-quality, of which, in Rome, he had had his due sense, but which clearly would show larger on the big London stage. Rome was, in comparison, a village, a family-party, a little old-world spinnet for the fingers of one hand. By the time they reached the Marble Arch it was almost as if she were showing him a new side, and that, in fact, gave amusement a new and a firmer basis. The right tone would be easy for putting himself in her hands. Should they disagree a little–frankly and fairly–about directions and chances, values and authenticities, the situation would be quite gloriously saved. They were none the less, as happened, much of one mind on the article of their keeping clear of resorts with which Maggie would be acquainted. Charlotte recalled it as a matter of course, named it in time as a condition–they would keep away from any place to which he had already been with Maggie.

This made indeed a scant difference, for though he had during the last month done few things so much as attend his future wife on her making of purchases, the antiquarii, as he called them with Charlotte, had not been the great affair. Except in Bond Street, really, Maggie had had no use for them: her situation indeed, in connection with that order of traffic, was full of consequences produced by her father’s. Mr. Verver, one of the great collectors of the world, hadn’t left his daughter to prowl for herself; he had little to do with shops, and was mostly, as a purchaser, approached privately and from afar. Great people, all over Europe, sought introductions to him; high personages, incredibly high, and more of them than would ever be known, solemnly sworn as everyone was, in such cases, to discretion, high personages made up to him as the one man on the short authentic list likely to give the price. It had therefore been easy to settle, as they walked, that the tracks of the Ververs, daughter’s as well as father’s, were to be avoided; the importance only was that their talk about it led for a moment to the first words they had as yet exchanged on the subject of Maggie. Charlotte, still in the Park, proceeded to them–for it was she who began–with a serenity of appreciation that was odd, certainly, as a sequel to her words of ten minutes before. This was another note on her–what he would have called another light–for her companion, who, though without giving a sign, admired, for what it was, the simplicity of her transition, a transition that took no trouble either to trace or to explain itself. She paused again an instant, on the grass, to make it; she stopped before him with a sudden “Anything of course, dear as she is, will do for her. I mean if I were to give her a pin-cushion from the Baker-Street Bazaar.”

“That’s exactly what _I_ meant”–the Prince laughed out this allusion to their snatch of talk in Portland Place. “It’s just what I suggested.”

She took, however, no notice of the reminder; she went on in her own way. “But it isn’t a reason. In that case one would never do anything for her. I mean,” Charlotte explained, “if one took advantage of her character.”

“Of her character?”

“We mustn’t take advantage of her character,” the girl, again unheeding, pursued. “One mustn’t, if not for HER, at least for one’s self. She saves one such trouble.”

She had spoken thoughtfully, with her eyes on her friend’s; she might have been talking, preoccupied and practical, of someone with whom he was comparatively unconnected. “She certainly GIVES one no trouble,” said the Prince. And then as if this were perhaps ambiguous or inadequate: “She’s not selfish–God forgive her!–enough.”

“That’s what I mean,” Charlotte instantly said. “She’s not selfish enough. There’s nothing, absolutely, that one NEED do for her. She’s so modest,” she developed–“she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love her–or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.”

The Prince frowned a little–as a tribute, after all, to seriousness. “She lets what–?”

“Anything–anything that you might do and that you don’t. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself that she asks efforts–so far as she ever HAS to ask them. She hasn’t, much. She does everything herself. And that’s terrible.”

The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn’t commit himself. “Terrible?”

“Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody,” Charlotte continued in the same manner, “is decent enough, good enough, to stand it–not without help from religion, or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting–that is without taking great care. Certainly,” she said, “such people as you and I are not.”

The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. “Not good enough to stand it?”

“Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.”

Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. “Oh, I don’t know. May not one’s affection for her do something more for one’s decency, as you call it, than her own generosity–her own affection, HER ‘decency’–has the unfortunate virtue to undo?”

“Ah, of course it must be all in that.”

But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. “What it comes to–one can see what you mean–is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.”

“Yes, that’s what it comes to,” said Charlotte Stant.

“And why,” he asked, almost soothingly, “should it be terrible?” He couldn’t, at the worst, see that.

“Because it’s always so–the idea of having to pity people.”

“Not when there’s also, with it, the idea of helping them.”

“Yes, but if we can’t help them?”

“We CAN–we always can. That is,” he competently added, “if we care for them. And that’s what we’re talking about.”

“Yes”–she on the whole assented. “It comes back then to our absolutely refusing to be spoiled.”

“Certainly. But everything,” the Prince laughed as they went on– “all your ‘decency,’ I mean–comes back to that.”

She walked beside him a moment. “It’s just what _I_ meant,” she then reasonably said.

VI

The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered longest, the small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street who was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive–this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the other while they considered the object with which he appeared mainly to hope to tempt them. They had come to him last, for their time was nearly up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting into a hansom at the Marble Arch, having yielded no better result than the amusement invoked from the first. The amusement, of course, was to have consisted in seeking, but it had also involved the idea of finding; which latter necessity would have been obtrusive only if they had found too soon. The question at present was if they were finding, and they put it to each other, in the Bloomsbury shop, while they enjoyed the undiverted attention of the shopman. He was clearly the master, and devoted to his business–the essence of which, in his conception, might precisely have been this particular secret that he possessed for worrying the customer so little that it fairly made for their relations a sort of solemnity. He had not many things, none of the redundancy of “rot” they had elsewhere seen, and our friends had, on entering, even had the sense of a muster so scant that, as high values obviously wouldn’t reign, the effect might be almost pitiful. Then their impression had changed; for, though the show was of small pieces, several taken from the little window and others extracted from a cupboard behind the counter–dusky, in the rather low-browed place, despite its glass doors–each bid for their attention spoke, however modestly, for itself, and the pitch of their entertainer’s pretensions was promptly enough given. His array was heterogeneous and not at all imposing; still, it differed agreeably from what they had hitherto seen.

Charlotte, after the incident, was to be full of impressions, of several of which, later on, she gave her companion–always in the interest of their amusement–the benefit; and one of the impressions had been that the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at. The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn’t looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connection, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never SAW. One kind of shopman was just like another to him–which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that, where it did notice, noticed so much. He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted–the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. He didn’t, no doubt, want to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation–this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired “type” in faces at hucksters’ stalls. Therefore, on this occasion, she had found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared– well, so for them. “He likes his things–he loves them,” she was to say; “and it isn’t only–it isn’t perhaps even at all–that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers, at any rate, to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people–he knows them when he sees them; and that’s why, as I say, you could make out, or at least _I_ could, that he cared for us. Didn’t you see”–she was to ask it with an insistence–“the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he’ll remember us”–she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. “But it was after all”–this was perhaps reassuring–“because, given his taste, since he HAS taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck–he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we’re beautiful–aren’t we?–and he knows. Then, also, he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he’s all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it–that is a regular way.”

Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter, where the shopman’s slim, light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuffboxes presented to–or by–the too-questionable great; cups, trays, taper-stands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals, of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative reinforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. They looked, the visitors, they touched, they vaguely pretended to consider, but with scepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. It was impossible they shouldn’t, after a little, tacitly agree as to the absurdity of carrying to Maggie a token from such a stock. It would be–that was the difficulty–pretentious without being “good”; too usual, as a treasure, to have been an inspiration of the giver, and yet too primitive to be taken as tribute welcome on any terms. They had been out more than two hours and, evidently, had found nothing. It forced from Charlotte a kind of admission.

“It ought, really, if it should be a thing of this sort, to take its little value from having belonged to one’s self.”

“Ecco!” said the Prince–just triumphantly enough. “There you are.”

Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he had not visited. But she completed her admission. “There’s nothing here she could wear.”

It was only after a moment that her companion rejoined. “Is there anything–do you think–that you could?”

It made her just start. She didn’t, at all events, look at the objects; she but looked for an instant very directly at him. “No.”

“Ah!” the Prince quietly exclaimed.

“Would it be,” Charlotte asked, “your idea to offer me something?”

“Well, why not–as a small ricordo.”

“But a ricordo of what?”

“Why, of ‘this’–as you yourself say. Of this little hunt.”

“Oh, I say it–but hasn’t my whole point been that I don’t ask you to. Therefore,” she demanded–but smiling at him now– “where’s the logic?”

“Oh, the logic–!” he laughed.

“But logic’s everything. That, at least, is how I feel it. A ricordo from you–from you to me–is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference.”

“Ah, my dear!” he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue covered what they said– and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuffboxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.

“You don’t refer,” she went on to her companion. “_I_ refer.”

He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. “Do you mean by that then that you would be free–?”

“‘Free’–?”

“To offer me something?”

This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. “Would you allow me–?”

“No,” said the Prince into his little box.

“You wouldn’t accept it from me?”

“No,” he repeated in the same way.

She exhaled a long breath that was like a guarded sigh. “But you’ve touched an idea that HAS been mine. It’s what I’ve wanted.” Then she added: “It was what I hoped.”

He put down his box–this had drawn his eyes. He made nothing, clearly, of the little man’s attention. “It’s what you brought me out for?”

“Well, that’s, at any rate,” she returned, “my own affair. But it won’t do?”

“It won’t do, cara mia.”

“It’s impossible?”

“It’s impossible.” And he took up one of the brooches.

She had another pause, while the shopman only waited. “If I were to accept from you one of these charming little ornaments as you suggest, what should I do with it?”

He was perhaps at last a little irritated; he even–as if HE might understand–looked vaguely across at their host. “Wear it, per Bacco!”

“Where then, please? Under my clothes?”

“Wherever you like. But it isn’t then, if you will,” he added, “worth talking about.”

“It’s only worth talking about, mio caro,” she smiled, “from your having begun it. My question is only reasonable–so that your idea may stand or fall by your answer to it. If I should pin one of these things on for you would it be, to your mind, that I might go home and show it to Maggie as your present?”

They had had between them often in talk the refrain, jocosely, descriptively applied, of “old Roman.” It had been, as a pleasantry, in the other time, his explanation to her of everything; but nothing, truly, had even seemed so old-Roman as the shrug in which he now indulged. “Why in the world not?”

“Because–on our basis–it would be impossible to give her an account of the pretext.”

“The pretext–?” He wondered.

“The occasion. This ramble that we shall have had together and that we’re not to speak of.”

“Oh yes,” he said after a moment “I remember we’re not to speak of it.”

“That of course you’re pledged to. And the one thing, you see, goes with the other. So you don’t insist.”

He had again, at random, laid back his trinket; with which he quite turned to her, a little wearily at last–even a little impatiently. “I don’t insist.”

It disposed for the time of the question, but what was next apparent was that it had seen them no further. The shopman, who had not stirred, stood there in his patience–which, his mute intensity helping, had almost the effect of an ironic comment. The Prince moved to the glass door and, his back to the others, as with nothing more to contribute, looked–though not less patiently–into the street. Then the shopman, for Charlotte, momentously broke silence. “You’ve seen, disgraziatamente, signora principessa,” he sadly said, “too much”–and it made the Prince face about. For the effect of the momentous came, if not from the sense, from the sound of his words; which was that of the suddenest, sharpest Italian. Charlotte exchanged with her friend a glance that matched it, and just for the minute they were held in check. But their glance had, after all, by that time, said more than one thing; had both exclaimed on the apprehension, by the wretch, of their intimate conversation, let alone of her possible, her impossible, title, and remarked, for mutual reassurance, that it didn’t, all the same, matter. The Prince remained by the door, but immediately addressing the speaker from where he stood.

“You’re Italian then, are you?”

But the reply came in English. “Oh dear no.”

“You’re English?”

To which the answer was this time, with a smile, in briefest Italian. “Che!” The dealer waived the question–he practically disposed of it by turning straightway toward a receptacle to which he had not yet resorted and from which, after unlocking it, he extracted a square box, of some twenty inches in height, covered with worn-looking leather. He placed the box on the counter, pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or of some material once richly gilt. He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. “My Golden Bowl,” he observed–and it sounded, on his lips, as if it said everything. He left the important object–for as “important” it did somehow present itself–to produce its certain effect. Simple, but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height. As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer. Charlotte, with care, immediately took it up, while the Prince, who had after a minute shifted his position again, regarded it from a distance.

It was heavier than Charlotte had thought. “Gold, really gold?” she asked of their companion.

He hesitated. “Look a little, and perhaps you’ll make out.”

She looked, holding it up in both her fine hands, turning it to the light. “It may be cheap for what it is, but it will be dear, I’m afraid, for me.”

“Well,” said the man, “I can part with it for less than its value. I got it, you see, for less.”

“For how much then?”

Again he waited, always with his serene stare. “Do you like it then?”

Charlotte turned to her friend. “Do YOU like it?” He came no nearer; he looked at their companion. “cos’e?”

“Well, signori miei, if you must know, it’s just a perfect crystal.”

“Of course we must know, per Dio!” said the Prince. But he turned away again–he went back to his glass door.

Charlotte set down the bowl; she was evidently taken. “Do you mean it’s cut out of a single crystal?”

“If it isn’t I think I can promise you that you’ll never find any joint or any piecing.”

She wondered. “Even if I were to scrape off the gold?”

He showed, though with due respect, that she amused him. “You couldn’t scrape it off–it has been too well put on; put on I don’t know when and I don’t know how. But by some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process.”

Charlotte, frankly charmed with the cup, smiled back at him now. “A lost art?”

“Call it a lost art,”

“But of what time then is the whole thing?”

“Well, say also of a lost time.”

The girl considered. “Then if it’s so precious, how comes it to be cheap?”

Her interlocutor once more hung fire, but by this time the Prince had lost patience. “I’ll wait for you out in the air,” he said to his companion, and, though he spoke without irritation, he pointed his remark by passing immediately into the street, where, during the next minutes, the others saw him, his back to the shopwindow, philosophically enough hover and light a fresh cigarette. Charlotte even took, a little, her time; she was aware of his funny Italian taste for London street-life.

Her host meanwhile, at any rate, answered her question. “Ah, I’ve had it a long time without selling it. I think I must have been keeping it, madam, for you.”

“You’ve kept it for me because you’ve thought I mightn’t see what’s the matter with it?”

He only continued to face her–he only continued to appear to follow the play of her mind. “What IS the matter with it?”

“Oh, it’s not for me to say; it’s for you honestly to tell me. Of course I know something must be.”

“But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?”

“I probably SHOULD find out as soon as I had paid for it.”

“Not,” her host lucidly insisted, “if you hadn’t paid too much.”

“What do you call,” she asked, “little enough?”

“Well, what should you say to fifteen pounds?”

“I should say,” said Charlotte with the utmost promptitude, “that it’s altogether too much.”

The dealer shook his head slowly and sadly, but firmly. “It’s my price, madam–and if you admire the thing I think it really might be yours. It’s not too much. It’s too little. It’s almost nothing. I can’t go lower.”

Charlotte, wondering, but resisting, bent over the bowl again. “Then it’s impossible. It’s more than I can afford.”

“Ah,” the man returned, “one can sometimes afford for a present more than one can afford for one’s self.” He said it so coaxingly that she found herself going on without, as might be said, putting him in his place. “Oh, of course it would be only for a present–!”

“Then it would be a lovely one.”

“Does one make a present,” she asked, “of an object that contains, to one’s knowledge, a flaw?”

“Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith,” the man smiled, “is always there.”

“And leave the person to whom one gives the thing, you mean, to discover it?”

“He wouldn’t discover it–if you’re speaking of a gentleman.”

“I’m not speaking of anyone in particular,” Charlotte said.

“Well, whoever it might be. He might know–and he might try. But he wouldn’t find.”

She kept her eyes on him as if, though unsatisfied, mystified, she yet had a fancy for the bowl. “Not even if the thing should come to pieces?” And then as he was silent: “Not even if he should have to say to me ‘The Golden Bowl is broken’?”

He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile. “Ah, if anyone should WANT to smash it–!”

She laughed; she almost admired the little man’s expression. “You mean one could smash it with a hammer?”

“Yes; if nothing else would do. Or perhaps even by dashing it with violence–say upon a marble floor.”

“Oh, marble floors!” But she might have been thinking–for they were a connection, marble floors; a connection with many things: with her old Rome, and with his; with the palaces of his past, and, a little, of hers; with the possibilities of his future, with the sumptuosities of his marriage, with the wealth of the Ververs. All the same, however, there were other things; and they all together held for a moment her fancy. “Does crystal then break–when it IS crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness.”

Her friend, in his way, discriminated. “Its beauty is its BEING crystal. But its hardness is certainly, its safety. It doesn’t break,” he went on, “like vile glass. It splits–if there is a split.”

“Ah!”–Charlotte breathed with interest. “If there is a split.” And she looked down again at the bowl. “There IS a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?”

“On lines and by laws of its own.”

“You mean if there’s a weak place?”

For all answer, after an hesitation, he took the bowl up again, holding it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the finest, sweetest sound. “Where is the weak place?”

She then did the question justice. “Well, for ME, only the price. I’m poor, you see–very poor. But I thank you and I’ll think.” The Prince, on the other side of the shop-window, had finally faced about and, as to see if she hadn’t done, was trying to reach, with his eyes, the comparatively dim interior. “I like it,” she said–“I want it. But I must decide what I can do.”

The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself. “Well, I’ll keep it for you.”

The small quarter-of-an-hour had had its marked oddity–this she felt even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury aspects had again, in their protest against the truth of her gathered impression, made her more or less their own. Yet the oddity might have been registered as small as compared to the other effect that, before they had gone much further, she had, with her companion, to take account of. This latter was simply the effect of their having, by some tacit logic, some queer inevitability, quite dropped the idea of a continued pursuit. They didn’t say so, but it was on the line of giving up Maggie’s present that they practically proceeded–the line of giving it up without more reference to it. The Prince’s first reference was in fact quite independently made. “I hope you satisfied yourself, before you had done, of what was the matter with that bowl.”

“No indeed, I satisfied myself of nothing. Of nothing at least but that the more I looked at it the more I liked it, and that if you weren’t so unaccommodating this would be just the occasion for your giving me the pleasure of accepting it.”

He looked graver for her, at this, than he had looked all the morning. “Do you propose it seriously–without wishing to play me a trick?”

She wondered. “What trick would it be?”

He looked at her harder. “You mean you really don’t know?”

“But know what?”

“Why, what’s the matter with it. You didn’t see, all the while?”

She only continued, however, to stare. “How could you see–out in the street?”

“I saw before I went out. It was because I saw that I did go out. I didn’t want to have another scene with you, before that rascal, and I judged you would presently guess for yourself.”

“Is he a rascal?” Charlotte asked. “His price is so moderate. She waited but a moment. “Five pounds. Really so little.”

“Five pounds?”

He continued to look at her. “Five pounds.”

He might have been doubting her word, but he was only, it appeared, gathering emphasis. “It would be dear–to make a gift of–at five shillings. If it had cost you even but five pence I wouldn’t take it from you.”

“Then,” she asked, “what IS the matter?”

“Why, it has a crack.”

It sounded, on his lips, so sharp, it had such an authority, that she almost started, while her colour, at the word, rose. It was as if he had been right, though his assurance was wonderful. “You answer for it without having looked?”

“I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.”

“But it’s exquisite,” Charlotte, as if with an interest in it now made even tenderer and stranger, found herself moved to insist.

“Of course it’s exquisite. That’s the danger.” Then a light visibly came to her–a light in which her friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflection of it, as she smiled at him, was in her own face. “The danger–I see–is because you’re superstitious.”

“Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack–and an omen’s an omen.”

“You’d be afraid–?”

“Per Bacco!”

“For your happiness?”

“For my happiness.”

“For your safety?”

“For my safety.”

She just paused. “For your marriage?”

“For my marriage. For everything.”

She thought again. “Thank goodness then that if there BE a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know–!” And she smiled with the sadness of it. “We can never then give each other anything.”

He considered, but he met it. “Ah, but one does know. _I_ do, at least–and by instinct. I don’t fail. That will always protect me.”

It was funny, the way he said such things; yet she liked him, really, the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or rather with a special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair.

“What then will protect ME?”

“Where I’m concerned _I_ will. From me at least you’ve nothing to fear,” he now quite amiably responded. “Anything you consent to accept from me–” But he paused.

“Well?”

“Well, shall be perfect.”

“That’s very fine,” she presently answered. “It’s vain, after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when you’ll accept nothing from me.”

Ah, THERE, better still, he could meet her. “You attach an impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself.”

Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition–then, abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of disenchantment–so far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared too difficult. “Oh, my ‘condition’–I don’t hold to it. You may cry it on the housetops–anything I ever do.”

“Ah well, then–!” This made, he laughed, all the difference.

But it was too late. “Oh, I don’t care now! I SHOULD have liked the Bowl. But if that won’t do there’s nothing.”

He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a moment he qualified. “Yet I shall want some day to give you something.”

She wondered at him. “What day?”

“The day you marry. For you WILL marry. You must–SERIOUSLY– marry.”

She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed. “To make you feel better?”

“Well,” he replied frankly, wonderfully–“it will. But here,” he added, “is your hansom.”

He had signalled–the cab was charging. She put out no hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she waited. “Well, I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all freedom.”

PART SECOND

VII

Adam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedom–might have been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The justification of the push he had applied, however, and of the push, equally sharp, that, to shut himself in, he again applied–the ground of this energy was precisely that he might here, however briefly, find himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked opportunity to give an eye. The vast, square, clean apartment was empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered village and strong cloudshadow, which were, together, a thing to create the sense, with everyone else at church, of one’s having the world to one’s self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr. Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said, for solitude, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through tortuous corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our attention–tender indeed almost to compassion–qualify his achieved isolation. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always figured other persons–such was the law of his nature–as a numerous array, and that, though conscious of but a single near tie, one affection, one duty deepest-rooted in his life, it had never, for many minutes together, been his portion not to feel himself surrounded and committed, never quite been his refreshment to make out where the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint, diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity, really faded to the blessed impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached. It shaded off, the appeal–he would have admitted that; but he had as yet noted no point at which it positively stopped.

Thus had grown in him a little habit–his innermost secret, not confided even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everything–thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved in the preservation by an adult of one of childhood’s toys. When he took a rare moment “off,” he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancy–sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of a wooden gun. It was essentially, in him, the IMITATION of depravity–which, for amusement, as might have been, he practised “keeping up.” In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so artlessly-artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case, to brevity. He had fatally stamped himself–it was his own fault–a man who could be interrupted with impunity. The greatest of wonders, moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to where he was. It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made of the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions.

The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained–these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted the kind of acquisitive power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all operations. A dim explanation of phenomena once vivid must at all events for the moment suffice us; it being obviously no account of the matter to throw on our friend’s amiability alone the weight of the demonstration of his economic history. Amiability, of a truth, is an aid to success; it has even been known to be the principle of large accumulations; but the link, for the mind, is none the less fatally missing between proof, on such a scale, of continuity, if of nothing more insolent, in one field, and accessibility to distraction in every other. Variety of imagination–what is that but fatal, in the world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from monotony? Mr. Verver then, for a fresh, full period, a period betraying, extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud. The cloud was his native envelope–the soft looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude of folds, but of a quality unmistakable for sensitive feelers. He was still reduced, in fine, to getting his rare moments with himself by feigning a cynicism. His real inability to maintain the pretence, however, had perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day–his acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter-of-an hour, of that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must reckon. A quarter-of-an- hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, 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, definitely, a week before, established a precedent. He did her at least that justice–it was a kind of justice he was always doing someone. He had on the previous Sunday liked to stop at home, and he 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 had not 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 manoeuvre 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 was it she had in mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made, a patient, punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly invited?–so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the MORE on one’s conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the middle West, were there as friends of Maggie’s, friends of the earlier time; but Mrs. Rance was there– or at least had primarily appeared–only as a friend of the Miss Lutches.

This lady herself was not of the middle West–she rather insisted on it–but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and most intimate States: he couldn’t remember which, though she insisted too on that. It was not in him–we may say it for him–to go so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of her own; and this partly because she had struck him, verily, rather as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such connection as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force. It pressed upon him hard, and all round, assuredly, this attribution of power. Everyone had need of one’s power, whereas one’s own need, at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it. The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the imputation of greed. The other, the constant imputation, that of being able to “do,” would have no ground if he hadn’t been, to start with–this was the point–provably luxurious. His lips, somehow, were closed–and by a spring connected moreover with the action of his eyes themselves. The latter showed him what he had done, showed him where he had come out; quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty, and the apex of which was a platform looking down, if one would, on the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half-a-dozen others.

His eyes, in any case, now saw Mrs. Rance approach with an instant failure to attach to the fact any grossness of avidity of Mrs. Rance’s own–or at least to descry any triumphant use even for the luridest impression of her intensity. What was virtually supreme would be her vision of his having attempted, by his desertion of the library, to mislead her–which in point of fact barely escaped being what he had designed. It was not easy for him, in spite of accumulations fondly and funnily regarded as of systematic practice, not now to be ashamed; the one thing comparatively easy would be to gloss over his course. The billiard-room was NOT, at the particular crisis, either a natural or a graceful place for the nominally main occupant of so large a house to retire to–and this without prejudice, either, to the fact that his visitor wouldn’t, as he apprehended, explicitly make him a scene. Should she frankly denounce him for a sneak he would simply go to pieces; but he was, after an instant, not afraid of that. Wouldn’t she rather, as emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly, treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?–show at least that they needn’t mind even though the vast table, draped in brown holland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be pursued, to be genially hunted. This last was a turn he was well aware the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed before him–for the mere moment– the prospect of her fairly proposing that they should knock about the balls. That danger certainly, it struck him, he should manage in some way to deal with. Why too, for that matter, had he need of defences, material or other?–how was it a question of dangers really to be called such? The deep danger, the only one that made him, as an idea, positively turn cold, would have been the possibility of her seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible issue. Here, fortunately, she was powerless, it being apparently so provable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.

She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere–somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh–as they had appeared eager to mention; though when they were separately questioned their descriptions failed to tally. He would be at the worst, should it come to the worst, Mrs. Rance’s difficulty, and he served therefore quite enough as the stout bulwark of anyone else. This was in truth logic without a flaw, yet it gave Mr. Verver less comfort than it ought. He feared not only danger–he feared the idea of danger, or in other words feared, hauntedly, himself. It was above all as a symbol that Mrs. Rance actually rose before him–a symbol of the supreme effort that he should have sooner or later, as he felt, to make. This effort would be to say No–he lived in terror of having to. He should be proposed to at a given moment–it was only a question of time–and then he should have to do a thing that would be extremely disagreeable. He almost wished, on occasion, that he wasn’t so sure he WOULD do it. He knew himself, however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie’s marriage and Maggie’s finer happiness– happy as he had supposed her before–that had made the difference; he hadn’t in the other time, it now seemed to him, had to think of such things. They hadn’t come up for him, and it was as if she, positively, had herself kept them down. She had only been his child–which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had done for him more than he knew– much, and blissfully, as he always HAD known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation still, all the same, kept pace with her activity–his situation being simply that there was more than ever to be done.

There had not yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense, now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life, of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces. It was as if his son-in-law’s presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law, had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future–very richly and handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now practically taken, was still pretty much the same “big fact,” the sky had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded, quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. At first, certainly, their decent little old-time union, Maggie’s and his own, had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say–something with a grand architectural front–had suddenly been dropped; so that the rest of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east end, the margin of street and passage, the quantity of over-arching heaven, had been temporarily compromised. Not even then, of a truth, in a manner disconcerting–given, that is, for the critical, or at least the intelligent, eye, the great style of the facade and its high place in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally to have been pronounced calculable or not, had not, naturally, been the miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily, that from this vantage of wide, wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as they said, with its spreading park, with its