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The Golden Bowl — Volume 1

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #4262 · 618,820 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Golden Bowl — Volume 1

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4262]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4262

Credits: This etext was produced by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA


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This etext was produced by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA







THE GOLDEN BOWL, VOLUME I

HENRY JAMES

1904


BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE

PART FIRST

                             I

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him;
he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more
convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they
have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to
which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London
much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a
case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself,
and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of
that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine
afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to
either of those places that these grounds of his predilection,
after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned
with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into
Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively
short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in
which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the
forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel,
brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled
together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the
loot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention--not even, for that matter,
when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces
shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned
hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of
parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the
Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since,
though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the
streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August
afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was too
restless--that was the fact--for any concentration, and the last
idea that would just now have occurred to him in any connection
was the idea of pursuit.

He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before,
and what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the
sense of how he had been justified. Capture had crowned the
pursuit--or success, as he would otherwise have put it, had
rewarded virtue; whereby the consciousness of these things made
him, for the hour, rather serious than gay. A sobriety that might
have consorted with failure sat in his handsome face,
constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time oddly and,
as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue
eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to
be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a
"refined" Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at
three o'clock, his fate had practically been sealed, and that
even when one pretended to no quarrel with it the moment had
something of the grimness of a crunched key in the strongest lock
that could be made. There was nothing to do as yet, further, but
feel what one had done, and our personage felt it while he
aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were married, so
definitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled the date
to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He
was to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady on
whose behalf, and on whose father's, the London lawyers had
reached an inspired harmony with his own man of business, poor
Calderoni, fresh from Rome and now apparently in the wondrous
situation of being "shown London," before promptly leaving it
again, by Mr. Verver himself, Mr. Verver whose easy way with his
millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the arrangements,
the principle of reciprocity. The reciprocity with which the
Prince was during these minutes most struck was that of
Calderoni's bestowal of his company for a view of the lions. If
there was one thing in the world the young man, at this juncture,
clearly intended, it was to be much more decent as a son-in-law
than lots of fellows he could think of had shown themselves in
that character. He thought of these fellows, from whom he was so
to differ, in English; he used, mentally, the English term to
describe his difference, for, familiar with the tongue from his
earliest years, so that no note of strangeness remained with him
either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for
the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly,
even for his relation with himself--though not unmindful that
there might still, as time went on, be others, including a more
intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with
violence, the larger or the finer issue--which was it?--of the
vernacular. Miss Verver had told him he spoke English too well--
it was his only fault, and he had not been able to speak worse
even to oblige her. "When I speak worse, you see, I speak
French," he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him
know, as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so
dreamed of making good, of making better; to say nothing of his
evident feeling that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not
a person to rise to. The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial,
charming, like every answer the parties to his new arrangement
had yet had from him--was that he was practising his American in
order to converse properly, on equal terms as it were, with Mr.
Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of it, he
said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the
observation that positively, of all his observations yet, had
most finely touched her.

"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There
are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man
I've ever seen in my life."

"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily
inquired.

It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The
things, or many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was
seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other
things that, with the other people known to the young man, had
failed of such a result. "Why, his 'form,'" he had returned,
"might have made one doubt."

"Father's form?" She hadn't seen it. It strikes me he hasn't got
any."

"He hasn't got mine--he hasn't even got yours."

"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh, yours,
my dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I've made
that out. So don't doubt it. It's where it has brought him out--
that's the point."

"It's his goodness that has brought him out," our young woman
had, at this, objected.

"Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out.
Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people in." He
had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. "No,
it's his WAY. It belongs to him."

But she had wondered still. "It's the American way. That's all."

"Exactly--it's all. It's all, I say! It fits him--so it must be
good for something."

"Do you think it would be good for you?" Maggie Verver had
smilingly asked.

To which his reply had been just of the happiest. "I don't feel,
my dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now
either hurt me or help me. Such as I am--but you'll see for
yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomo--which I devoutly hope:
I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce;
cooked down as a creme de volaille, with half the parts left out.
Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His
feathers, movements, his sounds--those are the parts that, with
me, are left out."

"All, as a matter of course--since you can't eat a chicken
alive!"

The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been
positive. "Well, I'm eating your father alive--which is the only
way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it's when he talks
American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to
get my pleasure. He couldn't make one like him so much in any
other language."

It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur--it was
the mere play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in
Chinese."

"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a
kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly
FOR the tone--which has made him possible."

"Oh, you'll hear enough of it," she laughed, "before you've done
with us."

Only this, in truth, had made him frown a little.

"What do you mean, please, by my having 'done' with you?"

"Why, found out about us all there is to find."

He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. "Ah, love, I
began with that. I know enough, I feel, never to be surprised.
It's you yourselves meanwhile," he continued, "who really know
nothing. There are two parts of me"--yes, he had been moved to go
on. "One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages,
the crimes, the follies, the boundless betises of other people--
especially of their infamous waste of money that might have come
to me. Those things are written--literally in rows of volumes, in
libraries; are as public as they're abominable. Everybody can get
at them, and you've, both of you, wonderfully, looked them in the
face. But there's another part, very much smaller doubtless,
which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown,
unimportant, unimportant--unimportant save to YOU--personal
quantity. About this you've found out nothing."

"Luckily, my dear," the girl had bravely said; "for what then
would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?"

The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEAR--he
couldn't call it anything else--she had looked, in her
prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had
been moved to reply. "The happiest reigns, we are taught, you
know, are the reigns without any history."

"Oh, I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that. "Call
it the bad part, if you like--yours certainly sticks out of you.
What was it else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me
originally think of you? It wasn't--as I should suppose you must
have seen--what you call your unknown quantity, your particular
self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the
crimes, the plunder and the waste--the wicked Pope, the monster
most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library
are all about. If I've read but two or three yet, I shall give
myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest.
Where, therefore"--she had put it to him again--"without your
archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?"

He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. "I might have
been in a somewhat better pecuniary situation." But his actual
situation under the head in question positively so little
mattered to them that, having by that time lived deep into the
sense of his advantage, he had kept no impression of the girl's
rejoinder. It had but sweetened the waters in which he now
floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured
from a gold-topped phial, for making one's bath aromatic. No one
before him, never--not even the infamous Pope--had so sat up to
his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how little
one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was
it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the
assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder
himself could have dreamed of?  This was the element that bore
him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her
exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colour--of what on
earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They
were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of
her imagination, with which their relation, his and these
people's, was all suffused. What he had further said on the
occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes
from his own thoughts while he loitered--what he had further said
came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck,
the soothing sound that was always with him. "You Americans are
almost incredibly romantic."

"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for
us."

"Everything?" He had wondered.

"Well, everything that's nice at all. The world, the beautiful,
world--or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so
much."

He had looked at her a moment--and he well knew how she had
struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the
beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered
was: "You see too much--that's what may sometimes make you
difficulties. When you don't, at least," he had amended with a
further thought, "see too little." But he had quite granted that
he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless.

He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there
seemed somehow no follies in theirs--nothing, one was obliged to
recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties.
Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to
themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted,
was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the
bargain, was as bad--that is as good--as herself.

"Oh, he's better," the girl had freely declared "that is he's
worse. His relation to the things he cares for--and I think it
beautiful--is absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over
here--it's the most romantic thing I know."

"You mean his idea for his native place?"

"Yes--the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow
it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in
the world. It's the work of his life and the motive of everything
he does."

The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again--
smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. "Has it been his
motive in letting me have you?"

"Yes, my dear, positively--or in a manner," she had said.

"American City isn't, by the way, his native town, for, though
he's not old, it's a young thing compared with him--a younger
one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place
has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity
performance. You're at any rate a part of his collection," she
had explained--"one of the things that can only be got over
here. You're a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price.
You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but you're so curious and
eminent that there are very few others like you--you belong to a
class about which everything is known. You're what they call a
morceau de musee."

"I see. I have the great sign of it," he had risked--"that I cost
a lot of money."

"I haven't the least idea," she had gravely answered, "what you
cost"--and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying
it. He had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the
best of that. "Wouldn't you find out if it were a question of
parting with me? My value would in that case be estimated."

She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value
were well before her. "Yes, if you mean that I'd pay rather than
lose you."

And then there came again what this had made him say. "Don't talk
about ME--it's you who are not of this age. You're a creature of
a braver and finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden
hour, wouldn't have been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I
didn't know some of the pieces your father has acquired, I should
rather fear, for American City, the criticism of experts. Would
it at all events be your idea," he had then just ruefully asked,
"to send me there for safety?"

"Well, we may have to come to it."

"I'll go anywhere you want."

"We must see first--it will be only if we have to come to it.
There are things," she had gone on, "that father puts away--the
bigger and more cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already
stored in masses, here and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in
warehouses, vaults, banks, safes, wonderful secret places. We've
been like a pair of pirates--positively stage pirates, the sort
who wink at each other and say 'Ha-ha!' when they come to where
their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well everywhere--
except what we like to see, what we travel with and have about
us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and
arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses
we hire a little less ugly. Of course it's a danger, and we have
to keep watch. But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says,
the good of it, and it's for the company of some of his things
that he's willing to run his risks. And we've had extraordinary
luck"--Maggie had made that point; "we've never lost anything
yet. And the finest objects are often the smallest. Values, in
lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do with size. But
there's nothing, however tiny," she had wound up, "that we've
missed."

"I like the class," he had laughed for this, "in which you place
me! I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the
hotels, or at the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful
one, and put out with the family photographs and the new
magazines. But it's something not to be so big that I have to be
buried."

"Oh," she had returned, "you shall not be buried, my dear, till
you're dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American
City."

"Before I pronounce I should like to see my tomb." So he had had,
after his fashion, the last word in their interchange, save for
the result of an observation that had risen to his lips at the
beginning, which he had then checked, and which now came back to
him. "Good, bad or indifferent, I hope there's one thing you
believe about me."

He had sounded solemn, even to himself, but she had taken it
gaily. "Ah, don't fix me down to 'one'! I believe things enough
about you, my dear, to have a few left if most of them, even, go
to smash. I've taken care of THAT. I've divided my faith into
water-tight compartments. We must manage not to sink."

"You do believe I'm not a hypocrite? You recognise that I don't
lie or dissemble or deceive? Is THAT water-tight?"

The question, to which he had given a certain intensity, had made
her, he remembered, stare an instant, her colour rising as if it
had sounded to her still stranger than he had intended. He had
perceived on the spot that any SERIOUS discussion of veracity, of
loyalty, or rather of the want of them, practically took her
unprepared, as if it were quite new to her. He had noticed it
before: it was the English, the American sign that duplicity,
like "love," had to be joked about. It couldn't be "gone into."
So the note of his inquiry was--well, to call it nothing else--
premature; a mistake worth making, however, for the almost
overdone drollery in which her answer instinctively sought
refuge.

"Water-tight--the biggest compartment of all? Why, it's the best
cabin and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward's
pantry! It's the ship itself--it's the whole line. It's the
captain's table and all one's luggage--one's reading for the
trip." She had images, like that, that were drawn from steamers
and trains, from a familiarity with "lines," a command of "own"
cars, from an experience of continents and seas, that he was
unable as yet to emulate; from vast modern machineries and
facilities whose acquaintance he had still to make, but as to
which it was part of the interest of his situation as it stood
that he could, quite without wincing, feel his future likely to
bristle with them.

It was in fact, content as he was with his engagement and
charming as he thought his affianced bride, his view of THAT
furniture that mainly constituted our young man's "romance"--and
to an extent that made of his inward state a contrast that he was
intelligent enough to feel. He was intelligent enough to feel
quite humble, to wish not to be in the least hard or voracious,
not to insist on his own side of the bargain, to warn himself in
short against arrogance and greed. Odd enough, of a truth, was
his sense of this last danger--which may illustrate moreover his
general attitude toward dangers from within. Personally, he
considered, he hadn't the vices in question--and that was
so much to the good. His race, on the other hand, had had them
handsomely enough, and he was somehow full of his race. Its
presence in him was like the consciousness of some inexpugnable
scent in which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the
hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some chemical
bath: the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly
felt himself at the mercy of the cause. He knew his antenatal
history, knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep
causes well before him. What was his frank judgment of so much of
its ugliness, he asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of
humility? What was this so important step he had just taken but
the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible,
contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If
what had come to him wouldn't do he must MAKE something
different. He perfectly recognised--always in his humility--that
the material for the making had to be Mr. Verver's millions.
There was nothing else for him on earth to make it with; he had
tried before--had had to look about and see the truth. Humble as
he was, at the same time, he was not so humble as if he had known
himself frivolous or stupid. He had an idea--which may amuse his
historian--that when you were stupid enough to be mistaken about
such a matter you did know it. Therefore he wasn't mistaken--his
future might be MIGHT be scientific. There was nothing in
himself, at all events, to prevent it. He was allying himself to
science, for it was science but the absence of prejudice backed
by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery,
which was the antidote to superstition, which was in its turn,
too much, the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of
archives. He thought of these--of his not being at all events
futile, and of his absolute acceptance of the developments of the
coming age to redress the balance of his being so differently
considered. The moments when he most winced were those at which
he found himself believing that, really, futility would have been
forgiven him. Even WITH it, in that absurd view, he would have
been good enough. Such was the laxity, in the Ververs, of the
romantic spirit. They didn't, indeed, poor dears, know what, in
that line--the line of futility--the real thing meant. HE did--
having seen it, having tried it, having taken its measure. This
was a memory in fact simply to screen out--much as, just in front
of him while he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early
to the stale summer day, rattled down at the turn of some crank.
There was machinery again, just as the plate glass, all about
him, was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples. Well,
he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he was on their side--if
it wasn't rather the pleasanter way of putting it that they were
on his.

Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur
of his walk. It would have been ridiculous--such a moral from
such a source--if it hadn't all somehow fitted to the gravity of
the hour, that gravity the oppression of which I began by
recording. Another feature was the immediate nearness of the
arrival of the contingent from home. He was to meet them at
Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had married
before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that
had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister
and her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal
uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin,
Don Ottavio, the most disponible of ex-deputies and of
relatives--a scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of
Maggie's plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the
altar. It was no great array, yet it was apparently to be a more
numerous muster than any possible to the bride herself, having
no wealth of kinship to choose from and making it up, on the
other hand, by loose invitations. He had been interested in the
girl's attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it,
giving him, as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the
kind of ruminations she would in general be governed by--which
were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadn't
natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they
wouldn't try to supply the place by artificial, by make-believe
ones, by any searching of highways and hedges. Oh yes, they had
acquaintances enough--but a marriage was an intimate thing. You
asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and kin--you asked
them over and above. But you didn't ask them alone, to cover your
nudity and look like what they weren't. She knew what she meant
and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her,
finding a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her,
desired her, to have character; his wife SHOULD have it, and he
wasn't afraid of her having much. He had had, in his earlier
time, to deal with plenty of people who had had it; notably with
the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle, the Cardinal,
above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his
education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset
him. He was thus fairly on the look-out for the characteristic
in this most intimate, as she was to come, of his associates.
He encouraged it when it appeared.

He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in
order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in
his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It
would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the
Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining to-night in
Portland Place, where Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting
that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. But what
meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have said, was his sense of the
immediate two or three hours. He paused on corners, at crossings;
there kept rising for him, in waves, that consciousness, sharp as
to its source while vague as to its end, which I began by
speaking of--the consciousness of an appeal to do something or
other, before it was too late, for himself. By any friend to whom
he might have mentioned it the appeal could have been turned to
frank derision. For what, for whom indeed but himself and the
high advantages attached, was he about to marry an
extraordinarily charming girl, whose "prospects," of the solid
sort, were as guaranteed as her amiability? He wasn't to do it,
assuredly, all for her. The Prince, as happened, however, was so
free to feel and yet not to formulate that there rose before him
after a little, definitely, the image of a friend whom he had
often found ironic. He withheld the tribute of attention from
passing faces only to let his impulse accumulate. Youth and
beauty made him scarcely turn, but the image of Mrs. Assingham
made him presently stop a hansom. HER youth, her beauty were
things more or less of the past, but to find her at home, as he
possibly might, would be "doing" what he still had time for,
would put something of a reason into his restlessness and thereby
probably soothe it. To recognise the propriety of this particular
pilgrimage--she lived far enough off, in long Cadogan Place--was
already in fact to work it off a little. A perception of the
propriety of formally thanking her, and of timing the act just as
he happened to be doing--this, he made out as he went, was
obviously all that had been the matter with him. It was true that
he had mistaken the mood of the moment, misread it rather,
superficially, as an impulse to look the other way--the other way
from where his pledges had accumulated. Mrs. Assingham,
precisely, represented, embodied his pledges--was, in her
pleasant person, the force that had set them successively in
motion. She had MADE his marriage, quite as truly as his papal
ancestor had made his family--though he could scarce see what she
had made it for unless because she too was perversely romantic.
He had neither bribed nor persuaded her, had given her nothing--
scarce even till now articulate thanks; so that her profit-to
think of it vulgarly--must have all had to come from the Ververs.

Yet he was far, he could still remind himself, from supposing
that she had been grossly remunerated. He was wholly sure she
hadn't; for if there were people who took presents and people who
didn't she would be quite on the right side and of the proud
class. Only then, on the other hand, her disinterestedness was
rather awful--it implied, that is, such abysses of confidence.
She was admirably attached to Maggie--whose possession of such a
friend might moreover quite rank as one of her "assets"; but the
great proof of her affection had been in bringing them, with her
design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome, meeting
him afterwards in Paris, and "liking" him, as she had in time
frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her
young friend's own and had then, unmistakably, presented him in a
light. But the interest in Maggie--that was the point--would have
achieved but little without her interest in HIM. On what did that
sentiment, unsolicited and unrecompensed, rest? what good,
again--for it was much like his question about Mr. Verver--should
he ever have done her? The Prince's notion of a recompense to
women--similar in this to his notion of an appeal--was more or
less to make love to them. Now he hadn't, as he believed, made
love the least little bit to Mrs. Assingham--nor did he think she
had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to mark
them off, the women to whom he hadn't made love: it represented--
and that was what pleased him in it--a different stage of
existence from the time at which he liked to mark off the women
to whom he had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham
herself been either aggressive or resentful. On what occasion,
ever, had she appeared to find him wanting? These things, the
motives of such people, were obscure--a little alarmingly so;
they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone
slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered
to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his
prospective wife's countryman-which was a thing to show, by the
way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the
shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further
toward the North Pole--or was it the South?--than anyone had ever
done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air
that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness
conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were
moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery.
The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham
herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never
known curtains but as purple even to blackness--but as producing
where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were
so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be
shocks.

Shocks, however, from these quite different depths, were not what
he saw reason to apprehend; what he rather seemed to himself not
yet to have measured was something that, seeking a name for it,
he would have called the quantity of confidence reposed in him.
He had stood still, at many a moment of the previous month, with
the thought, freshly determined or renewed, of the general
expectation--to define it roughly--of which he was the subject.
What was singular was that it seemed not so much an expectation
of anything in particular as a large, bland, blank assumption of
merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It
was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold
no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, mediaeval, wonderful,
of which the "worth" in mere modern change, sovereigns and half
crowns, would be great enough, but as to which, since there were
finer ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous.
That was the image for the security in which it was open to him
to rest; he was to constitute a possession, yet was to escape
being reduced to his component parts. What would this mean but
that, practically, he was never to be tried or tested? What would
it mean but that, if they didn't "change" him, they really
wouldn't know--he wouldn't know himself--how many pounds,
shillings and pence he had to give? These at any rate, for the
present, were unanswerable questions; all that was before him was
that he was invested with attributes. He was taken seriously.
Lost there in the white mist was the seriousness in them that
made them so take him. It was even in Mrs. Assingham, in spite of
her having, as she had frequently shown, a more mocking spirit.
All he could say as yet was that he had done nothing, so far as
to break any charm. What should he do if he were to ask her
frankly this afternoon what was, morally speaking, behind their
veil. It would come to asking what they expected him to do. She
would answer him probably: "Oh, you know, it's what we expect you
to be!" on which he would have no resource but to deny his
knowledge. Would that break the spell, his saying he had no idea?
What idea in fact could he have? He also took himself seriously--
made a point of it; but it wasn't simply a question of fancy and
pretension. His own estimate he saw ways, at one time and
another, of dealing with: but theirs, sooner or later, say what
they might, would put him to the practical proof. As the
practical proof, accordingly, would naturally be proportionate to
the cluster of his attributes, one arrived at a scale that he was
not, honestly, the man to calculate. Who but a billionaire could
say what was fair exchange for a billion? That measure was the
shrouded object, but he felt really, as his cab stopped in
Cadogan Place, a little nearer the shroud. He promised himself,
virtually, to give the latter a twitch.



                            II

"They're not good days, you know," he had said to Fanny Assingham
after declaring himself grateful for finding her, and then, with
his cup of tea, putting her in possession of the latest news--the
documents signed an hour ago, de part et d'autre, and the
telegram from his backers, who had reached Paris the morning
before, and who, pausing there a little, poor dears, seemed to
think the whole thing a tremendous lark. "We're very simple folk,
mere country cousins compared with you," he had also observed,
"and Paris, for my sister and her husband, is the end of the
world. London therefore will be more or less another planet. It
has always been, as with so many of us, quite their Mecca, but
this is their first real caravan; they've mainly known 'old
England' as a shop for articles in india-rubber and leather, in
which they've dressed themselves as much as possible. Which all
means, however, that you'll see them, all of them, wreathed in
smiles. We must be very easy with them. Maggie's too wonderful--
her preparations are on a scale! She insists on taking in the
sposi and my uncle. The, others will come to me. I've been
engaging their rooms at the hotel, and, with all those solemn
signatures of an hour ago, that brings the case home to me."

"Do you mean you're afraid?" his hostess had amusedly asked.

"Terribly afraid. I've now but to wait to see the monster come.
They're not good days; they're neither one thing nor the other.
I've really got nothing, yet I've everything to lose. One doesn't
know what still may happen."

The way she laughed at him was for an instant almost irritating;
it came out, for his fancy, from behind the white curtain. It was
a sign, that is, of her deep serenity, which worried instead of
soothing him. And to be soothed, after all, to be tided over, in
his mystic impatience, to be told what he could understand and
believe--that was what he had come for. "Marriage then," said
Mrs. Assingham, "is what you call the monster? I admit it's a
fearful thing at the best; but, for heaven's sake, if that's what
you're thinking of, don't run away from it."

"Ah, to run away from it would be to run away from you," the
Prince replied; "and I've already told you often enough how I
depend on you to see me through." He so liked the way she took
this, from the corner of her sofa, that he gave his sincerity--
for it WAS sincerity--fuller expression. "I'm starting on the
great voyage--across the unknown sea; my ship's all rigged and
appointed, the cargo's stowed away and the company complete. But
what seems the matter with me is that I can't sail alone; my ship
must be one of a pair, must have, in the waste of waters, a--what
do you call it?--a consort. I don't ask you to stay on board with
me, but I must keep your sail in sight for orientation. I don't
in the least myself know, I assure you, the points of the
compass. But with a lead I can perfectly follow. You MUST be my
lead."

"How can you be sure," she asked, "where I should take you?"

"Why, from your having brought me safely thus far. I should never
have got here without you. You've provided the ship itself, and,
if you've not quite seen me aboard, you've attended me, ever so
kindly, to the dock. Your own vessel is, all conveniently, in the
next berth, and you can't desert me now."

She showed him again her amusement, which struck him even as
excessive, as if, to his surprise, he made her also a little
nervous; she treated him in fine as if he were not uttering
truths, but making pretty figures for her diversion. "My vessel,
dear Prince?" she smiled. "What vessel, in the world, have I?
This little house is all our ship, Bob's and mine--and
thankful we are, now, to have it. We've wandered far, living, as
you may say, from hand to mouth, without rest for the soles of
our feet. But the time has come for us at last to draw in."

He made at this, the young man, an indignant protest. "You talk
about rest--it's too selfish!--when you're just launching me on
adventures?"

She shook her head with her kind lucidity. "Not adventures--
heaven forbid! You've had yours--as I've had mine; and my idea
has been, all along, that we should neither of us begin again. My
own last, precisely, has been doing for you all you so prettily
mention. But it consists simply in having conducted you to rest.
You talk about ships, but they're not the comparison. Your
tossings are over--you're practically IN port. The port," she
concluded, "of the Golden Isles."

He looked about, to put himself more in relation with the place;
then, after an hesitation, seemed to speak certain words instead
of certain others. "Oh, I know where I AM--! I do decline to be
left, but what I came for, of course, was to thank you. If to-day
has seemed, for the first time, the end of preliminaries, I feel
how little there would have been any at all without you. The
first were wholly yours."

"Well," said Mrs. Assingham, "they were remarkably easy. I've
seen them, I've HAD them," she smiled, "more difficult.
Everything, you must feel, went of itself. So, you must feel,
everything still goes."

The Prince quickly agreed. "Oh, beautifully! But you had the
conception."

"Ah, Prince, so had you!"

He looked at her harder a moment. "You had it first. You had it
most."

She returned his look as if it had made her wonder. "I LIKED it,
if that's what you mean. But you liked it surely yourself. I
protest, that I had easy work with you. I had only at last--when
I thought it was time--to speak for you."

"All that is quite true. But you're leaving me, all the same,
you're leaving me--you're washing your hands of me," he went on.
"However, that won't be easy; I won't BE left." And he had turned
his eyes about again, taking in the pretty room that she had just
described as her final refuge, the place of peace for a world-
worn couple, to which she had lately retired with "Bob." "I shall
keep this spot in sight. Say what you will, I shall need you. I'm
not, you know," he declared, "going to give you up for anybody."

"If you're afraid--which of course you're not--are you trying to
make me the same?" she asked after a moment.

He waited a minute too, then answered her with a question. "You
say you 'liked' it, your undertaking to make my engagement
possible. It remains beautiful for me that you did; it's charming
and unforgettable. But, still more, it's mysterious and
wonderful. WHY, you dear delightful woman, did you like it?"

"I scarce know what to make," she said, "of such an inquiry. If
you haven't by this time found out yourself, what meaning can
anything I say have for you? Don't you really after all feel,"
she added while nothing came from him--"aren't you conscious
every minute, of the perfection of the creature of whom I've put
you into possession?"

"Every minute--gratefully conscious. But that's exactly the
ground of my question. It wasn't only a matter of your handing me
over--it was a matter of your handing her. It was a matter of HER
fate still more than of mine. You thought all the good of her
that one woman can think of another, and yet, by your account,
you enjoyed assisting at her risk."

She had kept her eyes on him while he spoke, and this was what,
visibly, determined a repetition for her. "Are you trying to
frighten me?"

"Ah, that's a foolish view--I should be too vulgar. You
apparently can't understand either my good faith or my humility.
I'm awfully humble," the young man insisted; "that's the way I've
been feeling to-day, with everything so finished and ready. And
you won't take me for serious."

She continued to face him as if he really troubled her a little.
"Oh, you deep old Italians!"

"There you are," he returned--"it's what I wanted you to come to.
That's the responsible note."

"Yes," she went on--"if you're 'humble' you MUST be dangerous."

She had a pause while he only smiled; then she said: "I don't in
the least want to lose sight of you. But even if I did I
shouldn't think it right."

"Thank you for that--it's what I needed of you. I'm sure, after
all, that the more you're with me the more I shall understand.
It's the only thing in the world I want. I'm excellent, I really
think, all round--except that I'm stupid. I can do pretty well
anything I SEE. But I've got to see it first." And he pursued his
demonstration. "I don't in the least mind its having to be shown
me--in fact I like that better. Therefore it is that I want, that
I shall always want, your eyes. Through THEM I wish to look--even
at any risk of their showing me what I mayn't like. For then," he
wound up, "I shall know. And of that I shall never be afraid."

She might quite have been waiting to see what he would come to,
but she spoke with a certain impatience. "What on earth are you
talking about?"

But he could perfectly say: "Of my real, honest fear of being
'off' some day, of being wrong, WITHOUT knowing it. That's what I
shall always trust you for--to tell me when I am. No--with you
people it's a sense. We haven't got it--not as you have.
Therefore--!" But he had said enough. "Ecco!" he simply smiled.

It was not to be concealed that he worked upon her, but of course
she had always liked him. "I should be interested," she presently
remarked, "to see some sense you don't possess."

Well, he produced one on the spot. "The moral, dear Mrs.
Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of
course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome
sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the
tortuous stone staircase--half-ruined into the bargain!--in some
castle of our quattrocento is like the `lightning elevator' in
one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense
works by steam--it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and
steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that--
well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn round and
come down again."

"Trusting," Mrs. Assingham smiled, "to get up some other way?"

"Yes--or not to have to get up at all. However," he added, "I
told you that at the beginning."

"Machiavelli!" she simply exclaimed.

"You do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius.
However, if you really believe I have his perversity you wouldn't
say it. But it's all right," he gaily enough concluded; "I shall
always have you to come to."

On this, for a little, they sat face to face; after which,
without comment, she asked him if he would have more tea. All she
would give him, he promptly signified; and he developed, making
her laugh, his idea that the tea of the English race was somehow
their morality, "made," with boiling water, in a little pot, so
that the more of it one drank the more moral one would become.
His drollery served as a transition, and she put to him several
questions about his sister and the others, questions as to what
Bob, in particular, Colonel Assingham, her husband, could do for
the arriving gentlemen, whom, by the Prince's leave, he would
immediately go to see. He was funny, while they talked, about
his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their
habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their
conduct, as more rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever
have known. This, Mrs. Assingham professed, was exactly what
would endear them to her, and that, in turn, drew from her
visitor a fresh declaration of all the comfort of his being able
so to depend on her. He had been with her, at this point, some
twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits, and he
stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciation. He
stayed moreover--THAT was really the sign of the hour--in spite
of the nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth
much rather fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently
meant to soothe it. She had not soothed him, and there arrived,
remarkably, a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out.
He had not frightened her, as she called it--he felt that; yet
she was herself not at ease. She had been nervous, though trying
to disguise it; the sight of him, following on the announcement
of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This conviction, for
the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the effect, too,
of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in calling, he
had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow
IMPORTANT--that was what it was--that there should be at this
hour something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in all
their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the
least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was
to know, of a truth, that there was something the matter with
HIM; since strangely, with so little to go upon--his heart had
positively begun to beat to the tune of suspense. It fairly
befell at last, for a climax, that they almost ceased to
pretend--to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The
unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis--neither could have
said how long it lasted--during which they were reduced, for all
interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate
scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous
stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their
photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant.

The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might
have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their
communion--or indeed, even without meanings, have found his
account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern
sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern
sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs.
Assingham's dark, neat head, on which the crisp black hair made
waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the
fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations
against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance
and to make the best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue,
her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress--
these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle
age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a
daughter of the south, or still more of the east, a creature
formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon
by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to
take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared
fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact, however, neither a
pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been, recordedly,
her birthplace and "Europe" punctually her discipline. She wore
yellow and purple because she thought it better, as she said,
while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba than like
a revendeuse; she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in
her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature
itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown,
as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the overdressing. So she
was covered and surrounded with "things," which were frankly toys
and shams, a part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to
supply her friends. These friends were in the game that of
playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character.
Her character was attested by the second movement of her face,
which convinced the beholder that her vision of the humours of
the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed
the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American city
looked out, somehow, for the opportunity of it, from under the
lids of Jerusalem. With her false indolence, in short, her false
leisure, her false pearls and palms and courts and fountains, she
was a person for whom life was multitudinous detail, detail that
left her, as it at any moment found her, unappalled and
unwearied.

"Sophisticated as I may appear"--it was her frequent phrase--she
had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do;
it made her, as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two
great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social
scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early
American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which
they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt.

One of these gaps in Mrs. Assingham's completeness was her want
of children; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful
how little either, in the fulness of time, came to show; sympathy
and curiosity could render their objects practically filial, just
as an English husband who in his military years had "run"
everything in his regiment could make economy blossom like the
rose. Colonel  Bob had, a few years after his marriage, left the
army, which had clearly, by that time, done its laudable all for
the enrichment of his personal experience, and he could thus give
his whole time to the gardening in question. There reigned among
the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable
for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest
of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive
period when such things--such things as American girls accepted
as "good enough"--had not begun to be;--so that the pleasant pair
had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original,
honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a
kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage. Mrs. Assingham knew better,
knew there had been no historic hour, from that of Pocahontas
down, when some young Englishman hadn't precipitately believed
and some American girl hadn't, with a few more gradations,
availed herself to the full of her incapacity to doubt; but she
accepted resignedly the laurel of the founder, since she was in
fact pretty well the doyenne, above ground, of her transplanted
tribe, and since, above all, she HAD invented combinations,
though she had not invented Bob's own. It was he who had done
that, absolutely puzzled it out, by himself, from his first odd
glimmer-resting upon it moreover, through the years to come, as
proof enough, in him, by itself, of the higher cleverness. If she
kept her own cleverness up it was largely that he should have
full credit. There were moments in truth when she privately felt
how little--striking out as he had done--he could have afforded
that she should show the common limits. But Mrs. Assingham's
cleverness was in truth tested when her present visitor at last
said to her: "I don't think, you know, that you're treating me
quite right. You've something on your mind that you don't tell
me."

It was positive too that her smile, in reply, was a trifle dim.
"Am I obliged to tell you everything I have on my mind?"

"It isn't a question of everything, but it's a question of
anything that may particularly concern me. Then you shouldn't
keep it back. You know with what care I desire to proceed, taking
everything into account and making no mistake that may possibly
injure HER."

Mrs. Assingham, at this, had after an instant an odd
interrogation. "'Her'?"

"Her and him. Both our friends. Either Maggie or her father."

"I have something on my mind," Mrs. Assingham presently returned;
"something has happened for which I hadn't been prepared. But it
isn't anything that properly concerns you."

The Prince, with immediate gaiety, threw back his head. "What do
you mean by 'properly'? I somehow see volumes in it. It's the way
people put a thing when they put it--well, wrong. _I_ put things
right. What is it that has happened for me?"

His hostess, the next moment, had drawn spirit from his tone.

"Oh, I shall be delighted if you'll take your share of it.
Charlotte Stant is in London. She has just been here."

"Miss Stant? Oh really?" The Prince expressed clear surprise--a
transparency through which his eyes met his friend's with a
certain hardness of concussion. "She has arrived from America?"
he then quickly asked.

"She appears to have arrived this noon--coming up from
Southampton; at an hotel. She dropped upon me after luncheon and
was here for more than an hour."

The young man heard with interest, though not with an interest
too great for his gaiety. "You think then I've a share in it?
What IS my share?"

"Why, any you like--the one you seemed just now eager to take. It
was you yourself who insisted."

He looked at her on this with conscious inconsistency, and she
could now see that he had changed colour. But he was always easy.

"I didn't know then what the matter was."

"You didn't think it could be so bad?"

"Do you call it very bad?" the young man asked. "Only," she
smiled, "because that's the way it seems to affect YOU."

He hesitated, still with the trace of his quickened colour, still
looking at her, still adjusting his manner. "But you allowed you
were upset."

"To the extent--yes--of not having in the least looked for her.
Any more," said Mrs. Assingham, "than I judge Maggie to have
done."

The Prince thought; then as if glad to be able to say something
very natural and true: "No--quite right. Maggie hasn't looked for
her. But I'm sure," he added, "she'll be delighted to see her."

"That, certainly"--and his hostess spoke with a different shade
of gravity.

"She'll be quite overjoyed," the Prince went on. "Has Miss Stant
now gone to her?"

"She has gone back to her hotel, to bring her things here. I
can't have her," said Mrs. Assingham, "alone at an hotel."

"No; I see."

"If she's here at all she must stay with me." He quite took it
in. "So she's coming now?"

"I expect her at any moment. If you wait you'll see her."

"Oh," he promptly declared--"charming!" But this word came out as
if, a little, in sudden substitution for some other. It sounded
accidental, whereas he wished to be firm. That accordingly was
what he next showed himself. "If it wasn't for what's going on
these next days Maggie would certainly want to have her. In
fact," he lucidly continued, "isn't what's happening just a
reason to MAKE her want to?" Mrs. Assingham, for answer, only
looked at him, and this, the next instant, had apparently had
more effect than if she had spoken. For he asked a question that
seemed incongruous. "What has she come for!"

It made his companion laugh. "Why, for just what you say. For
your marriage."

"Mine?"--he wondered.

"Maggie's--it's the same thing. It's 'for' your great event. And
then," said Mrs. Assingham, "she's so lonely."

"Has she given you that as a reason?"

"I scarcely remember--she gave me so many. She abounds, poor
dear, in reasons. But there's one that, whatever she does, I
always remember for myself."

"And which is that?" He looked as if he ought to guess but
couldn't.

"Why, the fact that she has no home--absolutely none whatever.
She's extraordinarily alone."

Again he took it in. "And also has no great means."

"Very small ones. Which is not, however, with the expense of
railways and hotels, a reason for her running to and fro."

"On the contrary. But she doesn't like her country."

"Hers, my dear man?--it's little enough 'hers.'" The attribution,
for the moment, amused his hostess. "She has rebounded now--but
she has had little enough else to do with it."

"Oh, I say hers," the Prince pleasantly explained, "very much as,
at this time of day, I might say mine. I quite feel, I assure
you, as if the great place already more or less belonged to ME."

"That's your good fortune and your point of view. You own--or you
soon practically WILL own--so much of it. Charlotte owns almost
nothing in the world, she tells me, but two colossal trunks-only
one of which I have given her leave to introduce into this house.
She'll depreciate to you," Mrs. Assingham added, "your property."

He thought of these things, he thought of every thing; but he had
always his resource at hand of turning all to the easy. "Has she
come with designs upon me?" And then in a moment, as if even this
were almost too grave, he sounded the note that had least to do
with himself. "Est-elle toujours aussi belle?" That was the
furthest point, somehow, to which Charlotte Stant could be
relegated.

Mrs. Assingham treated it freely. "Just the same. The person in
the world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to
appreciation. It's all in the way she affects you. One admires
her if one doesn't happen not to. So, as well, one criticises
her."

"Ah, that's not fair!" said the Prince.

"To criticise her? Then there you are! You're answered."

"I'm answered." He took it, humorously, as his lesson--sank his
previous self-consciousness, with excellent effect, in grateful
docility. "I only meant that there are perhaps better things to
be done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once you
begin THAT, with anyone--!" He was vague and kind.

"I quite agree that it's better to keep out of it as long as one
can. But when one MUST do it--"

"Yes?" he asked as she paused. "Then know what you mean."

"I see. Perhaps," he smiled, "_I_ don't know what I mean."

"Well, it's what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should
know." Mrs. Assingham, however, made no more of this, having,
before anything else, apparently, a scruple about the tone she
had just used. "I quite understand, of course, that, given her
great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be
present. She has acted impulsively--but she has acted
generously."

"She has acted beautifully," said the Prince.

"I say 'generously' because I mean she hasn't, in any way,
counted the cost. She'll have it to count, in a manner, now," his
hostess continued. "But that doesn't matter."

He could see how little. "You'll look after her."

"I'll look after her."

"So it's all right."

"It's all right," said Mrs. Assingham.

"Then why are you troubled?"

It pulled her up--but only for a minute. "I'm not--any more than
you."

The Prince's dark blue eyes were of the finest, and, on occasion,
precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a
Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old
designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look
itself, at such times, suggested an image--that of some very
noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the
street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his
support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself: always
moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and
subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodically to
be considered. The young man's expression became, after this
fashion, something vivid and concrete--a beautiful personal
presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior,
patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of
a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure
thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest
ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince
was, for Mrs. Assingham's benefit, in view of the people. He
seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He
looked younger than his years; he was beautiful, innocent, vague.

"Oh, well, I'M not!" he rang out clear.

"I should like to SEE you, sir!" she said. "For you wouldn't have
a shadow of excuse." He showed how he agreed that he would have
been at a loss for one, and the fact of their serenity was thus
made as important as if some danger of its opposite had directly
menaced them. The only thing was that if the evidence of their
cheer was so established Mrs. Assingham had a little to explain
her original manner, and she came to this before they dropped the
question. "My first impulse is always to behave, about
everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear them--
I really like them. They're quite my element."

 He deferred, for her, to this account of herself. "But still,"
he said, "if we're not in the presence of a complication."

She hesitated. "A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one is
always a complication."

The young man weighed it almost as if the question were new to
him. "And will she stay very long?"

His friend gave a laugh. "How in the world can I know? I've
scarcely asked her."

"Ah yes. You can't."

But something in the tone of it amused her afresh. "Do you think
you could?"

"I?" he wondered.

"Do you think you could get it out of her for me--the probable
length of her stay?"

He rose bravely enough to the occasion and the challenge. "I
daresay, if you were to give me the chance."

"Here it is then for you," she answered; for she had heard,
within the minute, the stop of a cab at her door. "She's back."



                            III

It had been said as a joke, but as, after this, they awaited
their friend in silence, the effect of the silence was to turn
the time to gravity--a gravity not dissipated even when the
Prince next spoke. He had been thinking the case over and making
up his mind. A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one was a
complication. Mrs. Assingham, so far, was right. But there were
the facts--the good relations, from schooldays, of the two young
women, and the clear confidence with which one of them had
arrived. "She can come, you know, at any time, to US."

Mrs. Assingham took it up with an irony beyond laughter. "You'd
like her for your honeymoon?"

"Oh no, you must keep her for that. But why not after?"

She had looked at him a minute; then, at the sound of a voice in
the corridor, they had got up. "Why not? You're splendid!"
Charlotte Stant, the next minute, was with them, ushered in as
she had alighted from her cab, and prepared for not finding Mrs.
Assingham alone--this would have been to be noticed--by the
butler's answer, on the stairs, to a question put to him. She
could have looked at her hostess with such straightness and
brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there--the
discrimination of but a moment, yet which let him take her in
still better than if she had instantly faced him. He availed
himself of the chance thus given him, for he was conscious of all
these things. What he accordingly saw, for some seconds, with
intensity, was a tall, strong, charming girl who wore for him, at
first, exactly the look of her adventurous situation, a
suggestion, in all her person, in motion and gesture, in free,
vivid, yet altogether happy indications of dress, from the
becoming compactness of her hat to the shade of tan in her shoes,
of winds and waves and custom-houses, of far countries and long
journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded
on experience, of not being afraid. He was aware, at the same
time, that of this combination the "strongminded" note was not,
as might have been apprehended, the basis; he was now
sufficiently familiar with English-speaking types, he had sounded
attentively enough such possibilities, for a quick vision of
differences. He had, besides, his own view of this young lady's
strength of mind. It was great, he had ground to believe, but it
would never interfere with the play of her extremely personal,
her always amusing taste. This last was the thing in her--for she
threw it out positively, on the spot, like a light--that she
might have reappeared, during these moments, just to cool his
worried eyes with. He saw her in her light that immediate,
exclusive address to their friend was like a lamp she was holding
aloft for his benefit and for his pleasure. It showed him
everything--above all her presence in the world, so closely, so
irretrievably contemporaneous with his own: a sharp, sharp fact,
sharper during these instants than any other at all, even than
that of his marriage, but accompanied, in a subordinate and
controlled way, with those others, facial, physiognomic, that
Mrs. Assingham had been speaking of as subject to appreciation.
So they were, these others, as he met them again, and that was
the connection they instantly established with him. If they had
to be interpreted, this made at least for intimacy. There was but
one way certainly for HIM--to interpret them in the sense of the
already known.

Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too
narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth, on the
other hand, by no means small, with substance in its lips and a
slight, the very slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid
teeth, otherwise indeed well arrayed and flashingly white. But it
was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his own that these
things, in Charlotte Stant, now affected him; items in a full
list, items recognised, each of them, as if, for the long
interval, they had been "stored" wrapped up, numbered, put away
in a cabinet. While she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the
cabinet had opened of itself; he took the relics out, one by one,
and it was more and more, each instant, as if she were giving him
time. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking,
brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for
"appreciation"--a colour indescribable and of which he had known
no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan
head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her
wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of
the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine
sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the
apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old
bronze. He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and
the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special
beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the
perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some
wonderful finished instrument, something intently made for
exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary
fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower,
which gave her a likeness also to some long, loose silk purse,
well filled with gold pieces, but having been passed, empty,
through a finger-ring that held it together. It was as if, before
she turned to him, he had weighed the whole thing in his open
palm and even heard a little the chink of the metal. When she
did turn to him it was to recognise with her eyes what he might
have been doing. She made no circumstance of thus coming upon
him, save so far as the intelligence in her face could at any
moment make a circumstance of almost anything. If when she moved
off she looked like a huntress, she looked when she came nearer
like his notion, perhaps not wholly correct, of a muse. But what
she said was simply: "You see you're not rid of me. How is dear
Maggie?"

It was to come soon enough by the quite unforced operation of
chance, the young man's opportunity to ask her the question
suggested by Mrs. Assingham shortly before her entrance. The
license, had he chosen to embrace it, was within a few minutes
all there--the license given him literally to inquire of this
young lady how long she was likely to be with them. For a matter
of the mere domestic order had quickly determined, on Mrs.
Assingham's part, a withdrawal, of a few moments, which had the
effect of leaving her visitors free. "Mrs. Betterman's there?"
she had said to Charlotte in allusion to some member of the
household who was to have received her and seen her belongings
settled; to which Charlotte had replied that she had encountered
only the butler, who had been quite charming. She had deprecated
any action taken on behalf of her effects; but her hostess,
rebounding from accumulated cushions, evidently saw more in Mrs.
Betterman's non-appearance than could meet the casual eye. What
she saw, in short, demanded her intervention, in spite of an
earnest "Let ME go!" from the girl, and a prolonged smiling wail
over the trouble she was giving. The Prince was quite aware, at
this moment, that departure, for himself, was indicated; the
question of Miss Stant's installation didn't demand his presence;
it was a case for one to go away--if one hadn't a reason for
staying. He had a reason, however--of that he was equally aware;
and he had not for a good while done anything more conscious and
intentional than not, quickly, to take leave. His visible
insistence--for it came to that--even demanded of him a certain
disagreeable effort, the sort of effort he had mostly associated
with acting for an idea. His idea was there, his idea was to find
out something, something he wanted much to know, and to find it
out not tomorrow, not at some future time, not in short with
waiting and wondering, but if possible before quitting the place.
This particular curiosity, moreover, confounded itself a little
with the occasion offered him to satisfy Mrs. Assingham's own; he
wouldn't have admitted that he was staying to ask a rude
question--there was distinctly nothing rude in his having his
reasons. It would be rude, for that matter, to turn one's back,
without a word or two, on an old friend.

Well, as it came to pass, he got the word or two, for Mrs.
Assingham's preoccupation was practically simplifying. The little
crisis was of shorter duration than our account of it; duration,
naturally, would have forced him to take up his hat. He was
somehow glad, on finding himself alone with Charlotte, that he
had not been guilty of that inconsequence. Not to be flurried was
the kind of consistency he wanted, just as consistency was the
kind of dignity. And why couldn't he have dignity when he had so
much of the good conscience, as it were, on which such advantages
rested? He had done nothing he oughtn't--he had in fact done
nothing at all. Once more, as a man conscious of having known
many women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the
recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as
certain as sunrise or the coming round of Saints' days, the doing
by the woman of the thing that gave her away. She did it, ever,
inevitably, infallibly--she couldn't possibly not do it. It was
her nature, it was her life, and the man could always expect it
without lifting a finger. This was HIS, the man's, any man's,
position and strength--that he had necessarily the advantage,
that he only had to wait, with a decent patience, to be placed,
in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just
so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other
creature was her weakness and her deep misfortune--not less, no
doubt, than her beauty. It produced for the man that
extraordinary mixture of pity and profit in which his relation
with her, when he was not a mere brute, mainly consisted; and
gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of being always nice
to her, nice about her, nice FOR her. She always dressed her act
up, of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged it, showing
in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but one
thing in the world, equal to her abjection: she would let it be
known for anything, for everything, but the truth of which it was
made. That was what, precisely, Charlotte Stant would be doing
now; that was the present motive and support, to a certainty, of
each of her looks and motions. She was the twentieth woman, she
was possessed by her doom, but her doom was also to arrange
appearances, and what now concerned him was to learn how she
proposed. He would help her, would arrange WITH her to any point
in reason; the only thing was to know what appearance could best
be produced and best be preserved. Produced and preserved on her
part of course; since on his own there had been luckily no folly
to cover up, nothing but a perfect accord between conduct and
obligation.

They stood there together, at all events, when the door had
closed behind their friend, with a conscious, strained smile and
very much as if each waited for the other to strike the note or
give the pitch. The young man held himself, in his silent
suspense--only not more afraid because he felt her own fear. She
was afraid of herself, however; whereas, to his gain of lucidity,
he was afraid only of her. Would she throw herself into his arms,
or would she be otherwise wonderful? She would see what he would
do--so their queer minute without words told him; and she would
act accordingly. But what could he do but just let her see that
he would make anything, everything, for her, as honourably easy
as possible? Even if she should throw herself into his arms he
would make that easy--easy, that is, to overlook, to ignore, not
to remember, and not, by the same token, either, to regret. This
was not what in fact happened, though it was also not at a single
touch, but by the finest gradations, that his tension subsided.
"It's too delightful to be back!" she said at last; and it was
all she definitely gave him--being moreover nothing but what
anyone else might have said. Yet with two or three other things
that, on his response, followed it, it quite pointed the path,
while the tone of it, and her whole attitude, were as far removed
as need have been from the truth of her situation. The abjection
that was present to him as of the essence quite failed to peep
out, and he soon enough saw that if she was arranging she could
be trusted to arrange. Good--it was all he asked; and all the
more that he could admire and like her for it,

The particular appearance she would, as they said, go in for was
that of having no account whatever to give him--it would be in
fact that of having none to give anybody--of reasons or of
motives, of comings or of goings. She was a charming young woman
who had met him before, but she was also a charming young woman
with a life of her own. She would take it high--up, up, up, ever
so high. Well then, he would do the same; no height would be too
great for them, not even the dizziest conceivable to a young
person so subtle. The dizziest seemed indeed attained when, after
another moment, she came as near as she was to come to an apology
for her abruptness.

"I've been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I
wanted to see her happy--and it doesn't strike me I find you too
shy to tell me I SHALL."

"Of course she's happy, thank God! Only it's almost terrible, you
know, the happiness of young, good, generous creatures. It rather
frightens one. But the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints," said
the Prince, "have her in their keeping."

"Certainly they have. She's the dearest of the dear. But I
needn't tell you," the girl added.

"Ah," he returned with gravity, "I feel that I've still much to
learn about her." To which he subjoined "She'll rejoice awfully
in your being with us."

"Oh, you don't need me!" Charlotte smiled. "It's her hour. It's a
great hour. One has seen often enough, with girls, what it is.
But that," she said, "is exactly why. Why I've wanted, I mean,
not to miss it."

He bent on her a kind, comprehending face. "You mustn't miss
anything." He had got it, the pitch, and he could keep it now,
for all he had needed was to have it given him. The pitch was the
happiness of his wife that was to be--the sight of that happiness
as a joy for an old friend. It was, yes, magnificent, and not the
less so for its coming to him, suddenly, as sincere, as nobly
exalted. Something in Charlotte's eyes seemed to tell him this,
seemed to plead with him in advance as to what he was to find in
it. He was eager--and he tried to show her that too--to find what
she liked; mindful as he easily could be of what the friendship
had been for Maggie. It had been armed with the wings of young
imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed--always
counting out her intense devotion to her father--the liveliest
emotion she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired
by himself. She had not, to his knowledge, invited the object of
it to their wedding, had not thought of proposing to her, for a
matter of a couple of hours, an arduous and expensive journey.
But she had kept her connected and informed, from week to week,
in spite of preparations and absorptions. "Oh, I've been writing
to Charlotte--I wish you knew her better:" he could still hear,
from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he could
still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous
element in Maggie's wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate
to her. Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why
shouldn't Charlotte respond--and be quite FREE to respond--to
such fidelities with something more than mere formal good
manners? The relations of women with each other were of the
strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn't have trusted
here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding throughout
on the ground of the immense difference--difficult indeed as it
might have been to disembroil in this young person HER race-
quality. Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a
special product. Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means,
that is her want of ramifications and other advantages,
contributed to enrich her somehow with an odd, precious
neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached yet so aware, a
sort of small social capital. It was the only one she had--it was
the only one a lonely, gregarious girl COULD have, since few,
surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and
since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of
some gift of nature to which you could scarce give a definite
name.

It wasn't a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which
she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops
or lighted brands--it wasn't at least entirely that, for he had
known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had
quite failed to make interesting. He was polyglot himself, for
that matter--as was the case too with so many of his friends and
relations; for none of whom, more than for himself, was it
anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this
young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so,
certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her lips,
that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect
felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers--a few,
and mostly men--who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had
known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte's almost
mystifying instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their
acquaintance, she had made no display of it, quite as if English,
between them, his English so matching with hers, were their
inevitable medium. He had perceived all by accident--by hearing
her talk before him to somebody else that they had an alternative
as good; an alternative in fact as much better as the amusement
for him was greater in watching her for the slips that never
came. Her account of the mystery didn't suffice: her recall of
her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents, from
the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt
generation, demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her,
with the Tuscan balia who was her first remembrance; the servants
of the villa, the dear contadini of the poder, the little girls
and the other peasants of the next podere, all the rather shabby
but still ever so pretty human furniture of her early time,
including the good sisters of the poor convent of the Tuscan
hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything else, but
prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the
subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in
Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as
a smaller girl, three years before her own ending of her period
of five. Such reminiscences, naturally, gave a ground, but they
had not prevented him from insisting that some strictly civil
ancestor--generations back, and from the Tuscan hills if she
would-made himself felt, ineffaceably, in her blood and in her
tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she had taken his
theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little presents
that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all melted
together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned, not
unnaturally, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that
his discretion let him articulate. "You haven't, I rather
gather, particularly liked your country?" They would stick, for
the time, to their English.

"It doesn't, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn't in
the least matter, over there, whether one likes it or not--that
is to anyone but one's self. But I didn't like it," said
Charlotte Stant.

"That's not encouraging then to me, is it?" the Prince went on.

"Do you mean because you're going?"

"Oh yes, of course we're going. I've wanted immensely to go."
She hesitated. "But now?--immediately?"

"In a month or two--it seems to be the new idea." On which there
was something in her face--as he imagined--that made him say:
"Didn't Maggie write to you?"

"Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of
course you must stay"--Charlotte was easily clear--"as long as
possible."

"Is that what you did?" he laughed. "You stayed as long as
possible?"

"Well, it seemed to me so--but I hadn't 'interests.' You'll have
them--on a great scale. It's the country for interests," said
Charlotte. "If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn't have
left it."

He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. "Yours then
are rather here?"

"Oh, mine!"--the girl smiled. "They take up little room, wherever
they are."

It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it
somehow did for her-it determined in him a speech that would have
seemed a few minutes before precarious and in questionable taste.
The lead she had given him made the difference, and he felt it as
really a lift on finding an honest and natural word rise, by its
license, to his lips. Nothing surely could be, for both of them,
more in the note of a high bravery. "I've been thinking it all
the while so probable, you know, that you would have seen your
way to marrying."

She looked at him an instant, and, just for these seconds, he
feared for what he might have spoiled. "To marrying whom?"

"Why, some good, kind, clever, rich American."

Again his security hung in the balance--then she was, as he felt,
admirable.

"I tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I had
come, quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At
any rate it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have
me." Then she seemed to show as sorry for his having to hear of
her anything so disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it;
if he was disappointed she would cheer him up. "Existence, you
know, all the same, doesn't depend on that. I mean," she smiled,
"on having caught a husband."

"Oh--existence!" the Prince vaguely commented. "You think I ought
to argue for more than mere existence?" she asked. "I don't see
why MY existence--even reduced as much as you like to being
merely mine--should be so impossible. There are things, of sorts,
I should be able to have--things I should be able to be. The
position of a single woman to-day is very favourable, you know."

"Favourable to what?"

"Why, just TO existence--which may contain, after all, in one way
and another, so much. It may contain, at the worst, even
affections; affections in fact quite particularly; fixed, that
is, on one's friends. I'm extremely fond of Maggie, for instance
--I quite adore her. How could I adore her more if I were married
to one of the people you speak of?"

The Prince gave a laugh. "You might adore HIM more--!"

"Ah, but it isn't, is it?" she asked, "a question of that."

"My dear friend," he returned, "it's always a question of doing
the best for one's self one can--without injury to others." He
felt by this time that they were indeed on an excellent basis; so
he went on again, as if to show frankly his sense of its
firmness. "I venture therefore to repeat my hope that you'll
marry some capital fellow; and also to repeat my belief that such
a marriage will be more favourable to you, as you call it, than
even the spirit of the age."

She looked at him at first only for answer, and would have
appeared to take it with meekness had she not perhaps appeared a
little more to take it with gaiety. "Thank you very much," she
simply said; but at that moment their friend was with them again.
It was undeniable that, as she came in, Mrs. Assingham looked,
with a certain smiling sharpness, from one of them to the other;
the perception of which was perhaps what led Charlotte, for
reassurance, to pass the question on. "The Prince hopes so much I
shall still marry some good person."

Whether it worked for Mrs. Assingham or not, the Prince was
himself, at this, more than ever reassured. He was SAFE, in a
word--that was what it all meant; and he had required to be safe.
He was really safe enough for almost any joke. "It's only," he
explained to their hostess, "because of what Miss Stant has been
telling me. Don't we want to keep up her courage?" If the joke
was broad he had at least not begun it--not, that is, AS a joke;
which was what his companion's address to their friend made of
it. "She has been trying in America, she says, but hasn't brought
it off."

The tone was somehow not what Mrs. Assingham had expected, but
she made the best of it. "Well then," she replied to the young
man, "if you take such an interest you must bring it off."

"And you must help, dear," Charlotte said unperturbed--"as you've
helped, so beautifully, in such things before." With which,
before Mrs. Assingham could meet the appeal, she had addressed
herself to the Prince on a matter much nearer to him. "YOUR mar-
riage is on Friday?--on Saturday?"

"Oh, on Friday, no! For what do you take us? There's not a vulgar
omen we're neglecting. On Saturday, please, at the Oratory, at
three o'clock--before twelve assistants exactly."

"Twelve including ME?"

It struck him--he laughed. "You'll make the thirteenth. It won't
do!"

"Not," said Charlotte, "if you're going in for 'omens.' Should
you like me to stay away?"

"Dear no--we'll manage. We'll make the round number--we'll have
in some old woman. They must keep them there for that, don't
they?"

Mrs. Assingham's return had at last indicated for him his
departure; he had possessed himself again of his hat and
approached her to take leave. But he had another word for
Charlotte. "I dine to-night with Mr. Verver. Have you any
message?"

The girl seemed to wonder a little. "For Mr. Verver?"

"For Maggie--about her seeing you early. That, I know, is what
she'll like."

"Then I'll come early--thanks."

"I daresay," he went on, "she'll send for you. I mean send a
carriage."

"Oh, I don't require that, thanks. I can go, for a penny, can't
I?" she asked of Mrs. Assingham, "in an omnibus."

"Oh, I say!" said the Prince while Mrs. Assingham looked at her
blandly.

"Yes, love--and I'll give you the penny. She shall get there,"
the good lady added to their friend.

But Charlotte, as the latter took leave of her, thought of
something else. "There's a great favour, Prince, that I want to
ask of you. I want, between this and Saturday, to make Maggie a
marriage-present."

"Oh, I say!" the young man again soothingly exclaimed.

"Ah, but I MUST," she went on. "It's really almost for that I
came back. It was impossible to get in America what I wanted."

Mrs. Assingham showed anxiety. "What is it then, dear, you want?"

But the girl looked only at their companion. "That's what the
Prince, if he'll be so good, must help me to decide."

"Can't _I_," Mrs. Assingham asked, "help you to decide?"

"Certainly, darling, we must talk it well over." And she kept her
eyes on the Prince. "But I want him, if he kindly will, to go with
me to look. I want him to judge with me and choose. That, if you
can spare the hour," she said, "is the great favour I mean."

He raised his eyebrows at her--he wonderfully smiled. "What you
came back from America to ask? Ah, certainly then, I must find
the hour!" He wonderfully smiled, but it was rather more, after
all, than he had been reckoning with. It went somehow so little
with the rest that, directly, for him, it wasn't the note of
safety; it preserved this character, at the best, but by being
the note of publicity. Quickly, quickly, however, the note of
publicity struck him as better than any other. In another moment
even it seemed positively what he wanted; for what so much as
publicity put their relation on the right footing? By this appeal
to Mrs. Assingham it was established as right, and she
immediately showed that such was her own understanding.

"Certainly, Prince," she laughed, "you must find the hour!" And
it was really so express a license from her, as representing
friendly judgment, public opinion, the moral law, the margin
allowed a husband about to be, or whatever, that, after observing
to Charlotte that, should she come to Portland Place in the morn-
ing, he would make a point of being there to see her and so,
easily, arrange with her about a time, he took his departure with
the absolutely confirmed impression of knowing, as he put it to
himself, where he was. Which was what he had prolonged his visit
for. He was where he could stay.



                             IV

"I don't quite see, my dear," Colonel Assingham said to his wife
the night of Charlotte's arrival, "I don't quite see, I'm bound
to say, why you take it, even at the worst, so ferociously hard.
It isn't your fault, after all, is it? I'll be hanged, at any
rate, if it's mine."

The hour was late, and the young lady who had disembarked at
Southampton that morning to come up by the "steamer special," and
who had then settled herself at an hotel only to re-settle
herself a couple of hours later at a private house, was by this
time, they might hope, peacefully resting from her exploits.
There had been two men at dinner, rather battered
brothers-in-arms, of his own period, casually picked up by her
host the day before, and when the gentlemen, after the meal,
rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room, Charlotte, pleading
fatigue, had already excused herself. The beguiled warriors,
however, had stayed till after eleven--Mrs. Assingham, though
finally quite without illusions, as she said, about the military
character, was always beguiling to old soldiers; and as the
Colonel had come in, before dinner, only in time to dress, he had
not till this moment really been summoned to meet his companion
over the situation that, as he was now to learn, their visitor's
advent had created for them. It was actually more than midnight,
the servants had been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels had
ceased to come in through a window still open to the August air,
and Robert Assingham had been steadily learning, all the while,
what it thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from
him presented themselves, for the moment, as the essence of his
spirit and his attitude. He disengaged, he would be damned if he
didn't--they were both phrases he repeatedly used--his
responsibility. The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of
men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language. His wife had
once told him, in relation to his violence of speech; that such
excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired General whom
she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning
battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little
fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husband's
exaggerated emphasis was his box of toy soldiers, his military
game. It harmlessly gratified in him, for his declining years,
the military instinct; bad words, when sufficiently numerous and
arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons,
tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry. It was
natural, it was delightful--the romance, and for her as well, of
camp life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It was fighting
to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.

Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his wealth of
expression, he had not yet found the image that described her
favourite game; all he could do was practically to leave it to
her, emulating her own philosophy. He had again and again sat up
late to discuss those situations in which her finer consciousness
abounded, but he had never failed to deny that anything in life,
anything of hers, could be a situation for himself. She might be
in fifty at once if she liked--and it was what women did like, at
their ease, after all; there always being, when they had too much
of any, some man, as they were well aware, to get them out. He
wouldn't at any price, have one, of any sort whatever, of his
own, or even be in one along with her. He watched her,
accordingly, in her favourite element, very much as he had
sometimes watched, at the Aquarium, the celebrated lady who, in a
slight, though tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did
tricks in the tank of water which looked so cold and
uncomfortable to the non-amphibious. He listened to his companion
to-night, while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through
her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling. But it was
true that, this being the case, he desired the value of his
money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so bent
on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was going to
happen, and what, at the worst, could the poor girl do, even
granting she wanted to do anything? What, at the worst, for that
matter, could she be conceived to have in her head?

"If she had told me the moment she got here," Mrs. Assingham
replied, "I shouldn't have my difficulty in finding out. But she
wasn't so obliging, and I see no sign at all of her becoming so.
What's certain is that she didn't come for nothing. She wants"--
she worked it out at her leisure--"to see the Prince again. THAT
isn't what troubles me. I mean that such a fact, as a fact,
isn't. But what I ask myself is, What does she want it FOR?"

"What's the good of asking yourself if you know you don't know?"
The Colonel sat back at his own ease, with an ankle resting on
the other knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of
an extremely slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat
integument of fine-spun black silk and patent leather. It seemed
to confess, this member, to consciousness of military discipline,
everything about it being as polished and perfect, as straight
and tight and trim, as a soldier on parade. It went so far as to
imply that someone or other would have "got" something or other,
confinement to barracks or suppression of pay, if it hadn't been
just as it was. Bob Assingham was distinguished altogether by a
leanness of person, a leanness quite distinct from physical
laxity, which might have been determined, on the part of superior
powers, by views of transport and accommodation, and which in
fact verged on the abnormal. He "did" himself as well as his
friends mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial,
with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a
consequent looseness of apparel that, combined with a choice of
queer light shades and of strange straw-like textures, of the
aspect of Chinese mats, provocative of wonder at his sources of
supply, suggested the habit of tropic islands, a continual
cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs.
His smooth round head, with the particular shade of its white
hair, was like a silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the
bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The
hollows of his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes within
them, were like little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew
everything that could be known about life, which he regarded as,
for far the greater part, a matter of pecuniary arrangement. His
wife accused him of a want, alike, of moral and of intellectual
reaction, or rather indeed of a complete incapacity for either.
He never went even so far as to understand what she meant, and it
didn't at all matter, since he could be in spite of the
limitation a perfectly social creature. The infirmities, the
predicaments of men neither surprised nor shocked him, and
indeed--which was perhaps his only real loss in a thrifty career
--scarce even amused; he took them for granted without horror,
classifying them after their kind and calculating results and
chances. He might, in old bewildering climates, in old campaigns
of cruelty and license, have had such revelations and known such
amazements that he had nothing more to learn. But he was wholly
content, in spite of his fondness, in domestic discussion, for
the superlative degree; and his kindness, in the oddest way,
seemed to have nothing to do with his experience. He could deal
with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near
them.

This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of
whose meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited, for their
general economy, the play of her mind, just as he edited,
savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams.
The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his
Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing,
and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His
connection with it was really a master-piece of editing. This was
in fact, to come back, very much the process he might have been
proposing to apply to Mrs. Assingham's view of what was now
before them; that is to their connection with Charlotte Stant's
possibilities. They wouldn't lavish on them all their little
fortune of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn't spend
their cherished savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte,
moreover, who was a smooth and compact inmate, and whom he felt
as, with her instincts that made against waste, much more of his
own sort than his wife. He could talk with her about Fanny almost
better than he could talk with Fanny about Charlotte. However, he
made at present the best of the latter necessity, even to the
pressing of the question he has been noted as having last
uttered. "If you can't think what to be afraid of, wait till you
can think. Then you'll do it much better. Or otherwise, if that's
waiting too long, find out from HER. Don't try to find out from
ME. Ask her herself."

Mrs. Assingham denied, as we know, that her husband had a play of
mind; so that she could, on her side, treat these remarks only as
if they had been senseless physical gestures or nervous facial
movements. She overlooked them as from habit and kindness; yet
there was no one to whom she talked so persistently of such
intimate things. "It's her friendship with Maggie that's the
immense complication. Because THAT," she audibly mused, "is so
natural."

"Then why can't she have come out for it?"

"She came out," Mrs. Assingham continued to meditate, "because
she hates America. There was no place for her there--she didn't
fit in. She wasn't in sympathy--no more were the people she saw.
Then it's hideously dear; she can't, on her means, begin to live
there. Not at all as she can, in a way, here."

"In the way, you mean, of living with US?"

"Of living with anyone. She can't live by visits alone--and she
doesn't want to. She's too good for it even if she could. But
she will--she MUST, sooner or later--stay with THEM. Maggie will
want her--Maggie will make her. Besides, she'll want to herself."

"Then why won't that do," the Colonel asked, "for you to think
it's what she has come for?"

"How will it do, HOW?"--she went on as without hearing him.

"That's what one keeps feeling."

"Why shouldn't it do beautifully?"

"That anything of the past," she brooded, "should come back NOW?
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
acres and acres of garden and its majesty of artificial lake--
though that, for a person so familiar with the "great" ones,
might be rather ridiculous--no visibility of transition showed,
no violence of adjustment, in retrospect, emerged. The Palladian
church was always there, but the piazza took care of itself. The
sun stared down in his fulness, the air circulated, and the
public not less; the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the
east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were
also side doors for entrance, between the two--large, monumental,
ornamental, in their style--as for all proper great churches. By
some such process, in fine, had the Prince, for his father-in-
law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at all
ominously, a block.

Mr. Verver, it may further be mentioned, had taken at no moment
sufficient alarm to have kept in detail the record of his
reassurance; but he would none the less not have been unable, not
really have been indisposed, to impart in confidence to the right
person his notion of the history of the matter. The right
person--it is equally distinct--had not, for this illumination,
been wanting, but had been encountered in the form of Fanny
Assingham, not for the first time indeed admitted to his
counsels, and who would have doubtless at present, in any case,
from plenitude of interest and with equal guarantees, repeated
his secret. It all came then, the great clearance, from the one
prime fact that the Prince, by good fortune, hadn't proved
angular. He clung to that description of his daughter's husband
as he often did to terms and phrases, in the human, the social
connection, that he had found for himself: it was his way to have
times of using these constantly, as if they just then lighted the
world, or his own path in it, for him--even when for some of his
interlocutors they covered less ground. It was true that with
Mrs. Assingham he never felt quite sure of the ground anything
covered; she disputed with him so little, agreed with him so
much, surrounded him with such systematic consideration, such
predetermined tenderness, that it was almost--which he had once
told her in irritation as if she were nursing a sick baby. He
had accused her of not taking him seriously, and she had
replied--as from her it couldn't frighten him--that she took him
religiously, adoringly. She had laughed again, as she had laughed
before, on his producing for her that good right word about the
happy issue of his connection with the Prince--with an effect the
more odd perhaps as she had not contested its value. She couldn't
of course, however, be, at the best, as much in love with his
discovery as he was himself. He was so much so that he fairly
worked it--to his own comfort; came in fact sometimes near
publicly pointing the moral of what might have occurred if
friction, so to speak, had occurred. He pointed it frankly

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