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The Golden Bowl — Complete

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #4264 · 1,174,961 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Golden Bowl — Complete

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4264]
                Most recently updated: November 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN BOWL — COMPLETE ***




THE GOLDEN BOWL

Volumes I and II, Complete

By 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 what 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 marriage 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 morning, 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 one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince
the particular justice he did him, was even explicit as to the danger
that, in their remarkable relation, they had thus escaped. Oh, if he
HAD been angular!—who could say what might THEN have happened? He
spoke—and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs. Assingham too—as if he
grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.

It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last
vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and
hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his
spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of
the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a
conta

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