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 contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces. “You’re round, my boy,” he had said—“you’re ALL, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that you’re not square in the general mass—whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round—that’s what I mean—in the detail. It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels—or at least I do—with one’s hand. Say you had been formed, all over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice—so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can see them all from here—each of them sticking out by itself—all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides. One would have been scratched by diamonds—doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all—but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal. I give you my idea—I think you ought to have it—just as it has come to me.” The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled—though indeed as if assenting, from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.

In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been living, the reasons they so frequently gave—so much oftener than he had ever heard reasons given before—remained on the whole the element by which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been living. He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he hadn’t meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things he had. He had fallen back on his general explanation—“We haven’t the same values;” by which he understood the same measure of importance. His “curves” apparently were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase. He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of the subject of Mr. Verver’s approbation. The promptitude of his answer, we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest turn. “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws—in which case they’re to be had very cheap!” He had stopped short of the emphasis it would have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having HIM cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically reigning between them that Mr. Verver had not, on his side either, taken up the opportunity. It is the latter’s relation to such aspects, however, that now most concerns us, and the bearing of his pleased view of this absence of friction upon Amerigo’s character as a representative precious object. Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent “pieces” in gold, in silver, in enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.

Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Maggie herself, the aspirant to his daughter’s hand showed somehow the great marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to look for in pieces of the first order. Adam Verver knew, by this time, knew thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately believed, was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes. He had never spoken of himself as infallible—it was not his way; but, apart from the natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted so with Mr. Verver’s consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment, he had stared at HIS Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His “peak in Darien” was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion, that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It had been a turning of the page of the book of life—as if a leaf long inert had moved at a touch and, eagerly reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of it—what was most wondrous of all—still more even in the thought than in the act. The thought was that of the affinity of Genius, or at least of Taste, with something in himself—with the dormant intelligence of which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected him as changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual plane. He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty—and he didn’t after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success; now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the immense meaning it had waited for.

It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife, when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had so broken—and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier occasion, the journey of his honeymoon year, it had still been closely covered. He had “bought” then, so far as he had been able, but he had bought almost wholly for the frail, fluttered creature at his side, who had had her fancies, decidedly, but all for the art, then wonderful to both of them, of the Rue de la Paix, the costly authenticities of dressmakers and jewellers. Her flutter—pale disconcerted ghost as she actually was, a broken white flower tied round, almost grotesquely for his present sense, with a huge satin “bow” of the Boulevard—her flutter had been mainly that of ribbons, frills and fine fabrics; all funny, pathetic evidence, for memory, of the bewilderments overtaking them as a bridal pair confronted with opportunity. He could wince, fairly, still, as he remembered the sense in which the poor girl’s pressure had, under his fond encouragement indeed, been exerted in favour of purchase and curiosity. These were wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that threw her back, for his pity, into a past more remote than he liked their common past, their young affection, to appear. It would have had to be admitted, to an insistent criticism, that Maggie’s mother, all too strangely, had not so much failed of faith as of the right application of it; since she had exercised it eagerly and restlessly, made it a pretext for innocent perversities in respect to which philosophic time was at, last to reduce all groans to gentleness. And they had loved each other so that his own intelligence, on the higher line, had temporarily paid for it. The futilities, the enormities, the depravities, of decoration and ingenuity, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had made him think lovely! Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and addicted to silent pleasures—as he was accessible to silent pains—he even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play, if his wife’s influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of things, so promptly removed. Would she have led him altogether, attached as he was to her, into the wilderness of mere mistakes? Would she have prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous Peak?—or would she, otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence, where he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to HIS companions, the revelation vouchsafed? No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real lady: Mr. Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.

What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light. A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the good faith of it had been less. His comparative blindness had made the good faith, which in its turn had made the soil propitious for the flower of the supreme idea. He had had to LIKE forging and sweating, he had had to like polishing and piling up his arms. They were things at least he had had to believe he liked, just as he had believed he liked transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling all for themselves, the creation of “interests” that were the extinction of other interests, the livid vulgarity, even, of getting in, or getting out, first. That had of course been so far from really the case—with the supreme idea, all the while, growing and striking deep, under everything, in the warm, rich earth. He had stood unknowing, he had walked and worked where it was buried, and the fact itself, the fact of his fortune, would have been a barren fact enough if the first sharp tender shoot had never struggled into day. There on one side was the ugliness his middle time had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents, was the beauty with which his age might still be crowned. He was happier, doubtless, than he deserved; but THAT, when one was happy at all, it was easy to be. He had wrought by devious ways, but he had reached the place, and what would ever have been straighter, in any man’s life, than his way, now, of occupying it? It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift, primarily, to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final rites.

These would be the “opening exercises,” the august dedication of the place. His imagination, he was well aware, got over the ground faster than his judgment; there was much still to do for the production of his first effect. Foundations were laid and walls were rising, the structure of the shell all determined; but raw haste was forbidden him in a connection so intimate with the highest effects of patience and piety; he should belie himself by completing without a touch at least of the majesty of delay a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price. He was far from knowing as yet where he would end, but he was admirably definite as to where he wouldn’t begin. He wouldn’t begin with a small show—he would begin with a great, and he could scarce have indicated, even had he wished to try, the line of division he had drawn. He had taken no trouble to indicate it to his fellow-citizens, purveyors and consumers, in his own and the circumjacent commonwealths, of comic matter in large lettering, diurnally “set up,” printed, published, folded and delivered, at the expense of his presumptuous emulation of the snail. The snail had become for him, under this ironic suggestion, the loveliest beast in nature, and his return to England, of which we are present witnesses, had not been unconnected with the appreciation so determined. It marked what he liked to mark, that he needed, on the matter in question, instruction from no one on earth. A couple of years of Europe again, of renewed nearness to changes and chances, refreshed sensibility to the currents of the market, would fall in with the consistency of wisdom, the particular shade of enlightened conviction, that he wished to observe. It didn’t look like much for a whole family to hang about waiting-they being now, since the birth of his grandson, a whole family; and there was henceforth only one ground in all the world, he felt, on which the question of appearance would ever really again count for him. He cared that a work of art of price should “look like” the master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks.

He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take the small clutching child from his nurse’s arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—reduce it, he said, to that—in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even more than he had hoped: enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny Assingham had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of his full consciousness, overflowing the cup like a wine too generously poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now was, exactly, consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference, in fine, definitely made. He could call back his prior, his own wedded consciousness—it was not yet out of range of vague reflection. He had supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their boy, in New York—the grand climax of their recent American period, brought to so right an issue—the happy pair struck him as having carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern his imagination, at any rate, to follow them. Extraordinary, beyond question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment—it characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty: the strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether Maggie’s mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum. The maximum of tenderness he meant—as the terms existed for him; the maximum of immersion in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable; Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum: such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe—such was the impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes—but her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him, and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should prove at this time of day possible.

He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process of his introduction to his present interests—an introduction that had depended all on himself, like the “cheek” of the young man who approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. HIS real friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the door of that essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty—thanks to his modesty—had been to believe in his facility. THIS was the problem he had worked out to its solution—the solution that was now doing more than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he wished to feel “good,” as they said at American City, he had but to retrace his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back to—that the development had not been somebody’s else passing falsely, accepted too ignobly, for his. To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press—the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife’s death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty most went to his head. He was a plain American citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art. He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn’t afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were “placed” by their treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen—in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend’s head, moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there. His freedom to see—of which the comparisons were part—what could it do but steadily grow and grow?

It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for ALL freedom—since, for example, it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs. Rance’s conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other license of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for a little, that, though if proposed to—and not only by this aspirant but by any other—he wouldn’t prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression—this was the point—took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be met by one’s self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, “I’m restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because I’m proud and refined; but if it WASN’T for Mr. Rance and for my refinement and my pride!”—the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented, many-paged letters, of voices as to which, distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered little in what part of the resounding country they had learned to make themselves prevail. The Assinghams and the Miss Lutches had taken the walk, through the park, to the little old church, “on the property,” that our friend had often found himself wishing he were able to transport, as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to one of his exhibitory halls; while Maggie had induced her husband, not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith—her own as it had been her mother’s, and as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be taken for his—without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage might not have been acted out.

What at last appeared to have happened, however, was that the divided parties, coming back at the same moment, had met outside and then drifted together, from empty room to room, yet not in mere aimless quest of the pair of companions they had left at home. The quest had carried them to the door of the billiard-room, and their appearance, as it opened to admit them, determined for Adam Verver, in the oddest way in the world, a new and sharp perception. It was really remarkable: this perception expanded, on the spot, as a flower, one of the strangest, might, at a breath, have suddenly opened. The breath, for that matter, was more than anything else, the look in his daughter’s eyes—the look with which he SAW her take in exactly what had occurred in her absence: Mrs. Rance’s pursuit of him to this remote locality, the spirit and the very form, perfectly characteristic, of his acceptance of the complication—the seal set, in short, unmistakably, on one of Maggie’s anxieties. The anxiety, it was true, would have been, even though not imparted, separately shared; for Fanny Assingham’s face was, by the same stroke, not at all thickly veiled for him, and a queer light, of a colour quite to match, fairly glittered in the four fine eyes of the Miss Lutches. Each of these persons—counting out, that is, the Prince and the Colonel, who didn’t care, and who didn’t even see that the others did—knew something, or had at any rate had her idea; the idea, precisely, that this was what Mrs. Rance, artfully biding her time, WOULD do. The special shade of apprehension on the part of the Miss Lutches might indeed have suggested the vision of an energy supremely asserted. It was droll, in truth, if one came to that, the position of the Miss Lutches: they had themselves brought, they had guilelessly introduced Mrs. Rance, strong in the fact of Mr. Rance’s having been literally beheld of them; and it was now for them, positively, as if their handful of flowers—since Mrs. Rance was a handful!—had been but the vehicle of a dangerous snake. Mr. Verver fairly felt in the air the Miss Lutches’ imputation—in the intensity of which, really, his own propriety might have been involved.

That, none the less, was but a flicker; what made the real difference, as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie. His daughter’s anxiety alone had depths, and it opened out for him the wider that it was altogether new. When, in their common past, when till this moment, had she shown a fear, however dumbly, for his individual life? They had had fears together, just as they had had joys, but all of hers, at least, had been for what equally concerned them. Here of a sudden was a question that concerned him alone, and the soundless explosion of it somehow marked a date. He was on her mind, he was even in a manner on her hands—as a distinct thing, that is, from being, where he had always been, merely deep in her heart and in her life; too deep down, as it were, to be disengaged, contrasted or opposed, in short objectively presented. But time finally had done it; their relation was altered: he SAW, again, the difference lighted for her. This marked it to himself—and it wasn’t a question simply of a Mrs. Rance the more or the less. For Maggie too, at a stroke, almost beneficently, their visitor had, from being an inconvenience, become a sign. They had made vacant, by their marriage, his immediate foreground, his personal precinct—they being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for others—so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see, he had the sense of what she saw HIM. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception had there not, the next instant, been more for him in Fanny Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing.

So much mute communication was doubtless, all this time, marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing allusive, nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or immediately after luncheon—except indeed so far as their failure soon again to meet might be itself an accident charged with reference. The hour or two after luncheon—and on Sundays with especial rigour, for one of the domestic reasons of which it belonged to Maggie quite multitudinously to take account—were habitually spent by the Princess with her little boy, in whose apartment she either frequently found her father already established or was sooner or later joined by him. His visit to his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his day, against all interventions, and this without counting his grandson’s visits to HIM, scarcely less ordered and timed, and the odd bits, as he called them, that they picked up together when they could—communions snatched, for the most part, on the terrace, in the gardens or the park, while the Principino, with much pomp and circumstance of perambulator, parasol, fine lace over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance, took the air. In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great house the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the small child an heir-apparent—in the nursery of nurseries the talk, at these instituted times, was always so prevailingly with or about the master of the scene that other interests and other topics had fairly learned to avoid the slighting and inadequate notice there taken of them. They came in, at the best, but as involved in the little boy’s future, his past, or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing perhaps, in truth, had done more than this united participation to confirm in the elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver’s behalf, we have made some mention. It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process, might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with the place of immediate male parent swept bare and open to the next nearest sympathy.

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what the Prince might be or might do for his son—the sum of service, in his absence, so completely filled itself out. It was not in the least, moreover, that there was doubt of him, for he was conspicuously addicted to the manipulation of the child, in the frank Italian way, at such moments as he judged discreet in respect to other claims: conspicuously, indeed, that is, for Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to speak to her husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak to her father of the extravagance of her husband. Adam Verver had, all round, in this connection, his own serenity. He was sure of his son-in-law’s auxiliary admiration—admiration, he meant, of his grand-son; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the instinct—or it might fairly have been the tradition—of the latter’s making the child so solidly beautiful as to HAVE to be admired? What contributed most to harmony in this play of relations, however, was the way the young man seemed to leave it to be gathered that, tradition for tradition, the grandpapa’s own was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing. A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess herself—well, Amerigo’s very discretions were his way of taking account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir were, in fine, not more angular than any others to be observed in him; and Mr. Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours. It was as if the grandpapa’s special show of the character were but another side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception—that of the Prince’s inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to CONCLUDE. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated—on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was, after all, the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how, when you came to that, COULD you know that a horse wouldn’t shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it didn’t shy at a traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little, thus, from month to month, the Prince was learning what his wife’s father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off—he had been brought, up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr. Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side. He didn’t know—he was learning, and it was funny for him—to how many things he HAD been brought up. If the Prince could only strike something to which he hadn’t! This wouldn’t, it seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet MIGHT, a little, add to the interest.

What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together—at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the “old” garden, as it was called, old with an antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before them a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the greenness, through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest trees spaciously clustered and where they would find one of the quietest places. A bench had been placed, long ago, beneath a great oak that helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude and figure a bosky horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and the low sun made a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade; Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as, over her charming bare head, she now handled it, gave, with the big straw hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was “sequestered”—they had praised it for that together, before, and liked the word; and after they had begun to linger there they could have smiled (if they hadn’t been really too serious, and if the question hadn’t so soon ceased to matter), over the probable wonder of the others as to what would have become of them.

The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgment of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the superstition of not “hurting,” but might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment, whether that was to be, after all, the last word of their conscientious development. Certain it was, at all events, that, in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs. Rance, the attendance at tea, just in the right place on the west terrace, might perfectly comprise the four or five persons—among them the very pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted, announced and now brought—from the couple of other houses near enough, one of these the minor residence Of their proprietor, established, thriftily, while he hired out his ancestral home, within sight and sense of his profit. It was not less certain, either, that, for once in a way, the group in question must all take the case as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr. Verver and his daughter, to see their reputation for a decent friendliness, through any momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo’s possible funny Italian anxiety; Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware, conveniently amenable to this friend’s explanations, beguilements, reassurances, and perhaps in fact rather more than less dependent on them as his new life—since that was his own name for it—opened out. It was no secret to Maggie—it was indeed positively a public joke for her—that she couldn’t explain as Mrs. Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition of this luxury had to be met. He didn’t seem to want them as yet for use—rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed, beautiful, general, slightly indolent lack of more dissipated, or even just of more sophisticated, tastes.

However that might be, the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily recognised—and not least by herself—as filling in the intimate little circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she had taken, with her kind, melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of leisure. It naturally led her position in the household, as, she called it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form of protest. She was there to keep him quiet—it was Amerigo’s own description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit. Fanny herself limited indeed, she minimised, her office; you didn’t need a jailor, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon. This was not an animal to be controlled—it was an animal to be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was educative—which Maggie was so aware that she herself, inevitably, wasn’t; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge of was his mere intelligence. This left, goodness knew, plenty of different calls for Maggie to meet—in a case in which so much pink ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature. What it all amounted to, at any rate, was that Mrs. Assingham would be keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with them there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of people, strange English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so little as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she hadn’t yet learned to see him as meeting such exposure in her absence. How did he move and talk, how above all did he, or how WOULD he, look—he who, with his so nobly handsome face, could look such wonderful things—in case of being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder? There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie herself had her own odd way—which didn’t moreover the least irritate him—of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused himself with declaring, this love of chinoiseries; but she actually this evening didn’t mind—he might deal with her Chinese as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs. Assingham’s, a word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory which we have just found in our path. It wasn’t that the Princess could be indebted to another person, even to so clever a one as this friend, for seeing anything in her husband that she mightn’t see unaided; but she had ever, hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude any better description of a felt truth than her little limits—terribly marked, she knew, in the direction of saying the right things—enabled her to make. Thus it was, at any rate, that she was able to live more or less in the light of the fact expressed so lucidly by their common comforter—the fact that the Prince was saving up, for some very mysterious but very fine eventual purpose, all the wisdom, all the answers to his questions, all the impressions and generalisations, he gathered; putting them away and packing them down because he wanted his great gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to let it off. He wanted first to make sure of the whole of the subject that was unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he had collected would find their use. He knew what he was about—-trust him at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big noise. And Mrs. Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was about. It was the happy form of this assurance that had remained with Maggie; it could always come in for her that Amerigo knew what he was about. He might at moments seem vague, seem absent, seem even bored: this when, away from her father, with whom it was impossible for him to appear anything but respectfully occupied, he let his native gaiety go in outbreaks of song, or even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at times reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills, which she had, at the time of their engagement, seen and yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as the “perched” place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use—all without counting the cloud of mortgages that had, from far back, buried them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius, and actually making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow excavation. Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices—sacrifices resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr. Verver—necessary for winning them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife meanwhile—one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay about—was that she never admired him so much, or so found him heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute HER substance. There was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the license and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established for each: she going so far as to put it that, even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it, charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart, at these light moments, that his course wouldn’t then be difficult, inasmuch as, so simply constituted as he was on all the precious question—and why should he be ashamed of it?—he knew but one way with the fair. They had to be fair—and he was fastidious and particular, his standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation with them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary, properly human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His interest, she always answered, happened not to be “plain,” and plainness, all round, had little to do with the matter, which was marked, on the contrary, by the richest variety of colour; but the working basis, at all events, had been settled—the Miss Maddocks of life been assured of their importance for him. How conveniently assured Maggie—to take him too into the joke—had more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since it fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This was one of her rules-full as she was of little rules, considerations, provisions. There were things she of course couldn’t tell him, in so many words, about Amerigo and herself, and about their happiness and their union and their deepest depths—and there were other things she needn’t; but there were also those that were both true and amusing, both communicable and real, and of these, with her so conscious, so delicately cultivated scheme of conduct as a daughter, she could make her profit at will. A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on most of the elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it involved, this serenity, innumerable complete assumptions: since so ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spreading about them, of confidence solidly supported, might have suggested for persons of poorer pitch the very insolence of facility. Still, they weren’t insolent—THEY weren’t, our pair could reflect; they were only blissful and grateful and personally modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, when great things were great, when good things were good, and when safe things were safe, and not, therefore, placed below their fortune by timidity which would have been as bad as being below it by impudence. Worthy of it as they were, and as each appears, under our last possible analysis, to have wished to make the other feel that they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity. Their rightness, the justification of everything—something they so felt the pulse of—sat there with them; but they might have been asking themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but mightn’t the moment possibly count for them—or count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all before them—as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn’t always meet ALL contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt—the expression of the fine pang determined in her a few hours before—rise after a time to her lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion’s intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all. “What is it, after all, that they want to do to you?” “They” were for the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs. Rance was the symbol, and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what she meant. What she meant—when once she had spoken—could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: “What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered.” He accepted equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it wouldn’t so much matter if he hadn’t been so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have had to wait long—if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was a way. “Since you ARE an irresistible youth, we’ve got to face it. That, somehow, is what that woman has made me feel. There’ll be others.”

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him. “Yes, there’ll be others. But you’ll see me through.”

She hesitated. “Do you mean if you give in?”

“Oh no. Through my holding out.”

Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness. “Why SHOULD you hold out forever?”

He gave, none the less, no start—and this as from the habit of taking anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious. But it was quite written upon him too, for that matter, that holding out wouldn’t be, so very completely, his natural, or at any rate his acquired, form. His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long time—for a man so greatly beset. This appearance, that is, spoke but little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses—and all in spite of his being a small, spare, slightly stale person, deprived of the general prerogative of presence. It was not by mass or weight or vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail. There was even something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the footlights. He would have figured less than anything the stage-manager or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be, at the best, the financial “backer,” watching his interests from the wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry. Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed propriety of his greater stoutness. He had lost early in life much of his crisp, closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a small neat beard, too compact to be called “full,” though worn equally, as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and chin. His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was CLEAR, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver’s eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was “big” even when restricted to stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor’s vision out or most opened themselves to your own. Whatever you might feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them. If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend’s dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black “cut away” coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white—the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a sprigged blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waistcoat. “Should you really,” he now asked, “like me to marry?” He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it MIGHT be an idea; which, for that matter, he would be ready to carry out should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth, in the connection, to utter. “What I feel is that there is somehow something that used to be right and that I’ve made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn’t married, and that you didn’t seem to want to. It used also”—she continued to make out “to seem easy for the question not to come up. That’s what I’ve made different. It does come up. It WILL come up.”

“You don’t think I can keep it down?” Mr. Verver’s tone was cheerfully pensive.

“Well, I’ve given you, by MY move, all the trouble of having to.”

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. “I guess I don’t feel as if you had ‘moved’ very far. You’ve only moved next door.”

“Well,” she continued, “I don’t feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I’ve made the difference for you, I must think of the difference.”

“Then what, darling,” he indulgently asked, “DO you think?”

“That’s just what I don’t yet know. But I must find out. We must think together—as we’ve always thought. What I mean,” she went on after a moment, “is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you.”

“An alternative to what?”

“Well, to your simply missing what you’ve lost—without anything being done about it.”

“But what HAVE I lost?”

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. “Well, whatever it was that, BEFORE, kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I’m married to some one else you’re, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to THEM.”

“Isn’t it enough of a reason,” he mildly inquired, “that I don’t want to be?”

“It’s enough of a reason, yes. But to BE enough of a reason it has to be too much of a trouble. I mean FOR you. It has to be too much of a fight. You ask me what you’ve lost,” Maggie continued to explain. “The not having to take the trouble and to make the fight—that’s what you’ve lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were—because I was just as I was—that’s what you miss.”

“So that you think,” her father presently said, “that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?”

The detached tone of it—detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate—was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short, light laugh. “Well, what I don’t want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn’t understand. I SHOULD understand. That’s all,” said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. “You don’t go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don’t like?”

“Ah, father,” she sighed, “you know how far I go—how far I COULD go. But I only wish that if you ever SHOULD like anybody, you may never doubt of my feeling how I’ve brought you to it. You’ll always know that I know that it’s my fault.”

“You mean,” he went on in his contemplative way, “that it will be you who’ll take the consequences?”

Maggie just considered. “I’ll leave you all the good ones, but I’ll take the bad.”

“Well, that’s handsome.” He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly. “It’s about all I could expect of you. So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square. I’ll let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up. But am I to understand meanwhile,” he soon went on, “that, ready as you are to see me through my collapse, you’re not ready, or not AS ready, to see me through my resistance? I’ve got to be a regular martyr before you’ll be inspired?”

She demurred at his way of putting it. “Why, if you like it, you know, it won’t BE a collapse.”

“Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don’t WANT to like it. That is,” he amended, “unless I feel surer I do than appears very probable. I don’t want to have to THINK I like it in a case when I really shan’t. I’ve had to do that in some cases,” he confessed—“when it has been a question of other things. I don’t want,” he wound up, “to be MADE to make a mistake.”

“Ah, but it’s too dreadful,” she returned, “that you should even have to FEAR—or just nervously to dream—that you may be. What does that show, after all,” she asked, “but that you do really, well within, feel a want? What does it show but that you’re truly susceptible?”

“Well, it may show that”—he defended himself against nothing. “But it shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we’re leading now, numerous and formidable.”

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which, however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular. “Do you feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?”

“Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing. I think she’d do anything.”

“Oh well, I’d help you,” the Princess said with decision, “as against HER—if that’s all you require. It’s too funny,” she went on before he again spoke, “that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I’m bound to say, too funny. The thing is,” Maggie developed under this impression, “that I don’t think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don’t at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I’m sure, to Fanny Assingham.”

Mr. Verver-as if from due regard for these persons—considered a little. “What life would they like us to lead?”

“Oh, it’s not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together. SHE thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater.”

“Greater—?” He echoed it vaguely. “And Amerigo too, you say?”

“Ah yes"-her reply was prompt “but Amerigo doesn’t mind. He doesn’t care, I mean, what we do. It’s for us, he considers, to see things exactly as we wish. Fanny herself,” Maggie pursued, “thinks he’s magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for accepting the ‘social limitations’ of our life, for not missing what we don’t give him.”

Mr. Verver attended. “Then if he doesn’t miss it his magnificence is easy.”

“It IS easy-that’s exactly what I think. If there were things he DID miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He COULD be a Hero—he WILL be one if it’s ever necessary. But it will be about something better than our dreariness. I know,” the Princess declared, “where he’s magnificent.” And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as she had begun. “We’re not, all the same, committed to anything stupid. If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we CAN be grander. There’s nothing to prevent.”

“Is it a strict moral obligation?” Adam Verver inquired.

“No—it’s for the amusement.”

“For whose? For Fanny’s own?”

“For everyone’s—though I dare say Fanny’s would be a large part.” She hesitated; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring out, which she finally produced. “For yours in particular, say—if you go into the question.” She even bravely followed it up. “I haven’t really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done for you than is done.”

Mr. Verver uttered an odd vague sound. “Don’t you think a good deal is done when you come out and talk to me this way?”

“Ah,” said his daughter, smiling at him, “we make too much of that!” And then to explain: “That’s good, and it’s natural—but it isn’t great. We forget that we’re as free as air.”

“Well, THAT’S great,” Mr. Verver pleaded. “Great if we act on it. Not if we don’t.”

She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that belied a light tone. “What do you want,” he demanded, “to do to me?” And he added, as she didn’t say: “You’ve got something in your mind.” It had come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to be vague in him. There had been from the first something in her anxious eyes, in the way she occasionally lost herself, that it would perfectly explain. He was therefore now quite sure.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve.”

She had a silence that made him right. “Well, when I tell you you’ll understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes—it HAS been in my mind. I’ve been asking myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you if you could stand just now another woman.”

It relieved him a little, yet the beautiful consideration of her manner made it in a degree portentous. “Stand one—?”

“Well, mind her coming.”

He stared—then he laughed. “It depends on who she is.”

“There—you see! I’ve at all events been thinking whether you’d take this particular person but as a worry the more. Whether, that is, you’d go so far with her in your notion of having to be kind.”

He gave at this the quickest shake to his foot. How far would she go in HER notion of it.

“Well,” his daughter returned, “you know how far, in a general way, Charlotte Stant goes.”

“Charlotte? Is SHE coming?”

“She writes me, practically, that she’d like to if we’re so good as to ask her.”

Mr. Verver continued to gaze, but rather as if waiting for more. Then, as everything appeared to have come, his expression had a drop. If this was all it was simple. “Then why in the world not?”

Maggie’s face lighted anew, but it was now another light. “It isn’t a want of tact?”

“To ask her?”

“To propose it to you.”

“That I should ask her?”

He put the question as an effect of his remnant of vagueness, but this had also its own effect. Maggie wondered an instant; after which, as with a flush of recognition, she took it up. “It would be too beautiful if you WOULD!”

This, clearly, had not been her first idea—the chance of his words had prompted it. “Do you mean write to her myself?”

“Yes—it would be kind. It would be quite beautiful of you. That is, of course,” said Maggie, “if you sincerely CAN.”

He appeared to wonder an instant why he sincerely shouldn’t, and indeed, for that matter, where the question of sincerity came in. This virtue, between him and his daughter’s friend, had surely been taken for granted. “My dear child,” he returned, “I don’t think I’m afraid of Charlotte.”

“Well, that’s just what it’s lovely to have from you. From the moment you’re NOT—the least little bit—I’ll immediately invite her.”

“But where in the world is she?” He spoke as if he had not thought of Charlotte, nor so much as heard her name pronounced, for a very long time. He quite in fact amicably, almost amusedly, woke up to her.

“She’s in Brittany, at a little bathing-place, with some people I don’t know. She’s always with people, poor dear—she rather has to be; even when, as is sometimes the case; they’re people she doesn’t immensely like.”

“Well, I guess she likes US,” said Adam Verver. “Yes—fortunately she likes us. And if I wasn’t afraid of spoiling it for you,” Maggie added, “I’d even mention that you’re not the one of our number she likes least.”

“Why should that spoil it for me?”

“Oh, my dear, you know. What else have we been talking about? It costs you so much to be liked. That’s why I hesitated to tell you of my letter.”

He stared a moment—as if the subject had suddenly grown out of recognition. “But Charlotte—on other visits—never used to cost me anything.”

“No—only her ‘keep,’” Maggie smiled.

“Then I don’t think I mind her keep—if that’s all.” The Princess, however, it was clear, wished to be thoroughly conscientious. “Well, it may not be quite all. If I think of its being pleasant to have her, it’s because she WILL make a difference.”

“Well, what’s the harm in that if it’s but a difference for the better?”

“Ah then—there you are!” And the Princess showed in her smile her small triumphant wisdom. “If you acknowledge a possible difference for the better we’re not, after all, so tremendously right as we are. I mean we’re not—as satisfied and amused. We do see there are ways of being grander.”

“But will Charlotte Stant,” her father asked with surprise, “make us grander?”

Maggie, on this, looking at him well, had a remarkable reply. “Yes, I think. Really grander.”

He thought; for if this was a sudden opening he wished but the more to meet it. “Because she’s so handsome?”

“No, father.” And the Princess was almost solemn. “Because she’s so great.”

“Great—?”

“Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life.”

“So?” Mr. Verver echoed. “What has she done—in life?”

“Well, she has been brave and bright,” said Maggie. “That mayn’t sound like much, but she has been so in the face of things that might well have made it too difficult for many other girls. She hasn’t a creature in the world really—that is nearly—belonging to her. Only acquaintances who, in all sorts of ways, make use of her, and distant relations who are so afraid she’ll make use of THEM that they seldom let her look at them.”

Mr. Verver was struck—and, as usual, to some purpose. “If we get her here to improve us don’t we too then make use of her?”

It pulled the Princess up, however, but an instant. “We’re old, old friends—we do her good too. I should always, even at the worst—speaking for myself—admire her still more than I used her.”

“I see. That always does good.”

Maggie hesitated. “Certainly—she knows it. She knows, I mean, how great I think her courage and her cleverness. She’s not afraid—not of anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she trembled for her life. And then she’s INTERESTING—which plenty of other people with plenty of other merits never are a bit.” In which fine flicker of vision the truth widened to the Princess’s view. “I myself of course don’t take liberties, but then I do, always, by nature, tremble for my life. That’s the way I live.”

“Oh I say, love!” her father vaguely murmured.

“Yes, I live in terror,” she insisted. “I’m a small creeping thing.”

“You’ll not persuade me that you’re not as good as Charlotte Stant,” he still placidly enough remarked.

“I may be as good, but I’m not so great—and that’s what we’re talking about. She has a great imagination. She has, in every way, a great attitude. She has above all a great conscience.” More perhaps than ever in her life before Maggie addressed her father at this moment with a shade of the absolute in her tone. She had never come so near telling him what he should take it from her to believe. “She has only twopence in the world—but that has nothing to do with it. Or rather indeed”—she quickly corrected herself—“it has everything. For she doesn’t care. I never saw her do anything but laugh at her poverty. Her life has been harder than anyone knows.”

It was moreover as if, thus unprecedentedly positive, his child had an effect upon him that Mr. Verver really felt as a new thing. “Why then haven’t you told me about her before?”

“Well, haven’t we always known—?”

“I should have thought,” he submitted, “that we had already pretty well sized her up.”

“Certainly—we long ago quite took her for granted. But things change, with time, and I seem to know that, after this interval, I’m going to like her better than ever. I’ve lived more myself, I’m older, and one judges better. Yes, I’m going to see in Charlotte,” said the Princess—and speaking now as with high and free expectation—“more than I’ve ever seen.”

“Then I’ll try to do so too. She WAS”—it came back to Mr. Verver more—“the one of your friends I thought the best for you.”

His companion, however, was so launched in her permitted liberty of appreciation that she for the moment scarce heard him. She was lost in the case she made out, the vision of the different ways in which Charlotte had distinguished herself.

“She would have liked for instance—I’m sure she would have liked extremely—to marry; and nothing in general is more ridiculous, even when it has been pathetic, than a woman who has tried and has not been able.”

It had all Mr. Verver’s attention. “She has ‘tried’—?”

“She has seen cases where she would have liked to.”

“But she has not been able?”

“Well, there are more cases, in Europe, in which it doesn’t come to girls who are poor than in which it does come to them. Especially,” said Maggie with her continued competence, “when they’re Americans.”

Well, her father now met her, and met her cheerfully, on all sides. “Unless you mean,” he suggested, “that when the girls are American there are more cases in which it comes to the rich than to the poor.”

She looked at him good-humouredly. “That may be—but I’m not going to be smothered in MY case. It ought to make me—if I were in danger of being a fool—all the nicer to people like Charlotte. It’s not hard for ME,” she practically explained, “not to be ridiculous—unless in a very different way. I might easily be ridiculous, I suppose, by behaving as if I thought I had done a great thing. Charlotte, at any rate, has done nothing, and anyone can see it, and see also that it’s rather strange; and yet no one—no one not awfully presumptuous or offensive would like, or would dare, to treat her, just as she is, as anything but quite RIGHT. That’s what it is to have something about you that carries things off.”

Mr. Verver’s silence, on this, could only be a sign that she had caused her story to interest him; though the sign when he spoke was perhaps even sharper. “And is it also what you mean by Charlotte’s being ‘great’?”

“Well,” said Maggie, “it’s one of her ways. But she has many.”

Again for a little her father considered. “And who is it she has tried to marry?”

Maggie, on her side as well, waited as if to bring it out with effect; but she after a minute either renounced or encountered an obstacle. “I’m afraid I’m not sure.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Well, I don’t KNOW”—and, qualifying again, she was earnestly emphatic. “I only make it out for myself.”

“But you must make it out about someone in particular.”

She had another pause. “I don’t think I want even for myself to put names and times, to pull away any veil. I’ve an idea there has been, more than once, somebody I’m not acquainted with—and needn’t be or want to be. In any case it’s all over, and, beyond giving her credit for everything, it’s none of my business.”

Mr. Verver deferred, yet he discriminated. “I don’t see how you can give credit without knowing the facts.”

“Can’t I give it—generally—for dignity? Dignity, I mean, in misfortune.”

“You’ve got to postulate the misfortune first.”

“Well,” said Maggie, “I can do that. Isn’t it always a misfortune to be—when you’re so fine—so wasted? And yet,” she went on, “not to wail about it, not to look even as if you knew it?”

Mr. Verver seemed at first to face this as a large question, and then, after a little, solicited by another view, to let the appeal drop. “Well, she mustn’t be wasted. We won’t at least have waste.”

It produced in Maggie’s face another gratitude. “Then, dear sir, that’s all I want.”

And it would apparently have settled their question and ended their talk if her father had not, after a little, shown the disposition to revert. “How many times are you supposing that she has tried?”

Once more, at this, and as if she hadn’t been, couldn’t be, hated to be, in such delicate matters, literal, she was moved to attenuate. “Oh, I don’t say she absolutely ever TRIED—!”

He looked perplexed. “But if she has so absolutely failed, what then had she done?”

“She has suffered—she has done that.” And the Princess added: “She has loved—and she has lost.”

Mr. Verver, however, still wondered. “But how many times.”

Maggie hesitated, but it cleared up. “Once is enough. Enough, that is, for one to be kind to her.”

Her father listened, yet not challenging—only as with a need of some basis on which, under these new lights, his bounty could be firm. “But has she told you nothing?”

“Ah, thank goodness, no!”

He stared. “Then don’t young women tell?”

“Because, you mean, it’s just what they’re supposed to do?” She looked at him, flushed again now; with which, after another hesitation, “Do young men tell?” she asked.

He gave a short laugh. “How do I know, my dear, what young men do?”

“Then how do I know, father, what vulgar girls do?”

“I see—I see,” he quickly returned.

But she spoke the next moment as if she might, odiously, have been sharp. “What happens at least is that where there’s a great deal of pride there’s a great deal of silence. I don’t know, I admit, what I should do if I were lonely and sore—for what sorrow, to speak of, have I ever had in my life? I don’t know even if I’m proud—it seems to me the question has never come up for me.”

“Oh, I guess you’re proud, Mag,” her father cheerfully interposed. “I mean I guess you’re proud enough.”

“Well then, I hope I’m humble enough too. I might, at all events, for all I know, be abject under a blow. How can I tell? Do you realise, father, that I’ve never had the least blow?”

He gave her a long, quiet look. “Who SHOULD realise if I don’t?”

“Well, you’ll realise when I HAVE one!” she exclaimed with a short laugh that resembled, as for good reasons, his own of a minute before. “I wouldn’t in any case have let her tell me what would have been dreadful to me. For such wounds and shames are dreadful: at least,” she added, catching herself up, “I suppose they are; for what, as I say, do I know of them? I don’t WANT to know!”—she spoke quite with vehemence. “There are things that are sacred whether they’re joys or pains. But one can always, for safety, be kind,” she kept on; “one feels when that’s right.”

She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another—the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, “generalised” in its grace, a figure with which his human connection was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, something shyly mythological and nymphlike. The trick, he was not uncomplacently aware, was mainly of his own mind; it came from his caring for precious vases only less than for precious daughters. And what was more to the point still, it often operated while he was quite at the same time conscious that Maggie had been described, even in her prettiness, as “prim”—Mrs. Rance herself had enthusiastically used the word of her; while he remembered that when once she had been told before him, familiarly, that she resembled a nun, she had replied that she was delighted to hear it and would certainly try to; while also, finally, it was present to him that, discreetly heedless, thanks to her long association with nobleness in art, to the leaps and bounds of fashion, she brought her hair down very straight and flat over her temples, in the constant manner of her mother, who had not been a bit mythological. Nymphs and nuns were certainly separate types, but Mr. Verver, when he really amused himself, let consistency go. The play of vision was at all events so rooted in him that he could receive impressions of sense even while positively thinking. He was positively thinking while Maggie stood there, and it led for him to yet another question—which in its turn led to others still. “Do you regard the condition as hers then that you spoke of a minute ago?”

“The condition—?”

“Why that of having loved so intensely that she’s, as you say, ‘beyond everything’?”

Maggie had scarcely to reflect—her answer was so prompt. “Oh no. She’s beyond nothing. For she has had nothing.”

“I see. You must have had things to be them. It’s a kind of law of perspective.”

Maggie didn’t know about the law, but she continued definite. “She’s not, for example, beyond help.”

“Oh well then, she shall have all we can give her. I’ll write to her,” he said, “with pleasure.”

“Angel!” she answered as she gaily and tenderly looked at him.

True as this might be, however, there was one thing more—he was an angel with a human curiosity. “Has she told you she likes me much?”

“Certainly she has told me—but I won’t pamper you. Let it be enough for you it has always been one of my reasons for liking HER.”

“Then she’s indeed not beyond everything,” Mr. Verver more or less humorously observed.

“Oh it isn’t, thank goodness, that she’s in love with you. It’s not, as I told you at first, the sort of thing for you to fear.”

He had spoken with cheer, but it appeared to drop before this reassurance, as if the latter overdid his alarm, and that should be corrected. “Oh, my dear, I’ve always thought of her as a little girl.”

“Ah, she’s not a little girl,” said the Princess.

“Then I’ll write to her as a brilliant woman.”

“It’s exactly what she is.”

Mr. Verver had got up as he spoke, and for a little, before retracing their steps, they stood looking at each other as if they had really arranged something. They had come out together for themselves, but it had produced something more. What it had produced was in fact expressed by the words with which he met his companion’s last emphasis. “Well, she has a famous friend in you, Princess.”

Maggie took this in—it was too plain for a protest. “Do you know what I’m really thinking of?” she asked.

He wondered, with her eyes on him—eyes of contentment at her freedom now to talk; and he wasn’t such a fool, he presently showed, as not, suddenly, to arrive at it. “Why, of your finding her at last yourself a husband.”

“Good for YOU!” Maggie smiled. “But it will take,” she added, “some looking.”

“Then let me look right here with you,” her father said as they walked on.

Mrs. Assingham and the Colonel, quitting Fawns before the end of September, had come back later on; and now, a couple of weeks after, they were again interrupting their stay, but this time with the question of their return left to depend, on matters that were rather hinted at than importunately named. The Lutches and Mrs. Rance had also, by the action of Charlotte Stant’s arrival, ceased to linger, though with hopes and theories, as to some promptitude of renewal, of which the lively expression, awakening the echoes of the great stone-paved, oak-panelled, galleried hall that was not the least interesting feature of the place, seemed still a property of the air. It was on this admirable spot that, before her October afternoon had waned, Fanny Assingham spent with her easy host a few moments which led to her announcing her own and her husband’s final secession, at the same time as they tempted her to point the moral of all vain reverberations. The double door of the house stood open to an effect of hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful, windless, waiting, golden hour, under the influence of which Adam Verver met his genial friend as she came to drop into the post-box with her own hand a thick sheaf of letters. They presently thereafter left the house together and drew out half-an-hour on the terrace in a manner they were to revert to in thought, later on, as that of persons who really had been taking leave of each other at a parting of the ways. He traced his impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she had begun by using about Charlotte Stant. She simply “cleared them out”—those had been the three words, thrown off in reference to the general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in, the “halcyon” days the full beauty of which had appeared to shine out for them after Charlotte’s arrival. For it was during these days that Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches had been observed to be gathering themselves for departure, and it was with that difference made that the sense of the whole situation showed most fair—the sense of how right they had been to engage for so ample a residence, and of all the pleasure so fruity an autumn there could hold in its lap. This was what had occurred, that their lesson had been learned; and what Mrs. Assingham had dwelt upon was that without Charlotte it would have been learned but half. It would certainly not have been taught by Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches if these ladies had remained with them as long as at one time seemed probable. Charlotte’s light intervention had thus become a cause, operating covertly but none the less actively, and Fanny Assingham’s speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within him, fairly to startle him, as the indication of something irresistible. He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked to recover the sight—little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all entertained for a stiffish series of days. She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was happening—happening, that is, as a result of her influence. “Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,” Mrs. Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie—the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend—an odd little taste, as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing, so to speak, what COULD be said about her: almost as it her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs. Assingham, it struck him, applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young friend—so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie’s as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions of his having paternally lumped the two children together in the recommendation that they shouldn’t make too much noise nor eat too much jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte’s prompt influence she had not been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent visitors. “I felt in fact, privately, so sorry for them, that I kept my impression to myself while they were here—wishing not to put the rest of you on the scent; neither Maggie, nor the Prince, nor yourself, nor even Charlotte HERself, if you didn’t happen to notice. Since you didn’t, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I’m not—I followed it all. One SAW the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison’s only a little awkward, for I don’t in the least mean that Charlotte was consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them—but she didn’t know it.”

“Ah, she didn’t know it?” Mr. Verver had asked with interest.

“Well, I THINK she didn’t”—Mrs. Assingham had to admit that she hadn’t pressingly sounded her. “I don’t pretend to be sure, in every connection, of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t, certainly, like to make people suffer—not, in general, as is the case with so many of us, even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with her. She likes, that is—as all pleasant people do—to be liked.”

“Ah, she likes to be liked?” her companion had gone on.

“She did, at the same time, no doubt, want to help us—to put us at our ease. That is she wanted to put you—and to put Maggie about you. So far as that went she had a plan. But it was only AFTER—it was not before, I really believe—that she saw how effectively she could work.”

Again, as Mr. Verver felt, he must have taken it up. “Ah, she wanted to help us?—wanted to help ME?”

“Why,” Mrs. Assingham asked after an instant, “should it surprise you?”

He just thought. “Oh, it doesn’t!”

“She saw, of course, as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we all were. She didn’t need each of us to go, by appointment, to her room at night, or take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No doubt even she was rather impatient.”

“OF the poor things?” Mr. Verver had here inquired while he waited.

“Well, of your not yourselves being so—and of YOUR not in particular. I haven’t the least doubt in the world, par exemple, that she thinks you too meek.”

“Oh, she thinks me too meek?”

“And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in. All she had to do, after all, was to be nice to you.”

“To—a—ME?” said Adam Verver.

He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. “To you and to every one. She had only to be what she is—and to be it all round. If she’s charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she ‘acted’-as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them—the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and SO other, than themselves, COULD be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it’s she who’s the real thing.”

“Ah, it’s she who’s the real thing?” As HE had not hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so, doubtless, he had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal. “I see, I see”—he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was. “And what would it be—a—definitely that you understand by that?”

She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. “Why, exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will.”

“Oh—of course never?”

It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as “real”—just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter’s marriage. The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great “finds”—continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter’s betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached, and as to which he had made out, contentedly, that further news was to be obtained from a certain Mr. Gutermann-Seuss of Brighton. It was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in spite of the general tendency of the “devouring element” to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires. Adam Verver had in other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own little book, without having, for a day, raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those fortunate bachelors, or other gentlemen of pleasure, who so manage their entertainment of compromising company that even the austerest housekeeper, occupied and competent below-stairs, never feels obliged to give warning.

That figure has, however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he found himself practically alone at Fawns with his young friend; Amerigo and Maggie having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going abroad for a month, since his amusement was now scarce less happily assured than his security. An impulse eminently natural had stirred within the Prince; his life, as for some time established, was deliciously dull, and thereby, on the whole, what he best liked; but a small gust of yearning had swept over him, and Maggie repeated to her father, with infinite admiration, the pretty terms in which, after it had lasted a little, he had described to her this experience. He called it a “serenade,” a low music that, outside one of the windows of the sleeping house, disturbed his rest at night. Timid as it was, and plaintive, he yet couldn’t close his eyes for it, and when finally, rising on tiptoe, he had looked out, he had recognised in the figure below with a mandolin, all duskily draped in her grace, the raised appealing eyes and the one irresistible voice of the ever-to-be-loved Italy. Sooner or later, that way, one had to listen; it was a hovering, haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim, pathetic shade crying out to be comforted. For this there was obviously but one way—as there were doubtless also many words for the simple fact that so prime a Roman had a fancy for again seeing Rome. They would accordingly—hadn’t they better?—go for a little; Maggie meanwhile making the too-absurdly artful point with her father, so that he repeated it, in his amusement, to Charlotte Stant, to whom he was by this time conscious of addressing many remarks, that it was absolutely, when she came to think, the first thing Amerigo had ever asked of her. “She doesn’t count of course his having asked of her to marry him”— this was Mr. Verver’s indulgent criticism; but he found Charlotte, equally touched by the ingenuous Maggie, in easy agreement with him over the question. If the Prince had asked something of his wife every day in the year, this would be still no reason why the poor dear man should not, in a beautiful fit of homesickness, revisit, without reproach, his native country.

What his father-in-law frankly counselled was that the reasonable, the really too reasonable, pair should, while they were about it, take three or four weeks of Paris as well—Paris being always, for Mr. Verver, in any stress of sympathy, a suggestion that rose of itself to the lips. If they would only do that, on their way back, or however they preferred it, Charlotte and he would go over to join them there for a small look—though even then, assuredly, as he had it at heart to add, not in the least because they should have found themselves bored at being left together. The fate of this last proposal indeed was that it reeled, for the moment, under an assault of destructive analysis from Maggie, who—having, as she granted, to choose between being an unnatural daughter or an unnatural mother, and “electing” for the former—wanted to know what would become of the Principino if the house were cleared of everyone but the servants. Her question had fairly resounded, but it had afterwards, like many of her questions, dropped still more effectively than it had risen: the highest moral of the matter being, before the couple took their departure, that Mrs. Noble and Dr. Brady must mount unchallenged guard over the august little crib. If she hadn’t supremely believed in the majestic value of the nurse, whose experience was in itself the amplest of pillows, just as her attention was a spreading canopy from which precedent and reminiscence dropped as thickly as parted curtains—if she hadn’t been able to rest in this confidence she would fairly have sent her husband on his journey without her. In the same manner, if the sweetest—for it was so she qualified him—of little country doctors hadn’t proved to her his wisdom by rendering irresistible, especially on rainy days and in direct proportion to the frequency of his calls, adapted to all weathers, that she should converse with him for hours over causes and consequences, over what he had found to answer with his little five at home, she would have drawn scant support from the presence of a mere grandfather and a mere brilliant friend. These persons, accordingly, her own predominance having thus, for the time, given way, could carry with a certain ease, and above all with mutual aid, their consciousness of a charge. So far as their office weighed they could help each other with it—which was in fact to become, as Mrs. Noble herself loomed larger for them, not a little of a relief and a diversion.

Mr. Verver met his young friend, at certain hours, in the day-nursery, very much as he had regularly met the child’s fond mother—Charlotte having, as she clearly considered, given Maggie equal pledges and desiring never to fail of the last word for the daily letter she had promised to write. She wrote with high fidelity, she let her companion know, and the effect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself didn’t write. The reason of this was partly that Charlotte “told all about him”—which she also let him know she did—and partly that he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was generally, quite systematically, eased and, as they said, “done” for. Committed, as it were, to this charming and clever young woman, who, by becoming for him a domestic resource, had become for him practically a new person—and committed, especially, in his own house, which somehow made his sense of it a deeper thing—he took an interest in seeing how far the connection could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and in thus putting to the test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said, at the last, about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one, though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been, so usefully, for Fanny—no Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help her to be felt, according to Fanny’s diagnosis, as real. She was real, decidedly, from other causes, and Mr. Verver grew in time even a little amused at the amount of machinery Mrs. Assingham had seemed to see needed for pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than during those—at which we have just glanced—when Mrs. Noble made them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs.

Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his “favourite things”—and he had many favourites—with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice. She could play anything, she could play everything—always shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague measure, very much as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong, and with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations—while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest. It was a manner of passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air, at the end, none the less, before they separated, had a way of seeming full of the echoes of talk. They separated, in the hushed house, not quite easily, yet not quite awkwardly either, with tapers that twinkled in the large dark spaces, and for the most part so late that the last solemn servant had been dismissed for the night.

Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other voices—a word or two that affected our friend even at the moment, and rather oddly, as louder and rounder than any previous sound; and then he had lingered, under pretext of an opened window to be made secure, after taking leave of his companion in the hall and watching her glimmer away up the staircase. He had for himself another impulse than to go to bed; picking up a hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape and lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace through one of the long drawing-room windows and moved to and fro there for an hour beneath the sharp autumn stars. It was where he had walked in the afternoon sun with Fanny Assingham, and the sense of that other hour, the sense of the suggestive woman herself, was before him again as, in spite of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it had not yet been. He thought, in a loose, an almost agitated order, of many things; the power that was in them to agitate having been part of his conviction that he should not soon sleep. He truly felt for a while that he should never sleep again till something had come to him; some light, some idea, some mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but had been till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. “Can you really then come if we start early?”—that was practically all he had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And “Why in the world not, when I’ve nothing else to do, and should, besides, so immensely like it?”—this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene, even of the littlest, at all—though he perhaps didn’t quite know why something like the menace of one hadn’t proceeded from her stopping half-way upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge. There hovered about him, at all events, while he walked, appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor yet so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory, incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him, up to now, that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, as through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakably acquired it, through the young man’s having amiably passed it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was mistress in an equal degree of the regulated, the developed art of placing him high in the scale of importance. That was even for his own thought a clumsy way of expressing the element of similarity in the agreeable effect they each produced on him, and it held him for a little only because this coincidence in their felicity caused him vaguely to connect or associate them in the matter of tradition, training, tact, or whatever else one might call it. It might almost have been—if such a link between them was to be imagined—that Amerigo had, a little, “coached” or incited their young friend, or perhaps rather that she had simply, as one of the signs of the general perfection Fanny Assingham commended in her, profited by observing, during her short opportunity before the start of the travellers, the pleasant application by the Prince of his personal system. He might wonder what exactly it was that they so resembled each other in treating him like—from what noble and propagated convention, in cases in which the exquisite “importance” was to be neither too grossly attributed nor too grossly denied, they had taken their specific lesson; but the difficulty was here of course that one could really never know—couldn’t know without having been one’s self a personage; whether a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a General, or just a beautiful Author.

Before such a question, as before several others when they recurred, he would come to a pause, leaning his arms on the old parapet and losing himself in a far excursion. He had as to so many of the matters in hand a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out, in his unrest, for some idea, lurking in the vast freshness of the night, at the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion, and so, spreading beneath him, make him feel that he floated. What he kept finding himself return to, disturbingly enough, was the reflection, deeper than anything else, that in forming a new and intimate tie he should in a manner abandon, or at the best signally relegate, his daughter. He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost her—as was indeed inevitable—by her own marriage; he should reduce to definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the best an inconvenience, that required some makeweight and deserved some amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that he should appear to adopt, in doing it, the sentiment, in fact the very conviction, entertained, and quite sufficiently expressed, by Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had suffered—putting it with extravagance—at her hands. If she put it with extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came—which she put with extravagance too—from her persistence, always, in thinking, feeling, talking about him, as young. He had had glimpses of moments when to hear her thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would have supposed the special edge of the wrong she had done him to consist in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself: it wouldn’t so much have mattered if he had been of common parental age. That he wasn’t, that he was just her extraordinary equal and contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace where he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as a vast expanse of discovery, a world that looked, so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had been a loud, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and, verily, an inordinate size. This hallucination, or whatever he might have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to leave him gasping. The gasp of admiration had by this time, however, lost itself in an intensity that quickly followed—the way the wonder of it, since wonder was in question, truly had been the strange DELAY of his vision. He had these several days groped and groped for an object that lay at his feet and as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking beyond. It had sat all the while at his hearth-stone, whence it now gazed up in his face.

Once he had recognised it there everything became coherent. The sharp point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his future to him, as a father, would be in his so managing that Maggie would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him. And it not only wouldn’t be decently humane, decently possible, not to make this relief easy to her—the idea shone upon him, more than that, as exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely confronted with the material way in which it might be met. The way in which it might be met was by his putting his child at peace, and the way to put her at peace was to provide for his future—that is for hers—by marriage, by a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute—what he hadn’t seen was what she could contribute TO. When it had all supremely cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend’s leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted. It wasn’t only moreover that the word, with a click, so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his remedy. Oh, if Charlotte didn’t accept him, of course the remedy would fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to be tried. And success would be great—that was his last throb—if the measure of relief effected for Maggie should at all prove to have been given by his own actual sense of felicity. He really didn’t know when in his life he had thought of anything happier. To think of it merely for himself would have been, even as he had just lately felt, even doing all justice to that condition—yes, impossible. But there was a grand difference in thinking of it for his child.

It was at Brighton, above all, that this difference came out; it was during the three wonderful days he spent there with Charlotte that he had acquainted himself further—though doubtless not even now quite completely—with the merits of his majestic scheme. And while, moreover, to begin with, he still but held his vision in place, steadying it fairly with his hands, as he had often steadied, for inspection, a precarious old pot or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favour, those independent of what he might himself contribute and that therefore, till he should “speak,” remained necessarily vague—that quantity, I say, struck him as positively multiplying, as putting on, in the fresh Brighton air and on the sunny Brighton front, a kind of tempting palpability. He liked, in this preliminary stage, to feel that he should be able to “speak” and that he would; the word itself being romantic, pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays where handsome and ardent young men, in uniforms, tights, cloaks, high-boots, had it, in soliloquies, ever on their lips; and the sense on the first day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second was over conduced already to make him say to his companion that they must spend more than their mere night or two. At his ease on the ground of what was before him he at all events definitely desired to be, and it was strongly his impression that he was proceeding step by step. He was acting—it kept coming back to that—not in the dark, but in the high golden morning; not in precipitation, flurry, fever, dangers these of the path of passion properly so called, but with the deliberation of a plan, a plan that might be a thing of less joy than a passion, but that probably would, in compensation for that loss, be found to have the essential property, to wear even the decent dignity, of reaching further and of providing for more contingencies. The season was, in local parlance, “on,” the elements were assembled; the big windy hotel, the draughty social hall, swarmed with “types,” in Charlotte’s constant phrase, and resounded with a din in which the wild music of gilded and befrogged bands, Croatian, Dalmatian, Carpathian, violently exotic and nostalgic, was distinguished as struggling against the perpetual popping of corks. Much of this would decidedly have disconcerted our friends if it hadn’t all happened, more preponderantly, to give them the brighter surprise. The noble privacy of Fawns had left them—had left Mr. Verver at least—with a little accumulated sum of tolerance to spend on the high pitch and high colour of the public sphere. Fawns, as it had been for him, and as Maggie and Fanny Assingham had both attested, was out of the world, whereas the scene actually about him, with the very sea a mere big booming medium for excursions and aquariums, affected him as so plump in the conscious centre that nothing could have been more complete for representing that pulse of life which they had come to unanimity at home on the subject of their advisedly not hereafter forgetting. The pulse of life was what Charlotte, in her way, at home, had lately reproduced, and there were positively current hours when it might have been open to her companion to feel himself again indebted to her for introductions. He had “brought” her, to put it crudely, but it was almost as if she were herself, in her greater gaiety, her livelier curiosity and intensity, her readier, happier irony, taking him about and showing him the place. No one, really, when he came to think, had ever taken him about before—it had always been he, of old, who took others and who in particular took Maggie. This quickly fell into its relation with him as part of an experience—marking for him, no doubt, what people call, considerately, a time of life; a new and pleasant order, a flattered passive state, that might become—why shouldn’t it?— one of the comforts of the future.

Mr. Gutermann-Seuss proved, on the second day—our friend had waited till then—a remarkably genial, a positively lustrous young man occupying a small neat house in a quarter of the place remote from the front and living, as immediate and striking signs testified, in the bosom of his family. Our visitors found themselves introduced, by the operation of close contiguity, to a numerous group of ladies and gentlemen older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who mostly affected them as scarce less anointed for hospitality and who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, of some anniversary gregariously and religiously kept, though they subsequently fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle, preponderantly and directly indebted for their being, in fact, to Mr. Gutermann-Seuss. To the casual eye a mere smart and shining youth of less than thirty summers, faultlessly appointed in every particular, he yet stood among his progeny—eleven in all, as he confessed without a sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes astride of such impersonal old noses—while he entertained the great American collector whom he had so long hoped he might meet, and whose charming companion, the handsome, frank, familiar young lady, presumably Mrs. Verver, noticed the graduated offspring, noticed the fat, ear-ringed aunts and the glossy, cockneyfied, familiar uncles, inimitable of accent and assumption, and of an attitude of cruder intention than that of the head of the firm; noticed the place in short, noticed the treasure produced, noticed everything, as from the habit of a person finding her account at any time, according to a wisdom well learned of life, in almost any “funny” impression. It really came home to her friend on the spot that this free range of observation in her, picking out the frequent funny with extraordinary promptness, would verily henceforth make a different thing for him of such experiences, of the customary hunt for the possible prize, the inquisitive play of his accepted monomania; which different thing could probably be a lighter and perhaps thereby a somewhat more boisterously refreshing form of sport. Such omens struck him as vivid, in any case, when Mr. Gutermann-Seuss, with a sharpness of discrimination he had at first scarce seemed to promise, invited his eminent couple into another room, before the threshold of which the rest of the tribe, unanimously faltering, dropped out of the scene. The treasure itself here, the objects on behalf of which Mr. Verver’s interest had been booked, established quickly enough their claim to engage the latter’s attention; yet at what point of his past did our friend’s memory, looking back and back, catch him, in any such place, thinking so much less of wares artfully paraded than of some other and quite irrelevant presence? Such places were not strange to him when they took the form of bourgeois back-parlours, a trifle ominously grey and grim from their north light, at watering-places prevailingly homes of humbug, or even when they wore some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had been everywhere, pried and prowled everywhere, going, on occasion, so far as to risk, he believed, life, health and the very bloom of honour; but where, while precious things, extracted one by one from thrice-locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental ilk, were impressively ranged before him, had he, till now, let himself, in consciousness, wander like one of the vague?

He didn’t betray it—ah THAT he knew; but two recognitions took place for him at once, and one of them suffered a little in sweetness by the confusion. Mr. Gutermann-Seuss had truly, for the crisis, the putting down of his cards, a rare manner; he was perfect master of what not to say to such a personage as Mr. Verver while the particular importance that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves, his repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles, successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and revealed, lay there at last in their full harmony and their venerable splendour, but the tribute of appreciation and decision was, while the spectator considered, simplified to a point that but just failed of representing levity on the part of a man who had always acknowledged without shame, in such affairs, the intrinsic charm of what was called discussion. The infinitely ancient, the immemorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty—this property of the ordered and matched array had inevitably all its determination for him, but his submission was, perhaps for the first time in his life, of the quick mind alone, the process really itself, in its way, as fine as the perfection perceived and admired: every inch of the rest of him being given to the foreknowledge that an hour or two later he should have “spoken.” The burning of his ships therefore waited too near to let him handle his opportunity with his usual firm and sentient fingers—waited somehow in the predominance of Charlotte’s very person, in her being there exactly as she was, capable, as Mr. Gutermann-Seuss himself was capable, of the right felicity of silence, but with an embracing ease, through it all, that made deferred criticism as fragrant as some joy promised a lover by his mistress, or as a big bridal bouquet held patiently behind her. He couldn’t otherwise have explained, surely, why he found himself thinking, to his enjoyment, of so many other matters than the felicity of his acquisition and the figure of his cheque, quite equally high; any more than why, later on, with their return to the room in which they had been received and the renewed encompassment of the tribe, he felt quite merged in the elated circle formed by the girl’s free response to the collective caress of all the shining eyes, and by her genial acceptance of the heavy cake and port wine that, as she was afterwards to note, added to their transaction, for a finish, the touch of some mystic rite of old Jewry.

This characterisation came from her as they walked away—walked together, in the waning afternoon, back to the breezy sea and the bustling front, back to the nimble and the flutter and the shining shops that sharpened the grin of solicitation on the mask of night. They were walking thus, as he felt, nearer and nearer to where he should see his ships burn, and it was meanwhile for him quite as if this red glow would impart, at the harmonious hour, a lurid grandeur to his good faith. It was meanwhile too a sign of the kind of sensibility often playing up in him that—fabulous as this truth may sound—he found a sentimental link, an obligation of delicacy, or perhaps even one of the penalties of its opposite, in his having exposed her to the north light, the quite properly hard business-light, of the room in which they had been alone with the treasure and its master. She had listened to the name of the sum he was capable of looking in the face. Given the relation of intimacy with him she had already, beyond all retractation, accepted, the stir of the air produced at the other place by that high figure struck him as a thing that, from the moment she had exclaimed or protested as little as he himself had apologised, left him but one thing more to do. A man of decent feeling didn’t thrust his money, a huge lump of it, in such a way, under a poor girl’s nose—a girl whose poverty was, after a fashion, the very basis of her enjoyment of his hospitality—without seeing, logically, a responsibility attached. And this was to remain none the less true for the fact that twenty minutes later, after he had applied his torch, applied it with a sign or two of insistence, what might definitely result failed to be immediately clear. He had spoken—spoken as they sat together on the out-of-the-way bench observed during one of their walks and kept for the previous quarter of the present hour well in his memory’s eye; the particular spot to which, between intense pauses and intenser advances, he had all the while consistently led her. Below the great consolidated cliff, well on to where the city of stucco sat most architecturally perched, with the rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front and above, the safe sense of the whole place yet prevailed in lamps and seats and flagged walks, hovering also overhead in the close neighbourhood of a great replete community about to assist anew at the removal of dish-covers.

“We’ve had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together, that I hope it won’t come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband.” As if he had known she wouldn’t, she of course couldn’t, at all gracefully, and whether or no, reply with a rush, he had said a little more—quite as he had felt he must in thinking it out in advance. He had put the question on which there was no going back and which represented thereby the sacrifice of his vessels, and what he further said was to stand for the redoubled thrust of flame that would make combustion sure. “This isn’t sudden to me, and I’ve wondered at moments if you haven’t felt me coming to it. I’ve been coming ever since we left Fawns—I really started while we were there.” He spoke slowly, giving her, as he desired, time to think; all the more that it was making her look at him steadily, and making her also, in a remarkable degree, look “well” while she did so—a large and, so far, a happy, consequence. She wasn’t at all events shocked—which he had glanced at but for a handsome humility—and he would give her as many minutes as she liked. “You mustn’t think I’m forgetting that I’m not young.”

“Oh, that isn’t so. It’s I that am old. You ARE young.” This was what she had at first answered—and quite in the tone too of having taken her minutes. It had not been wholly to the point, but it had been kind—which was what he most wanted. And she kept, for her next words, to kindness, kept to her clear, lowered voice and unshrinking face. “To me too it thoroughly seems that these days have been beautiful. I shouldn’t be grateful to them if I couldn’t more or less have imagined their bringing us to this.” She affected him somehow as if she had advanced a step to meet him and yet were at the same time standing still. It only meant, however, doubtless, that she was, gravely and reasonably, thinking—as he exactly desired to make her. If she would but think enough she would probably think to suit him. “It seems to me,” she went on, “that it’s for YOU to be sure.”

“Ah, but I AM sure,” said Adam Verver. “On matters of importance I never speak when I’m not. So if you can yourself FACE such a union you needn’t in the least trouble.”

She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild, slightly damp southwest, she met his eyes without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying: “I won’t pretend I don’t think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me, I mean,” she pursued, “because I’m so awfully unattached. I should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another—a motive outside of myself. In fact,” she said, so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour, “in fact, you know, I want to BE married. It’s—well, it’s the condition.”

“The condition—?” He was just vague.

“It’s the state, I mean. I don’t like my own. ‘Miss,’ among us all, is too dreadful—except for a shopgirl. I don’t want to be a horrible English old-maid.”

“Oh, you want to be taken care of. Very well then, I’ll do it.”

“I dare say it’s very much that. Only I don’t see why, for what I speak of,” she smiled—“for a mere escape from my state—I need do quite so MUCH.”

“So much as marry me in particular?”

Her smile was as for true directness. “I might get what I want for less.”

“You think it so much for you to do?”

“Yes,” she presently said, “I think it’s a great deal.”

Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far—then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know where they were. There rose for him, with this, the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. “Of course, yes—that’s my disadvantage: I’m not the natural, I’m so far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty. I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, so inevitably, in such another light.”

But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft—made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep. “You don’t understand me. It’s of all that it is for YOU to do—it’s of that I’m thinking.”

Oh, with this, for him, the thing was clearer! “Then you needn’t think. I know enough what it is for me to do.”

But she shook her head again. “I doubt if you know. I doubt if you CAN.”

“And why not, please—when I’ve had you so before me? That I’m old has at least THAT fact about it to the good—that I’ve known you long and from far back.”

“Do you think you’ve ‘known’ me?” asked Charlotte Stant. He hesitated—for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him doubt. Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling—this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn’t rabid, but he wasn’t either, as a man of a proper spirit, to be frightened. “What is that then—if I accept it—but as strong a reason as I can want for just LEARNING to know you?”

She faced him always—kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same time, in her odd way, as for mercy. “How can you tell whether if you did you would?”

It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. “I mean when it’s a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late.”

“I think it’s a question,” he promptly enough made answer, “of liking you the more just for your saying these things. You should make something,” he added, “of my liking you.”

“I make everything. But are you sure of having exhausted all other ways?”

This, of a truth, enlarged his gaze. “But what other ways?”

“Why, you’ve more ways of being kind than anyone I ever knew.”

“Take it then,” he answered, “that I’m simply putting them all together for you.” She looked at him, on this, long again—still as if it shouldn’t be said she hadn’t given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with admiration. “You’re very, very honourable.”

“It’s just what I want to be. I don’t see,” she added, “why you’re not right, I don’t see why you’re not happy, as you are. I can not ask myself, I can not ask YOU,” she went on, “if you’re really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oughtn’t we,” she asked, “to think a little of others? Oughtn’t I, at least, in loyalty—at any rate in delicacy—to think of Maggie?” With which, intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained. “She’s everything to you—she has always been. Are you so certain that there’s room in your life—?”

“For another daughter?—is that what you mean?” She had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.

He had not, however, disconcerted her. “For another young woman—very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion,” said Charlotte Stant.

“Can’t a man be, all his life then,” he almost fiercely asked, “anything but a father?” But he went on before she could answer. “You talk about differences, but they’ve been already made—as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage—made, I mean, for me. She constantly thinks of it—it allows her no rest. To put her at peace is therefore,” he explained, “what I’m trying, with you, to do. I can’t do it alone, but I can do it with your help. You can make her,” he said, “positively happy about me.”

“About you?” she thoughtfully echoed. “But what can I make her about herself?”

“Oh, if she’s at ease about me the rest will take care of itself. The case,” he declared, “is in your hands. You’ll effectually put out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me.”

Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face, but it was all the more honourable to her, as he had just called it that she should want to see each of the steps of his conviction. “If you’ve been driven to the ‘likes’ of me, mayn’t it show that you’ve felt truly forsaken?”

“Well, I’m willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that I feel consoled.”

“But HAVE you,” she demanded, “really felt so?” He hesitated.

“Consoled?”

“Forsaken.”

“No—I haven’t. But if it’s her idea—!” If it was her idea, in short, that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. “That is if it’s my idea. I happen, you see, to like my idea.”

“Well, it’s beautiful and wonderful. But isn’t it, possibly,” Charlotte asked, “not quite enough to marry me for?”

“Why so, my dear child? Isn’t a man’s idea usually what he does marry for?”

Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps be a large question, or at all events something of an extension of one they were immediately concerned with. “Doesn’t that a good deal depend on the sort of thing it may be?” She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them, might differ; with which, however, giving no more time to it, she sounded another question. “Don’t you appear rather to put it to me that I may accept your offer for Maggie’s sake? Somehow”—she turned it over—“I don’t so clearly SEE her quite so much finding reassurance, or even quite so much needing it.”

“Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so ready to leave us?”

Ah, Charlotte on the contrary made much! “She was ready to leave us because she had to be. From the moment the Prince wanted it she could only go with him.”

“Perfectly—so that, if you see your way, she will be able to ‘go with him’ in future as much as she likes.”

Charlotte appeared to examine for a minute, in Maggie’s interest, this privilege—the result of which was a limited concession. “You’ve certainly worked it out!”

“Of course I’ve worked it out—that’s exactly what I HAVE done. She hadn’t for a long time been so happy about anything as at your being there with me.”

“I was to be with you,” said Charlotte, “for her security.”

“Well,” Adam Verver rang out, “this IS her security. You’ve only, if you can’t see it, to ask her.”

“‘Ask’ her?”—the girl echoed it in wonder. “Certainly—in so many words. Telling her you don’t believe me.”

Still she debated. “Do you mean write it to her?”

“Quite so. Immediately. To-morrow.”

“Oh, I don’t think I can write it,” said Charlotte Stant. “When I write to her”—and she looked amused for so different a shade—“it’s about the Principino’s appetite and Dr. Brady’s visits.”

“Very good then—put it to her face to face. We’ll go straight to Paris to meet them.”

Charlotte, at this, rose with a movement that was like a small cry; but her unspoken sense lost itself while she stood with her eyes on him—he keeping his seat as for the help it gave him, a little, to make his appeal go up. Presently, however, a new sense had come to her, and she covered him, kindly, with the expression of it. “I do think, you know, you must rather ‘like’ me.”

“Thank you,” said Adam Verver. “You WILL put it to her yourself then?”

She had another hesitation. “We go over, you say, to meet them?”

“As soon as we can get back to Fawns. And wait there for them, if necessary, till they come.”

“Wait—a—at Fawns?”

“Wait in Paris. That will be charming in itself.”

“You take me to pleasant places.” She turned it over. “You propose to me beautiful things.”

“It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You’ve made Brighton—!”

“Ah!”—she almost tenderly protested. “With what I’m doing now?”

“You’re promising me now what I want. Aren’t you promising me,” he pressed, getting up, “aren’t you promising me to abide by what Maggie says?”

Oh, she wanted to be sure she was. “Do you mean she’ll ASK it of me?”

It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but certain? “She’ll speak to you. She’ll speak to you FOR me.”

This at last then seemed to satisfy her. “Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?” He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. “Of course I give you time. Especially,” he smiled, “as it’s time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see, I mean, how I need you.”

“I already see,” said Charlotte, “how you’ve persuaded yourself you do.” But she had to repeat it. “That isn’t, unfortunately, all.”

“Well then, how you’ll make Maggie right.”

“‘Right’?” She echoed it as if the word went far. And “O—oh!” she still critically murmured as they moved together away.

He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie’s reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns—a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform—had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to “speak” to her so far even as to tell her of the communication despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them—it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn’t be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.

It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris—which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch—made, between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders—things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common conventions—that was what was odd—had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed—or would have figured it with less of unrest—that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all “far” there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself, on the receipt of Maggie’s missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him—his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn’t much matter which—and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. There was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie, certainly, would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.

These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte’s simply saying to him that she didn’t like him enough. This he wouldn’t have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough—nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that—as a man, so to speak—he properly pleased her. He said nothing—the words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her chair at his approach, murmured them out. “We start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and sympathy.” There they were, the words, and what did she want more? She didn’t, however, as she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say they were enough—though he saw, the next moment, that her silence was probably not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this change of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly she liked him enough—liked him enough to make him, old as he was ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. “Do you begin, a little, to be satisfied?”

Still, however, she had to think. “We’ve hurried them, you see. Why so breathless a start?”

“Because they want to congratulate us. They want,” said Adam Verver, “to SEE our happiness.”

She wondered again—and this time also, for him, as publicly as possible. “So much as that?”

“Do you think it’s too much?”

She continued to think plainly. “They weren’t to have started for another week.”

“Well, what then? Isn’t our situation worth the little sacrifice? We’ll go back to Rome as soon as you like WITH them.”

This seemed to hold her—as he had previously seen her held, just a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions to what they would do together on a certain contingency. “Worth it, the little sacrifice, for whom? For us, naturally—yes,” she said. “We want to see them—for our reasons. That is,” she rather dimly smiled, “YOU do.”

“And you do, my dear, too!” he bravely declared. “Yes then—I do too,” she after an instant ungrudging enough acknowledged. “For us, however, something depends on it.”

“Rather! But does nothing depend on it for them?”

“What CAN—from the moment that, as appears, they don’t want to nip us in the bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent us. But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little—such intense eagerness, I confess,” she went on, “more than a little puzzles me. You may think me,” she also added, “ungracious and suspicious, but the Prince can’t at all want to come back so soon. He wanted quite too intensely to get away.”

Mr. Verver considered. “Well, hasn’t he been away?”

“Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it. Besides,” said Charlotte, “he may not be able to join in the rosy view of our case that you impute to her. It can’t in the least have appeared to him hitherto a matter of course that you should give his wife a bouncing stepmother.”

Adam Verver, at this, looked grave. “I’m afraid then he’ll just have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts; and accept it—if he can imagine no better reason—just because she does. That,” he declared, “will have to do for him.”

His tone made her for a moment meet his face; after which, “Let me,” she abruptly said, “see it again”—taking from him the folded leaf that she had given back and he had kept in his hand. “Isn’t the whole thing,” she asked when she had read it over, “perhaps but a way like another for their gaining time?”

He again stood staring; but the next minute, with that upward spring of his shoulders and that downward pressure of his pockets which she had already, more than once, at disconcerted moments, determined in him, he turned sharply away and wandered from her in silence. He looked about in his small despair; he crossed the hotel court, which, overarched and glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs, exotic ladies in chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some “dental,” medical, surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. He went as far as the porte-cochere, took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even, somehow, just here, by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte. “It is incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?—in the absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing.” The manner of it operated—she acknowledged with no great delay this natural possibility. “No—nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in love.”

“Well, isn’t Amerigo immensely in love?”

She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the degree—but she after all adopted Mr. Verver’s. “Immensely.”

“Then there you are!”

She had another smile, however—she wasn’t there quite yet. “That isn’t all that’s wanted.”

“But what more?”

“Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that SHE really believes.” With which Charlotte became still more lucidly logical. “The reality of his belief will depend in such a case on the reality of hers. The Prince may for instance now,” she went on, “have made out to his satisfaction that Maggie may mainly desire to abound in your sense, whatever it is you do. He may remember that he has never seen her do anything else.”

“Well,” said Adam Verver, “what kind of a warning will he have found in that? To what catastrophe will he have observed such a disposition in her to lead?”

“Just to THIS one!” With which she struck him as rising straighter and clearer before him than she had done even yet.

“Our little question itself?” Her appearance had in fact, at the moment, such an effect on him that he could answer but in marvelling mildness. “Hadn’t we better wait a while till we call it a catastrophe?”

Her rejoinder to this was to wait—though by no means as long as he meant. When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it was mildly too. “What would you like, dear friend, to wait for?” It lingered between them in the air, this demand, and they exchanged for the time a look which might have made each of them seem to have been watching in the other the signs of its overt irony. These were indeed immediately so visible in Mr. Verver’s face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced them—and as if also to bring out at last, under pressure, something she had all the while been keeping back—she took a jump to pure plain reason. “You haven’t noticed for yourself, but I can’t quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume—WE assume, if you like—Maggie wires her joy only to you. She makes no sign of its overflow to me.”

It was a point—and, staring a moment, he took account of it. But he had, as before, his presence of mind—to say nothing of his kindly humour. “Why, you complain of the very thing that’s most charmingly conclusive! She treats us already as ONE.”

Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there was something in the way he said things—! She faced him in all her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and definitely showed it. “I do like you, you know.”

Well, what could this do but stimulate his humour? “I see what’s the matter with you. You won’t be quiet till you’ve heard from the Prince himself. I think,” the happy man added, “that I’ll go and secretly wire to him that you’d like, reply paid, a few words for yourself.”

It could apparently but encourage her further to smile. “Reply paid for him, you mean—or for me?”

“Oh, I’ll pay, with pleasure, anything back for you—as many words as you like.” And he went on, to keep it up. “Not requiring either to see your message.”

She could take it, visibly, as he meant it. “Should you require to see the Prince’s?”

“Not a bit. You can keep that also to yourself.”

On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a real question, she appeared to consider—and almost as if for good taste—that the joke had gone far enough. “It doesn’t matter. Unless he speaks of his own movement—! And why should it be,” she asked, “a thing that WOULD occur to him?”

“I really think,” Mr. Verver concurred, “that it naturally wouldn’t. HE doesn’t know you’re morbid.”

She just wondered—but she agreed. “No—he hasn’t yet found it out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn’t yet; and I’m willing to give him meanwhile the benefit of the doubt.” So with this the situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared had she not too quickly had one of her restless relapses. “Maggie, however, does know I’m morbid. SHE hasn’t the benefit.”

“Well,” said Adam Verver a little wearily at last, “I think I feel that you’ll hear from her yet.” It had even fairly come over him, under recurrent suggestion, that his daughter’s omission WAS surprising. And Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more than three minutes.

“Oh, it isn’t that I hold that I’ve a RIGHT to it,” Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified—and the observation itself gave him a further push.

“Very well—I shall like it myself.”

At this then, as if moved by his way of constantly—and more or less against his own contention—coming round to her, she showed how she could also always, and not less gently, come half way. “I speak of it only as the missing GRACE—the grace that’s in everything that Maggie does. It isn’t my due”—she kept it up—“but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful.”

“Then come out to breakfast.” Mr. Verver had looked at his watch. “It will be here when we get back.”

“If it isn’t”—and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room—“if it isn’t it will have had but THAT slight fault.”

He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face—for it was a wondrous product of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before—he held it there a minute before giving it up. “Will you promise me then to be at peace?”

She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. “I promise you.”

“Quite for ever?”

“Quite for ever.”

“Remember,” he went on, to justify his demand, “remember that in wiring you she’ll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me.”

It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur. “‘Naturally’—?”

“Why, our marriage puts him for you, you see—or puts you for him—into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it.”

“About its making me his stepmother-in-law—or whatever I SHOULD become?” Over which, for a little, she not undivertedly mused. “Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that.”

“Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you a message, he’ll be it ALL.” And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. “Don’t you think he’s charming?”

“Oh, charming,” said Charlotte Stant. “If he weren’t I shouldn’t mind.”

“No more should I!” her friend harmoniously returned.

“Ah, but you DON’T mind. You don’t have to. You don’t have to, I mean, as I have. It’s the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I were you,” she went on—“if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don’t know,” she said, “what in the world—that didn’t touch my luck—I should trouble my head about.”

“I quite understand you—yet doesn’t it just depend,” Mr. Verver asked, “on what you call one’s luck? It’s exactly my luck that I’m talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you’ve made me all right. It’s only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn’t they,” he explained, “that make one so: it’s the something else I want that makes THEM right. If you’ll give me what I ask, you’ll see.”

She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes, while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by another interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of dispersal for luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it, for free talk, should they have been moved to loudness, quite to themselves. She was ready for their adjournment, but she was also aware of a pedestrian youth, in uniform, a visible emissary of the Postes et Telegraphes, who had approached, from the street, the small stronghold of the concierge and who presented there a missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung over his shoulder. The portress, meeting him on the threshold, met equally, across the court, Charlotte’s marked attention to his visit, so that, within the minute, she had advanced to our friends with her cap-streamers flying and her smile of announcement as ample as her broad white apron. She raised aloft a telegraphic message and, as she delivered it, sociably discriminated. “Cette fois-ci pour madame!”—with which she as genially retreated, leaving Charlotte in possession. Charlotte, taking it, held it at first unopened. Her eyes had come back to her companion, who had immediately and triumphantly greeted it. “Ah, there you are!”

She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with the message he himself had put before her, studied its contents without a sign. He watched her without a question, and at last she looked up. “I’ll give you,” she simply said, “what you ask.”

The expression of her face was strange—but since when had a woman’s at moments of supreme surrender not a right to be? He took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence—so that nothing more, for some instants, passed between them. Their understanding sealed itself—he already felt that she had made him right. But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had made HER so; and always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in fine, would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. “What my child does for me—!”

Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply. She held her paper wide open, but her eyes were all for his. “It isn’t Maggie. It’s the Prince.”

“I SAY!”—he gaily rang out. “Then it’s best of all.”

“It’s enough.”

“Thank you for thinking so!” To which he added “It’s enough for our question, but it isn’t—is it? quite enough for our breakfast? Dejeunons.”

She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document always before them. “Don’t you want to read it?”

He thought. “Not if it satisfies you. I don’t require it.”

But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. “You can if you like.”

He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. “Is it funny?”

Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. “No—I call it grave.”

“Ah, then, I don’t want it.”

“Very grave,” said Charlotte Stant.

“Well, what did I tell you of him?” he asked, rejoicing, as they started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat.