 CHAPTER XVIII. This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed, yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort? It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It's the charm at any rate, she said from her place at the fire, of trying again the old feelings. They come back, they come back. Everything, she went on, comes back. Besides, she wound up. You know for yourself. He stood near her, his hands in his pockets, but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. Ah, I haven't your courage. Moreover, he laughed, it seems to me that so far as that goes, I do live in handsoms, but you must awfully want your tea. He quickly added, so let me give you a good stiff cup. He busied himself with this care, and she sat down on his pushing up a low seat where she had been standing, so that while she talked he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself, and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration nonetheless presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate, in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked in a raid, it was only a question as yet of their seeing their way together, to which indeed exactly the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. It's not that you haven't my courage, Charlotte said, but that you haven't, I rather think, my imagination, unless indeed it should turn out after all, she added, that you haven't even my intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you've given me more proof. And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. You knew, besides, you knew today I would come. And if you knew that, you know everything. So she pursued, and if he didn't, meanwhile, if he didn't even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporizing kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever sense have been carrying about with her like a precious metal, not exactly blessed by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. Above all, she said, there has been the personal romance of it. Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes, I don't think even my intelligence fails me. Oh, it's further than that goes, and if I've had a better day than you, it's perhaps when I come to think of it that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see, but I don't. I don't, I don't. She repeated. It's precisely boring oneself without relief, he protested, that takes courage. Passive then, not active. My romance is that if you want to know I've been all day on the town, literally on the town, isn't that what they call it? I know how it feels. After which, as if breaking off, and you, have you never been out, she asked. He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. What should I have gone out for? Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you're wonderful, all of you, you know how to live. We're clumsy brutes, we others, besides you, we must always be doing something. However, Charlotte pursued, if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me, which I'm sure, though you won't confess it, was what you didn't want, and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that looked blank about it as you will. I've come to congratulate you on. That's really what I can at last do. You can't not know at least on such a day as this. You can't not know, she said, where you are. She waited as for him either to grant that he knew or to pretend that he didn't. But he only drew a long, deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew. It seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver, exactly as she sat there. So for some moments, with their long look, they betreated the matter in silence, with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. There it all is, extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us, as I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven't we therefore to take things as we find them? She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one as well he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea, he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have, and then, on her, nothing thanks, returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. What else can we do? What in all the world else? He took them up, however, no more than at first. Where then have you been? He asked, as from mere interest in her adventure. Everywhere I could think of except to see people. I didn't want people. I wanted too much to think. But I've been back at intervals, three times, and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy. It's very amusing. I shall owe him when we come to settle more money than he has ever seen. I've been, my dear, she went on. To the British Museum, which you know I always adore, and I've been to the National Gallery, into a dozen old booksellers, coming across treasures, and I've lunched on some strange nastiness at a cook-shop in Halburn. I wanted to go to the tower, but it was too far. My old man urged that, and I would have gone to the zoo if it hadn't been too wet, which he also begged me to observe. But you wouldn't believe. I did put in St. Paul's. Such days, she wound up, are expensive. For besides the cab, I've bought quantities of books. She immediately passed at any rate to another point. I can't help wondering when you must last have laid eyes on them. And then, as it had apparently for her companion an effect of abruptness, Maggie, I mean, and the child, for I suppose you know he's with her. Oh, yes, I know he's with her. I saw them this morning. And did they then announce their program? She told me she was taking him, as usual, Donanno. And for the whole day, he hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly shifted. She didn't say, and I didn't ask. Well, she went on. It can't have been later than half past ten, I mean, when you saw them. They had got to eat in Square before eleven. You know, we don't formally breakfast, Adam and I. We have tea in our rooms, at least I have. But luncheon is early, and I saw my husband this morning by twelve. He was showing the child a picture book. He had been there with them, had left them settled together. Then she had gone out, taking the carriage for something he had been attending, but that she offered to do instead. The Prince appeared to confess at this to his interest. Taking, you mean, your carriage? I don't know which, and it doesn't matter. It's not a question, she smiled, of a carriage the more or the less. It's not a question, even, if you come to that of a cab. It's so beautiful, she said, that it's not a question of anything vulgar or horrid. Which she gave him time to agree about, and though he was silent it was rather remarkably as if he fell in. I went out, I wanted to, I had my idea, it seemed to me important. It has been, it is important. I know as I haven't known before the way they feel, I couldn't in any other way have made so sure of it. They feel a confidence, the Prince observed. He had indeed said it for her. They feel a confidence. And she proceeded with usidity to the fuller illustration of it, speaking again of the three different moments that in the course of her wild ramble had witnessed her return, for curiosity and even really a little from anxiety, to eat and square. She was possessed of a latch-key rarely used, it had always irritated Adam, one of the few things that did, to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home in the small hours after parties. So I had but to slip in each time with my cab at the door and make out for myself without there knowing it that Maggie was still there. I came, I went, without there so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose, she asked, becomes of one. Not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn't matter, but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman, as a decent harmless wife after all, as the best stepmother after all that really ever was, or at the least simply as a mattress de meson not quite without a conscience. They must even in their odd way, she declared, have some idea. Oh, they've a great deal of idea, said the Prince, and nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. They think so much of us, they think in particular so much of you. Ah, don't put it all on me, she smiled. But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place. It's a matter of your known character. Ah, thank you for known, she still smiled. It's a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It's a matter of what those things have done for you in the world. I mean in this world, in this place. Your personage for them, and personages do go and come. Oh, no, my dear, there you're quite wrong. And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. That's exactly what personages don't do. They live in state and under constant consideration. They haven't latched keys, but drums and trumpets announce them. And when they go out in growlers it makes a greater noise still. It's you, Carol Mio, she said, who so far as that goes are the personage. Ah, he in turn protested. Don't put it all on me. What did any rate when you get home, he added, show you say that you've been doing? I shall say beautifully that I've been here. All day? Yes, all day, keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything, she went on, without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you, just as quite as comfortably you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are. He considered this a while in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her, after which rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out. How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy? And then further, as if slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect. He would have done the same for one of yours. Ah, if I could have had one. I hoped and I believed, said Charlotte, that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck, that it might have been. I'm sure he hoped and intended so. It's not at any rate, she went on, my fault. There it is. She had uttered these statements one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but as if once for all, she made her clearness complete. And now I'm too sure it will never be. He waited for a moment. Never, never. They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency of distinctness. It would probably have been better, Charlotte added. But things turn out. And it leaves us, she made the point, more alone. He seemed to wonder. It leaves you more alone. Oh, she again returned. Don't put it all on me. Maggie would have given herself to his child, I'm sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine, she explained. It would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them, to keep our sposy apart. She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but as he seemed to take it in spite of this for important, she then spoke gravely enough. It's as strange as you like, but we're immensely alone. He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease in his hands and his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throwback his head, and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. What will you say, she meanwhile asked, that you've been doing? This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. I mean when she comes in, for I suppose she will some time come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing. Well, he thought again. Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven't. Ah! What haven't you had? What aren't you having? Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and he still took it before he answered from her eyes. We must at least, then, not to be absurd together do the same thing. We must act it would really seem in concert. It would really seem. Her eyebrows, her shoulders went up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. It's all in the world I pretend. We must act in concert. Heaven knows, she said, they do. So it was that he evidently saw, and that by his admission the case could fairly be put, but what he evidently saw appeared to come over him at the same time as too much for him, so that he fell back suddenly to ground where she was not awaiting him. The difficulty is, and will always be, that I don't understand them. I didn't at first, but I thought I should learn to. That was what I hoped. And it appeared then that Fanny Asingham might help me. Oh, Fanny Asingham, said Charlotte Verber. He stared a moment at her tongue. She would do anything for us. To which Charlotte at first said nothing, as if from the sense of too much. Then indulgently enough she shook her head. We're beyond her. He thought a moment, as of where this placed them. She'd do anything, then, for them. Well, so would we, so that doesn't help us. She is broken down. She doesn't understand us. And really, my dear, Charlotte added, Fanny Asingham doesn't matter. He wondered again. Unless as taking care of them. Ah! Charlotte instantly said. Isn't it for us only to do that? She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. I think we want no one's aid. She spoke, indeed, with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly, with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him in any case as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision. They formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name and could act on was something that now at last, not to be too imminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. He had anticipated him, but, as her expression left for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response as he looked at her came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, and the glory of which, as it almost might be called, what he gave her back had the value of what she had given him. They're extraordinarily happy. Oh, Charlotte's measure of it was only too full. Be atypically. That's the great thing, he went on, so that it doesn't matter, really, that one doesn't understand. Besides, you do. Enough. I understand my husband, perhaps, she after an instant conceded. I don't understand your wife. You're of the same race at any rate, more or less, of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I've gone on trying to see if I haven't some of these things, too, I, on my side, have more and more failed. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can't help seeing it. I'm decidedly too different. Yet you're not, Charlotte made the important point. Too different from me? I don't know, as we're not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were, he said, you would find some abyss of divergence. Since it depends on that, then, she smiled, I'm safe as you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion to feel, and even to remark, they're very, very simple. That makes, she added, a difficulty for belief. But when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty for action. I have at last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I'm not afraid. He wondered a moment. Not afraid of what? Well, generally, of some beastly mistake, especially of any mistake found that on one's idea of their differences. For that idea, Charlotte developed, positively makes one so tender. Ah, but rather. Well then, there it is. I can't put myself into Maggie's skin. I can't, as I say. It's not my fit. I shouldn't be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I do anything to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her, too, she went on. I think I'm still more so for my husband. He's in truth of a sweet simplicity. The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr. Verver. While I don't know that I can choose, at night all cats are gray, I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them, and how to do ourselves justice we do, it represents for us a conscious care. Of every hour, literally, said Charlotte, she could rise to the highest measure of the facts, and for which we must trust each other. Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Unfortunately, the Prince hastened to add, we can. With which, as for the full assurance and the Pledge it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. It's all too wonderful. Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. It's too beautiful. And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. It's sacred, he said at last. It's sacred, she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out, and took it in, drawn by their intensity more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of the narrow straight into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response, and their response their pressure. With the violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses, they passionately sealed their pledge. CHAPTER XIX He had taken it from her, as we have seen more over, that Fanny Asingham didn't now matter. The now he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages. And though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behavior for the hour so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the foreign office. With regret, nonetheless, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension. But he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open to interpretation. It had never indeed before that evening come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure on the dear woman's part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say, and if she had, in fact, as by Charlotte's observation, broken down, the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses, the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact, for didn't any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit? Which was the last thing he had expected of her, and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had been Charlotte's remark that they were at last beyond her, whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs. Asingham's want of faith, but when he thought at his ease of the way persons who were capable really entertained, or at least with any refinement, the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty, if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself, to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he was married, that one found one used one's imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy, to call worthy, of the personal relation, never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them. He might humorously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidiously the cup. These were the services that, by all romantic tradition, were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate, but he could amuse himself with saying, so far as the amusement went, that they were what he had once for all turned his back on. Many was meanwhile frequent it appeared in Eaton Square, so much he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at tea-time, during the same period in Portland Place, though they had little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions, Mrs. Assingham herself made actually no approach. Her latest view of her utility seemed to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent field. It was finding there, in fact, everything and everyone but the prince, who mostly just now kept away, or who at all events, on the interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been all prodigious if he had not already with Charlotte's aid so very considerably lived into it. It would have been all indescribably remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on the surface, nobody else's yet, in the combination, seemed estranged from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie, she knew by this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about Charlotte, she knew by the same reasoning how most probably to miss that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed, of course, on finding her so absent from her home. Just as this particular phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind, best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons shy of Portland Place itself. This was appreciable. So that she might well, after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte's appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the account they might be keeping of the usual solitude, since it came to this, of the head of that house. There was always to cover all ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of Mrs. Verver's day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation in charge of the social relations of the family, literally of those of the two households. As to her genius for representing which in the great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more accumulated, it had been established in the two households at an early stage, and with the highest good humor that Charlotte was, a, was the social success, whereas the princess, though kind, though punctilious, though charming, though in fact the dearest little creature in the world, and the princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly never be, and might as well practically give it up, whether through being above it or below it, too much outside of it or too much lost in it, too unequipped or too indisposed, didn't especially matter. What sufficed was that the whole thing, call it appetite or call it patience, the act of representation at large and the daily business of intercourse, fell in with Charlotte's tested facility and not much less visibly with her accommodating, her generous view of her domestic use. She had come frankly into the connection to do and to be what she could, no questions asked, and she had taken over accordingly as it stood, and in the finest practical spirit, the burden of a visiting list that Maggie originally left to herself, and left even more to the principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand. She had in a word not only mounted cheerfully the London treadmill, she had handsomely professed herself for the further comfort of the three others, sustained in the effort by a frivolous side, if that were not too harsh a name for a pleasant constitutional curiosity. There were possibilities of dullness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters of an hour that turned up like false pieces in a debased currency, of which she made on principle very nearly as light as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The prince had on this score paid her his compliments soon after her return from her wedding tour in America, whereby all accounts she had wondrously borne the brunt, facing brightly at her husband's side everything that came up, and what had come often was beyond words. Just as precisely with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at hand as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her husband's son-in-law from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus it had been in short that Charlotte could for her friend's appreciation so promptly make her point, even using expressions from which she let her see at the hour that he drew amusement of his own. What could be more simple than one's going through with everything, she had asked, when it's so plain a part of one's contract? I've got so much by my marriage. For she had never for a moment concealed from him how much she had felt it and was finding it, that I should deserve no charity if I stented my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, or just one's decency in one's honor and one's virtue. These things, henceforth, if you're interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. Oh, yes, since I'm not a brute, she had wound up. You shall see me as I am. Which was therefore as he had seen her, dealing always from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless all the while, and tributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her husband's daughter were lapped. It had, in fact, probably done something more than this. It had given them a finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in, on the crudest expression of it, to do the worldly for them, and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. In proportion, as she did it moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings. Which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie, and whose cords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less naturally by the same token they included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie's. Bearing in mind dear Amorigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness and question didn't, no doubt, quite equally provide for, that would be to balance just in a manner Charlotte's very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognize it. Well, that Charlotte might be appraised, as at last not ineffectually recognizing it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the prince's breast these others, these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set an order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently, considering in a special his fuller resources in that line, while he worked out, to the last lucidity the principle on which he forebore either to seek fanny out in Cadogan Place, or to perpetrate the error of too much an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte's, that might prevail there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite an ultimate, and it consorted with common prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square and Fine would be to show that he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case, moreover, was that the world, by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residents at the same time, it must promptly be added, did on occasion, wake up to opportunity, and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations, one of which fitful flights precisely had before Easter the effect of disturbing a little our young man's measure of his margin. He, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte's own judgment was always that they were ideally free, the proof of which would always be she maintained, that everyone they feared they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive wreathed with smiles on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in smiles all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck Amorigo as being. They were, frankly, touching occasions to him, marked in the great London Buscalade, with a small, still grace of their own, an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came, everybody rushed, but all succumbed to the soft influence and the brutality of mere multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put off at the foot of the fine staircase with the overcoats and shawls. The entertainment offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not insistently incurred, and had thereby possibly, all the more, the note of this almost archaidian optimism. A large, bright, dull, murmurous, mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable, and hierarchically placeable, couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by a brief instrumental concert over the preparation of which the Prince knew, Maggie's anxiety had conferred with Charlotte's ingenuity, and both had supremely reveled, as it were, in Mr. Verver's solvency. The assingums were there by prescription, though quite at the foot of the social ladder, and with the Colonel's wife in spite of her humility of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because, in the first place, she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth in the standard of passive grace. And because of the fact that, in the second, the occasion so far as it referred itself with any confidence of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially, well meaningly, and perversely, to Maggie. It was not indistinguishable to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife, too, had imperfection her own little character. But he wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself, and this he knew in spite of any desire she entertained, to the essential air of having over much on her mind the felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit of the feast. He knew as well the other things of which her appearance was at any time, and in Eaton Square especially, made up. Her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid, and coming out in the delicate warmth of occasions like the quickened fragrance of a flower. Her resemblance as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, in the first flushed days after their engagement, to a little dancing girl at rest, ever so light of movement, but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously on a bench. Her approximation finally, for it was an allergy somehow more than identity, to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honor of that line, Maggie would no doubt at fifty have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a cornelia in miniature. A light, however, broke for him in season, and when once it had done so, it made him more than ever aware of Mrs. Verver's vaguely, yet quite exquisitely, contingent participation, a mere hinted or tender discretion, in short of Mrs. Verver's indescribable, unfathomable relation to the scene. Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighborhood, her intenser presence, her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame, and that had, in fact, kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no means unbecoming spot. The party was her father's party, and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the importance of his importance, so that sympathy created for her a sort of visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled with filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression, movement, tone. It was all unmistakable, and as pretty as possible, if one would, and even as funny. But it put the pair so together, as undivided by the marriage of each, that the princess, Elnive, Pader, might sit where she liked. She would still always, in that house, be irremediably Maggie Verver. The prince found himself on this occasion so beset with that perception that its natural compliment for him would really have been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of the same impression, and then recorded cases of his having dying with his daughter. This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would have been easily arrested. For it wasn't present to come over Amorigo as never before, that his remarkable father-in-law was the man in the world least equipped with different appearances for different hours. He was simple, he was a revelation of simplicity, and that was the end of him so far as he consisted of an appearance at all, a question that might verily, for a weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man, who was taking his pleasure tonight, it will be seen, in sundry occult ways, it amused him to feel how everything else the master of the house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and amiabilities amplified by the social legend, depended for conveying the effect of quantity on no personal equation, no mere measurable medium. Quantity was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver's estimable quality was almost wholly in that provision. He was meager and modest and clear-browed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed without defiance. His shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high, his complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not covered. In spite of all of which he looked at the top of his table, so nearly like a little boy, shyly entertaining in virtue of some imposed rank, that he could only be one of the powers, the representative of a force, quite as an infant king as the representative of a dynasty. In this generalized view of his father-in-law, intensified tonight, but always operative, Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. The refuge, after the reunion of the two households in England, had more and more offered itself as a substitute for communities, from man to man, that by his original calculation might have become possible, but they did not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family eyes across the table, met them afterwards in the music room, but only to read in them still what he had learned to read during his first months, the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of apprehension in which the terms and conditions were finally fixed in absolute. This directed regard rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated, and was, to the prince's fancy, much of the same order as any glance directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a check received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a banker. It made sure of the amount, and just so from time to time, the amount of the prince was made sure. He was being thus in renewed instalments perpetually paid in. He already reposed in the bank as a value, but subject in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all, had not fixed it. The figure was a conception all of Mr. Verver's own. Finally, however, everything must be kept up to it. Never so much as to-night had the prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable as these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was impossible that he should not now and again meet Charlotte's eyes, as it was also visible that she, too, now and again met her husbands. For her as well in all his pulses he felt a conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them together. Through the veins show of their separation, made the two other faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of care, would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound. End of Chapter 19 CHAPTER XX. The main interests of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste. This was the lingering savor of a cup presented to him by Fanny Asingham's hand after dinner, while the clustered quartet kept their ranged companions in the music room, moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Asingham contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved by the genius of Brahms, beyond what she could bear, so that without apparent deliberation she had presently floated away at the young man's side to such a distance as permitted them to converse without the effect of disdain. It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms, it was there achieved, and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring, and a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness, these independent words with him. She had sounded, covertly but distinctly, by the time they receded together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain, which had introduced in turn a slight awkwardness. Do you know that they're not, after all, going to match him, so that, if they don't, if at least Maggie doesn't, you won't, I suppose, go by yourself? It was, as I say, at match him, where the event had placed him. It was at match him during the Easter days that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined. He had paid, first and last, many an English country visit. He had learned, even from a bold, to do the English things, and to do them all sufficiently in the English way. If he didn't always enjoy them madly, he enjoyed them at any rate as much to an appearance as the good people who had, in the night of time, unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practiced them. Yet with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical life, the determined need which apparently all participant of returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front, in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals of metopaths around the pocketed corners of billiard tables. It sufficiently on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge playing, of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly climax over the boteliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray. It met finally to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression. Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left out. It was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own people, or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else, that he moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt as a congruous whole. English society, as he would have said, cut him accordingly in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket. The prince's shining star may, no doubt, having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety, but whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal out of sight, amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather momentously occurred in Eaton Square, among his enjoyed minutes with his old friend. His present perspective made definitely clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on, and he could scarce have said why, a sharpness of importance. She had never lied to him before, if only because it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the question of what he would do, by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do, in that event of Maggie's and Mr. Verver's not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day or two, resignedly to entertain, as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the lying the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of it all too directly prying had become marked in her. Betrayed by the solicitude of which she had already three weeks before, given him a view, she had been obliged on a second thought, to name intelligibly, a reason for her appeal. While the prince on his side had had not without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one, and yet remaining unprovided. Not without mercy, because absolutely he had on the spot in his friendliness, invented one for her use, presenting it to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up to hand back to her a dropped flower. You ask if I am likely also to back out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel decide. He had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting her to ascent, though not having had his impression, from any indication offered him by Charlotte, that the Asinghams were really in question for the large match-and-party. The wonderful thing after this was that the active couple had in the interval managed to inscribe themselves on the golden roll. An exertion of a sort that, to do her justice, he had never before observed fanny to make. This last passage of the chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she would. Once launched himself at any rate, as he had been directed by all the terms of the intercourse between Portland Place and Eaton Square, as steeped at Machum in the enjoyment of a splendid hospitality, he found everything for his interpretation, for his convenience, fall easily enough into place, and all the more that Mrs. Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with. The great house was full of people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible propinquity, and no appearance, of course, was less to be cultivated than that of his having sought an opportunity to foregather with his friend at a safe distance from their respective sposey. There was a happy boldness at the best in their mingling thus, each unaccompanied, and the same sustained sociability, just exactly a touch of that eccentricity of associated freedom which set so lightly on the imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as much as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should, at such a rate, go about together, go on the other hand, this consideration drew relief from the fact that, in their high conditions, and with the easy tradition, the almost inspiring allowances of the house in question, no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced anything more than funny. Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider, looking as it did well over the heads of all lower growths, and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated party to the general alliance. What any one thought of any one else, above all of any one else with any one else, was a matter incurring in these lulls so little awkward formulation that hovering judgment, the spirit with the scales, might perfectly have been imaged there as some rather snubbed and subdued, but quite trained in tactful poor relation of equal, of the properest lineage, only of aspect a little dingy, doubtless from too limited a change of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence, never betrayed by a rattle of her rusty machine, a room in the attic and a plate at the side table were decently usual. It was amusing in such lightness of air that the prince should again present himself only to speak for the princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home, and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as it embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, and the way of sofas and cabinets habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at Pompey's houses, had been found to expose him. That was all right, the noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess. What would the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying even at moments like some infant Hercules who wouldn't be dressed? What would these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow guests that the poor assingums, and their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendor, were the only approach to a false note in the concert. The stir of the air was such foregoing in a degree to one's head, that as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure. Every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger. Every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favor of the powers, the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees, and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand, to that the thing came back, was above all for courage and good humor, and the value of this as a general assurance, that is foreseen one through it the worst, had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large, languorous, unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns, which was, much to the point, in its hand. Courage and good humor, therefore, were the breath of the day, though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amorigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided in the bosom of his wife at so contented a view of his conduct and course, a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in, and this wonder of irony became, on occasion, too intense to be kept holy to himself. It wasn't that it match him, anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they said, to happen. There were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it had been called, struck him so full on the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of, what, indeed, would they have made of it? They were, of course, Maggie and her father, moping, so far as they ever consented to mope and monotonous eaten square, but placid, too, in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew it might have appeared in these lights absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of, whether beautifully or cynically, and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn't one of their needs and that they were, in fact, constitutionally inaccessible to it. They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children, so that verily the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio. The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father's wife, should prove to have been made for the long run after the pattern set from so far back to the ververs. If one was so made, one had certainly no business on any terms at Machum. Whereas if one wasn't, one had no business there on the particular terms, terms of conformity with the principles of Eden Square, under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man, which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation, deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous, but that one couldn't yet help, as, for instance, when one's wife chose in the most usual way to make one so. Precisely here, however, was the difference. It had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual, yet to which nonetheless it would be too absurd that he should merely lend himself. Being thrust systematically with another woman, and a woman one happened by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one is idiotic or incapable, this was a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one's own handling. What was supremely grotesque, in fact, was the essential opposition of theories. As if a gallantuomo, as he at least constitutionally conceived, gallantumony could do anything but blush to go about at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it, also as a man of the world, all merciful justice. But assuredly nonetheless, there was but one way really to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich ineffectual comment, Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Isn't this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them during their auspicious visit of an exquisite sense of complicity. CHAPTER XXI He found himself therefore saying with gaiety, even to fanny assing him for their common concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place, what would Arcari Sposy have made of it here? What would they, you know, really? Which overflow would have been reckless, if already and surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of this friend as the person in whom the element of protest had of late been unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself, of course, to her replying, ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for you? But quite apart from the small sense the question would have had at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and cheer. He had his view as well, or at least a partial one, of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver's last dinner. Without diplomatizing to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight. She had let herself in for being, as she had made haste for that matter, during the very first half hour, at teach or proclaim herself, the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quaint your graces, her little local authority, her humor and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her Bonamese, that they were hers, dear Fanny Asingham's, these matters and others would be all now as not. Five minutes had suffice to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst, be picturesque, for she habitually spoke of herself as local to Sloan Street, whereas it match'em she should never be anything but horrible, and that all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement in her, of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn't really watching him, ground for which would have been too terribly grave, she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure. So she might precisely mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take. The Prince could see it all. It wasn't a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn't even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips that she now knew her. He didn't then say, ah, see what you've done, isn't it rather your own fault? He behaved differently altogether, eminently distinguished himself, for she told him she had never seen him so universally distinguished. He yet distinguished her in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for bridge and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived it match him. So that his niceness to her, she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes, had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration. She understands, he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs. Berver. She understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her time, but she hasn't last made it out for herself. She sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with a sense of security most favorable to it. She can't, of course, very well put it to us that we have so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances. She can't say, in so many words, don't think of me, for I too must make the best of mine, arrange as you can only, and live as you must. I don't get quite that from her any more than I ask for it, but her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care in our way as she so anxiously takes in hers, so that she's, well, the prince wound up, what you may call practically all right. Charlotte, in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn't call it anything. Return as he might to the lucidity, the importance or whatever it was of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She led him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself. Only on the eve of their visit's end was she, for once, clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half hour before dinner. This easiest of chances they had already a couple of times arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on, be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall, then, was empty before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemates were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire at one end where they might imitate with art, the unpremeditated. Above all, here, for the snatched instance, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They had prolongations of instance that counted as visions of bliss. They had slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them, so that our young woman's tone had even now a certain dryness. It's very good of her, my dear, to trust us. But what else can she do? Why, whatever people do when they don't trust, let one see they don't. But let whom see? Well, let me, say, to begin with. And should you mind that? He had a slight show of surprise. Shouldn't you? Her letting you see? No, said Charlotte. The only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don't look out, may let her see. To which she added. You may let her see you know that you're afraid. I'm only afraid of you a little at moments, he presently returned. But I shan't let Fanny see that. It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Asingham's vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done. What in the world can she do against us? There's not a word that she can breathe. She's helpless. She can't speak. She would be herself the first to be dished by it. And then as he seemed slow to follow, it all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage. The Prince might have had his moment of demure, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. May she also be said a good deal to have made yours. That was intended, I think, wasn't it? For a kind of rectification? Charlotte, on her side for an instant, hesitated. Then she was prompter still. I don't mean there was anything to rectify. Everything was as it had to be, and I'm not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I'm speaking of how she took in her way, each time, their lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up today. She can't go to them and say, It's very awkward, of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken. He took it in still with his long look at her. All the more that she wasn't. She was right. He's right, he went on, and everything will stay so. Then that's all I say. But he worked it out for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. We're happy and they're happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny assing him want? Ah, my dear, said Charlotte. It's not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she's fixed, that she must stand exactly where everything has by her own act placed her. It's you who have seemed haunted with the possibility for her of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for. And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile. We are prepared for anything, for everything, and as we are, practically, so she must take us. She's condemned to consistency. She's doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore, Mrs. Verber gently laughed, she has the chance of her life. So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere. Maybe but a mask for doubts and fears and for gaining time. The prince had looked with the question as if this again could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. You keep talking about such things as if they were our fair at all. I feel at any rate that I have nothing to do with her doubts and fears or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It's enough for me that she'll always be of necessity, much more afraid for herself really, either to see or to speak than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren't. And Charlotte's face, with these words, to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them, fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption, so apt as the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed the next instant have seen her friend wince in advance at her use of a word that was already on her lips. For it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn't here to fore by a hare's breath deviated. If it didn't sound so vulgar, I should say that we're, fatally as it were, safe. Pardon the low expression, since it's what we happen to be. We're so because they are, and they're so because they can't be anything else. From the moment that having originally intervened for them, she wouldn't now be able to bear herself if she didn't keep them so. That's the way she's inevitably with us, said Charlotte over her smile. We hang essentially together. Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. Yes, I see. We hang essentially together. His friend had a shrug, a shrug that had a grace. The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. Ah, beyond doubt it's a case. He stood looking at her. It's a case. There can't, he said. Have been many. Perhaps never, never, never any other. That, she smiled. I confess I should like to think. Only hours. Only hours, most probably. Sparriamo. To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added. Poor Fanny. But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. Looking in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air. Poor poor Fanny. It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the spirit of these words, that the party at Machum, raking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of the social side of the process of repatriation with due presence of mind. It was impossible for reasons that he should travel to town with the assingums. It was impossible for the same reasons that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right tone for disposing of his elder friend's suggestion, an assumption in fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs. Verver had been precisely a part of Mrs. Assingham's mildness, and nothing could better have characterized her sense for social shades than her easy perception that the gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton Square might now confess, quite without indiscretion, to simultaneity of movement. She had made, for the four days, no direct appeal to the latter personage, but the Prince was accidental witness of her taking a fresh start at the moment the company were about to scatter for the last night of their stay. There had been at this climax the usual preparatory talk about hours and combinations in the midst of which poor Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said, You and the Prince love, quite apparently without blinking. She took for granted their public withdrawal together. She remarked that she and Bob were alike ready, in the interest of sociability, to take any train that would make them all one party. I feel really as if all this time I have seen nothing of you. That gave an added grace to the candor of the dear things approach. But just then it was, on the other hand, that the young man found himself borrow most effectively the secret of the right tongue for doing as he preferred. His preference had, during the evening, not failed of occasion to press him with mute insistences, practically without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy. It had arrived that a felt identity was Charlotte's own. She spoke all for their friend while she answered their friend's question, but she nonetheless signaled to him as definitely as if she had fluttered a white handkerchief from a window. It's awfully sweet of you, darling. Our going together would be charming, but you mustn't mind us. You must suit yourselves we've settled, Amorigo and I, to stay over till after luncheon. Amorigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned straight away so as not to be instantly appealed to, and for the very emotion of the wonder furthermore, of what divination may achieve when winged by a community of passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had been keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered it simply as a consequence of their deepening, unexpressed need of each other, and without the passing between them of a word. He hadn't, God knew, to take it from her. She was too conscious of what he wanted. But the lesson for him was in the straight, clear tone that Charlotte could thus distill in the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no touch for plausibility, that she wasn't strictly obliged to add, and in the truly superior way in which women, so situated, express and distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Asingham quite adequately. She had not spoiled it by a reason, a scrap larger than the smallest that would serve, and she had above all, thrown off, for his stretch to but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun. The measure of everything, to all his sense, at these moments, was in it. The measure especially of the thought that had been growing with him, a positive obsession and that began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with the truth of an exquisite order at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself. The truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn't possibly, saved by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. They had already told them, with an hourly voice, that it had a meaning. A meaning that their associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plow through the sands and the sight afar of the palm cluster, might drink in at last the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day, and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive taste of it. Yet it was all, nonetheless, as if their response had remained below their fortune. How to bring it by some brave free lift up to the same height was the idea with which, behind and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of which, as in that of the sun-checkered green wood of romance, his spirit thus, at the opening of a vista, met hers. They were already from that moment, so hand in hand in the place that he found himself making use, five minutes later, of exactly the same tone as Charlotte's, for telling Mrs. Assingham, that he was likewise, in the matter of the return to London, sorry for what might not be. This had become, of a sudden, the simplest thing in the world, the sense of which, moreover, seemed really to amount to a portent that he should feel, for evermore, on the general head, conveniently at his ease with her. He went in fact a step further than Charlotte, put the latter forward as creating his necessity. She was staying over luncheon to oblige their hostess, as a consequence of which he must also stay to see her decently home. He must deliver her safe and sound, he felt, in Eaton Square. Regret as he might too, the difference made by this obligation, he frankly didn't mind, in as much as over and above the pleasure itself, his scruple would certainly gratify both Mr. Verver and Maggie. They never yet had absolutely and entirely learned, he even found deliberation to intimate, how little he really neglected the first, as it seemed nowadays quite to have become, of his domestic duties. Therefore he still constantly felt how little he must remit his effort to make them remark it, to which he added, with equal lucidity, that they would return in time for dinner, and if he didn't, as a last word, subjoin that it would be lovely a fanny to find, on her own return, a moment to go to Eaton Square and report them a struggling bravely on, this was not because the impulse, down to the very name for the amiable act, altogether failed to rise. His inward assurance, his general plan, had at moments where she was concerned, its drops of continuity, and nothing would less have pleased him than that she should suspect in him, however tempted, any element of conscious cheek. But he was always, that was really the upshot, cultivating, thanklessly, the considerate and the delicate. It was a long lesson, this unlearning, with people of English race, all the little superstitions that accompany friendship. Mrs. Asingham herself was the first to say that she would unfailingly report. She brought it out in fact, he thought, quite wonderfully, having attained the summit of the wonderful, during the brief interval that had separated her appeal to Charlotte from this passage with himself. She had taken the five minutes, obviously, amid the rest of the talk and the movement, to retire into her tent for meditation, which showed, among several things, the impression Charlotte had made on her. It was from the tent she emerged, as with arms refurbished, though who indeed could say if the manner in which she now met him spoke most really of the glitter of battle, or of the white waiver of the flag of truce. The parlay was short either way, the gallantry of her offer was all sufficient. I'll go to our friends then, I'll ask for luncheon, I'll tell them when to expect you. That will be charming, say we're all right. All right, precisely, I can't say more, Mrs. Asingham smiled. No doubt. But he considered, as for the possible importance of it. Neither can you, by what I seem to feel, say less. Oh, I won't say less, Fanny laughed, with which the next moment she had turned away, but they had it again, not less bravely on the morrow after breakfast and the thick of the advancing carriages and the exchange of farewells. I think I'll send home my maid from Houston, she was then prepared to amend, and go to Eaton Square straight, so you can be easy. Oh, I think we're easy, the Prince returned. Be sure to say at any rate that we're bearing up. You're bearing up, good. And Charlotte returns to dinner. To dinner. We're not likely, I think, to make another night away. Well then, I wish you at least a pleasant day. Oh, he laughed as they separated, we shall do our best for it. After which, in due course, with the announcement of their conveyance, the Asingham's rolled off. CHAPTER XXII It was quite for the Prince after this, as if the view had further cleared, so that the half hour during which he strolled on the terrace and smoked, the day being lovely, overflowed with the plenitude of its particular quality. Its general brightness was composed doubtless of many elements, but what shone out of it as if the whole place and time had been a great picture from the hand of genius, presented to him as a prime ornament for his collection and all varnished and framed to hang up, what marked it especially for the highest appreciation was his extraordinarily unchallenged, his absolutely appointed and enhanced possession of it. Poor Fanny Asingham's challenge amounted to nothing. One of the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble balustrade, so like others that he knew in still more nobly terraced Italy, was that she was squared, all conveniently even to herself, and that rumbling toward London with this contentment she had become an image irrelevant to the scene. It further passed across him, as his imagination was, for reasons during the time, unprecedentedly active, that he had, after all, gained more from women than he had ever lost by them. There appeared so more and more on those mystic books that are kept in connection with such commerce, even by men of the loosest business habits, a balance in his favor that he could pretty well as a rule take for granted. What were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures, but combine and conspire for his advantage? From Maggie herself, most wonderful in her way of all, to his hostess of the present hour, and to whose head it had so inevitably come to keep Charlotte on, for reasons of her own, and who had asked in this benevolent spirit, why in the world, if not obliged, without plausibility, to hurry, her husband's son-in-law should not wait over in her company. He would at least see, Lady Castellene had said, that nothing dreadful should happen to her, either while still there or during the exposure of the run to town, and for that matter, if they exceeded a little their license, it would positively help them to have done so together. Each of them would, in this way, at home, have the other comfortably to blame, all of which besides, in Lady Castellene as in Maggie, and Fanny Asingham as in Charlotte herself, was working. For him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their part, definite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte, that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his remarkable fortune. But there were more things before him than even these, things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious, and the towers of three cathedrals in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly like dim silver, in the same richness of tone, didn't he somehow the more feel it so, because precisely Lady Castellene had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain sweet intelligibility as a note of the day? It made everything fit. Above all, it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he lingered and waited, his meditative smile. She had detained Charlotte because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she couldn't detain Mr. Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ample adropery. Castellene had gone up to London, the place was all her own. She had had a fancy for a quiet morning with Mr. Blint, a sleek, civil, accomplished young man, distinctly younger than her ladyship, who played and sang delightfully, played even bridge and sang the English comic as well as the French tragic, and the presence, which really meant the absence, of a couple of other friends, if they were happily chosen, would make everything all right. The Prince had the sense, all good-humoredly, of being happily chosen, and it was not spoiled for him even by another sense that followed in its train, and with which, during his life in England, he had more than once had reflectively to deal. The state of being reminded how, after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant to the working of affairs that he could be bent on occasion to use his comparatively trivial. No other of her guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess. Affairs of whatever sorts had claimed, by early trains, every active, easy, smoothly working man, each in his way a lubricated item of the great social, political, administrative on-grinage, claimed most of all Castellene himself, who was so very oddly, than the personages and the type, rather a large item. If he, on the other hand, had an affair, it was not of that order. It was of the order, verily, that he had been reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute. It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision of being reduced interfered not at all with the measure of his actual ease. It kept before him again, at moments, the so familiar fact of his sacrifices, down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his wife's convenience, of his real situation in the world, with the consequence thus that he was, in the last analysis, among all these so often inferior people, practically held cheap and made light of. But though all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them. From that of the droll ambiguity of English relations, to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn't somehow take Mr. Blint seriously. He was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than a Roman prince who consented to be an abeyance. Yet it was past finding out, either, how such a woman as Lady Casseldeen could take him, since this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, well. He had lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various other things with them. But the number of questions about them he couldn't have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one residual impression. They didn't like less situation, net. That was all he was very sure of. They wouldn't have them at any price. It had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise, the very influence of which actually so hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air, the light and the color, the fields and the hills and the sky, the blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, moved to it every accent of their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it had succeeded. It had made up to now for that seeded solidity and the rich sea mist on which the garish, the supposedly envious peoples have ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even much initiation left one at given moments so puzzled as to the element of staleness and all the freshness and of freshness and all the staleness of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were other marble terraces sweeping more purple prospects on which he would have known what to think and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fill-up of a discerned relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning. The inquiring mind in these present conditions might, it was true, be more sharply challenged, but the result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to know, was too often to be confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse of logic, a confirmed bewilderment. And moreover, above all, nothing mattered in the relation of the enclosing scene to his own consciousness, but its very most direct bearings. Lady Castledine's dream of Mr. Blint for the morning was doubtless already with all the spacious harmonies reestablished, taking the form of going over something with him, at the piano, in one of the numerous smaller rooms that were consecrated to the less gregarious uses. What she had wished had been affected, her convenience had been assured. This made him, however, wonder the more where Charlotte was, since he didn't at all suppose her to be making a tackless third, which would be to have accepted mere spectatorship and the duet of their companions. The upshot of everything for him, a like of the less and of the more, was that the exquisite day bloomed there like a large fragrant flower that he had only to gather. But it was to Charlotte he wished to make the offering, and as he moved along the terrace, which rendered visible parts of two sides of the house, he looked up at all the windows that were open to the April morning, and wondered which of them would represent his friend's room. It befell thus that his question, after no long time, was answered. He saw Charlotte appear above as if she had been called by the pausing of his feet on the flags. She had come to the sill on which she leaned to look down, and she remained there a minute smiling at him. He had been immediately struck with her wearing a hat and a jacket, which conduced to her appearance of readiness not so much to join him, with a beautiful uncovered head and a parasol, where he stood, as to take with him some larger step altogether. The larger step had been, since the evening before, intensely in his own mind, though he had not fully thought out even yet, the slightly difficult detail of it. But he had had no chance, such as he needed, to speak the definite word to her, and the face she now showed affected him accordingly as a notice that she had wonderfully guessed it for herself. They had these identities of impulse. They had had them repeatedly before. And if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness. What in fact most often happened was that her rightness went, as who should say, even further than his own. They were conscious of the same necessity at the same moment. And it was she, as a general thing, who most clearly saw her way to it. Something in her long look at him now out of the old gray window, something in the very poise of her hat, the color of her neck-tie, the prolonged stillness of her smile, touched into sudden light for him all the wealth of the fact that he could count on her. He had his hand there, to pluck it, on the open bloom of the day. But what did the bright minute mean, but that her answering hand was already intelligently out? So therefore, while the minute lasted, it passed between them that their cup was full, which cupped their very eyes, holding it fast, carried and steadied, and began as they tasted it, to praise. He broke over, after a moment, the silence. It only once a moon, a mandolin and a little danger, to be a serenade, ah, then, she lightly called down. Let it at least have this, with which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another in the front of her dress and flung it down to him. He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched and placed it in his buttonhole. Come down quickly, he said in an Italian, not loud but deep. Vengo, vengo! She is clearly but more lightly tossed out, and she had left him the next minute to wait for her. He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes rested, as they had already often done, on the brave, darker wash of faraway watercolor that represented the most distant of the cathedral towns. This place, with its great church and its high accessibility, its towers that distinguishably signaled, its English history, its appealing type, its acknowledged interests, this place had sounded its name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of things which now throbbed within him. He had kept saying to himself, Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester, quite as if the sharpest meaning of all the years just past were intensely expressed in it. That meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte, stood there together in the very luster of this truth. Every present circumstance helped to proclaim it. It was blown into their faces as by the lips of the morning. He knew why, from the first of his marriage, he had tried with such patience for such conformity. He knew why he had given up so much and bored himself so much. He knew why he, at any rate, had gone in, on the basis of all forms, on the basis of his having, in a manner, sold himself for a situation net. It had all been just an order that his—well, what on earth should he call it but his freedom? Should it present be as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl? He hadn't struggled nor snatched. He was taking but what had been given him. The pearl dropped itself with its exquisite quality and rarity straight into his hand. Here precisely it was incarnate. Its size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared, a far off, in one of the smaller doorways. She came toward him in silence while he moved to meet her. The great scale of this particular front, at Machum, multiplied thus, in the golden morning, the stages of their meeting and the successions of their consciousness. It wasn't till she had come quite close that he produced for her his gloster, gloster, gloster, and his—look at it over there. She knew just where to look. Yes, isn't it one of the best? There are cloisters or towers or something. And her eyes, which though her lips smiled were almost grave with their depths of acceptance, came back to him. Over the tomb of some old king. We must see the old king. We must do the cathedral, he said. We must know all about it. If we could but take, he exhaled, the full opportunity. And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes. I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together. I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do. So that I know ten miles off how you feel. But do you remember, she asked, apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you wouldn't have? Just before your marriage, she brought it back to him. The gilded crystal bowl and the little Bloomsbury shop. Oh, yes. But it took, with a slight surprise, on the prince's part some small recollecting. The treacherous, cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me and the little swindling Jew who understood Italian and who backed you up. But I feel this is an occasion, he immediately added. And I hope you don't mean, he smiled, that as an occasion it's also cracked. They spoke naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as they were, though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows. But it made each fine in the other's voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed. Don't you think too much of cracks and aren't you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks, said Charlotte. And I've often recalled the bowl and the little swindling Jew wondering if they've parted company. He made, she said, a great impression on me. Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on him, and I dare say that if you were to go back to him you'd find he has been keeping that treasure for you. But as to cracks, the prince went on. What did you tell me the other day you prettily called them in English? Rifts within the loot? Risk them as much as you like for yourself, but don't risk them for me. He spoke it in all the gaiety of his just barely tremulous serenity. I go, as you know, by my superstitions. And that's why, he said, I know where we are. There every one today on our side. Resting on the parapet toward the great view, she was silent a little, and he saw the next moment that her eyes were closed. I go but by one thing. Her hand was on the sunwarm stone, so that turned as they were away from the house. He put his own upon it and covered it. I go by you, she said. I go by you. So they remained a moment till he spoke again with a gesture that matched. What is really our great necessity, you know, is to go by my watch. It's already eleven. He had looked at the time, so that if we stop here for luncheon what becomes of our afternoon? To this Charlotte's eyes opened straight. There's not the slightest need of our stopping here to luncheon. Don't you see, she asked, how I'm ready? He had taken it in, but there was always more and more of her. You mean you've arranged? It's easy to arrange. My maid goes up with my things. You've only to speak to your man about chores, and they can go together. You mean we can leave at once? She let him have it all. One of the carriages about which I spoke will already have come back for us. If your superstitions are on our side, she smiled. So my arrangements are, and I'll back my support against yours. Then you had thought, he wondered, about Gloucester. She hesitated, but it was only her way. I thought you would think. We have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They are food for superstition, if you like. It's beautiful, she went on, that it should be Gloucester. Gloucester, Gloucester, as you say, making it sound like an old song. However, I'm sure Gloucester, Gloucester will be charming. She still added, we shall be able easily to lunch there, and with our luggage and our servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours. We can wire, she wound up, from there. Ever so quietly she had brought it, as she had thought it, all out, and it had to be as covertly that he let his appreciation expand. Then Lady Casseldeen doesn't dream of our staying. He took it but thinking yet. Then what does she dream? Of Mr. Blint, poor dear, of Mr. Blint only. Her smile for him, for the Prince himself, was free. Have I positively to tell you that she doesn't want us? She only wanted us for the others, to show she wasn't left alone with him. Now that that's done, and that they've all gone, she of course knows for herself. Knows, the Prince vaguely echoed. Why, that we like cathedrals, that we inevitably stop to see them, or go round to take them in, whenever we've a chance, that it's what our respective families quite expect of us, and would be disappointed for us to fail of. This, as for estieri, Mrs. Verver pursued, would be our pull, if our pull weren't indeed so great all round. He could only keep his eyes on her. And have you made out the very train? The very one. Paddington, the six-fifty, in. That gives us oceans. We can dine at the usual hour at home, and as Maggie will, of course, be an eaten square, I hereby invite you. For a while he still but looked at her. It was a minute before he spoke. Thank you very much. With pleasure. To which he, in a moment, added. But the train for Gloucester. A local one, eleven-twenty-two, with several stops, but doing it a good deal I forget how much within the hour, so that we've time. Only, she said, we must employ our time. He roused himself as from the mere momentary spell of her. He looked again at his watch while they moved back to the door through which she had advanced. But he had also again questions and stops, all as for the mystery and the charm. You looked it up without my having asked you. Oh, my dear, she laughed. I've seen you with Bradshaw. It takes Anglo-Saxon blood. Blood, he echoed. You've that of every race. It kept her before him. You're terrible. Well, he could put it as he liked. I know the name of the inn. What is it, then? There, too, you'll see. But I've chosen the right one. And I think I remember the tomb, she smiled. Oh, the tomb. Any tomb would do for him. But I mean I had been keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with it. You had been keeping it for me as much as you like. But how do you make out, she asked, that you were keeping it from me? I don't, now. How shall I ever keep anything, some day when I shall wish to? Ah, for things I may not want to know, I promise you shall find me stupid. They had reached their door, was she herself paused to explain. These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I've wanted everything. Well, it was all right. You shall have everything. End of chapter 22.