 CHAPTER XI. Mrs. Asingham and the Colonel, quitting fawns before the end of September, had come back later on, and now, a couple of weeks after, they were again interrupting their stay, but this time with the question of their return left to depend on matters that were rather hinted at than unfortunately named. The Luches and Mrs. Rantz had also, by the action of Charlotte Stantz's arrival, ceased to linger, though with hopes and theories as to some promptitude of renewal, of which the lively expression, awakening the echoes of the great stone-paved, oak-paneled, galleried hall that was not the least interesting feature of the place, seemed still a property of the air. It was on this admirable spot that before her October afternoon had waned, Fanny Asingham spent with her easy host a few moments which led to her announcing her own and her husband's final secession, at the same time as they tempted her to point the moral of all vain reverberations. The double door of the house stood open to an effective hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful windless, waiting golden hour, under the influence of which Adam Verver met his genial friend as she came to drop into the post-box with her own hand a thick sheaf of letters. They presently thereafter left the house together and drew out half an hour on the terrace in a manner they were to revert to and thought, later on, as that of persons who really had been taking leave of each other at a parting of the ways. He traced his impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she had begun by using about Charlotte's stant. She simply cleared them out. Those had been the three words, thrown off in reference to the general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in, the Halcyon days, the full beauty of which had appeared to shine out for them after Charlotte's arrival. For it was during these days that Mrs. Rance and the Miss Luches had been observed to be gathering themselves for departure, and it was with that difference made that the sense of the whole situation showed most fair, the sense of how right they had been to engage for so ample a residence, and of all the pleasures so fruity and autumn there could hold in its lap. This was what had occurred, that their lesson had been learned, and what Mrs. Asingham had dwelt upon was that without Charlotte it would have been learned but half. It would certainly not have been taught by Mrs. Rance and the Miss Luches if these ladies had remained with them as long as at one time seemed probable. Charlotte's light intervention had thus become a cause, operating covertly but nonetheless actively, and Fanny Asingham's speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within him, fairly to startle him as the indication of something irresistible. He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked to recover the sight, little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies whom he had after all entertained for a stiffish series of days. She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn't known what was happening, happening that is as a result of her influence. Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke, Mrs. Asingham remarked, which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie, the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend, an odd little taste, as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing so to speak what could be said about her. Almost as at her portrait by some imminent hand were going on, so that he watched it grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs. Asingham had struck him, applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young friend, so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie's, as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions of his having paternally lumped the two children together, and the recommendation that they shouldn't make too much noise nor eat too much jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte's prompt influence she had not been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent visitors. I felt, in fact, privately so sorry for them, that I kept my impression to myself while they were here, wishing not to put the rest of you on the scent. Neither Maggie nor the Prince, nor yourself, nor even Charlotte herself if you didn't happen to notice. Since you didn't, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I'm not. I followed it all. One saw the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things. Very much as I suppose people at the court of the Borges may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the honor of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison's only a little awkward, for I don't in the least mean that Charlotte was consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their poison, in the sense of morally disagreeing with them, but she didn't know it. Ah, she didn't know it. Mr. Verver had asked with interest. Well, I think she didn't. Disassing him had to admit that she hadn't pressingly sounded her. I don't pretend to be sure in every connection of what Charlotte knows. She doesn't certainly like to make people suffer, not in general as is the case with so many of us, even other women. She likes much rather to put them at their ease with her. She likes, that is, as all pleasant people do, to be liked. Ah, she likes to be liked, her companion had gone on. She did, at the same time, no doubt, want to help us, to put us at our ease. That is what she wanted to put you, and to put Maggie about you, so far as that went she had a plan. But it was only after, it was not before, I really believe, that she saw how effectively she could work. Again, as Mr. Verver felt, he must have taken it up. Ah, she wanted to help us, wanted to help me. Why, Mrs. Asingham asked after an instant, should it surprise you? He just thought, oh, it doesn't. She saw, of course, as soon as she came, with her quickness where we all were, she didn't need each of us to go by appointment to her room at night or take her out into the fields for our palpitating tale, no doubt even she was rather impatient. Of the poor things, Mr. Verver had here inquired while he waited. Well, of your not yourselves being so, and of your not in particular, I haven't the least doubt on the world, par exempli, that she thinks you too meek. Oh, she thinks me too meek. And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in, all she had to do after all was to be nice to you. To, ah, me? Said Adam Verver. He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. To you and to everyone. She had only to be what she is, and to be it all round. If she's charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she acted as the bourgeois wine used to act. One saw it come over them, the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks. Then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it's she who's the real thing. Ah, it's she who's the real thing? As he had not hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Luches and Mrs. Rance, so doubtless he had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal. I see, I see. He could at least simply take it home now. Yet is not without wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was. And what would it be, ah, definitely that you understand by that? She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. Why, exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognize that they never will. Oh, of course never. It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and deepened after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as real, just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter's marriage. The note of reality, and so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great finds, continued beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets say, and new human acquisitions, all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with the finest of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old Morocco case stamped in unaffacible guilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amorigo and about the Bernardino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter's betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself about Charlotte's stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached, and as to which he had made out contentedly, that further news was to be obtained from a certain Mr. Guderman Seuss of Brighton. It was all at bottom in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold still flame, where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea, followed by appropriation, of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind, where in short, in spite of the general tendency of the devouring element to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping up of profane altrufires. Adam Verver had, in other words, learnt the lesson of the senses to the end of his own little book, without having for a day raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large, being in this particular not unlike those fortunate bachelors or other gentleman of pleasure, who so managed their entertainment of compromising company that even the austereist housekeeper, occupied incompetent below stairs, never feels obliged to give warning. That figure has, however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, that before the first ten days of November had elapsed, he found himself practically alone at fawns with his young friend. Amorigo and Maggie, having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going abroad for a month, since his amusement was now scarcely happily assured than his security. An impulse eminently natural had stirred within the Prince. His life, as for some time established, was deliciously dull, and thereby on the whole what he liked best. But a small gust of yearning had swept over him, and Maggie repeated to her father, with infinite admiration, the pretty terms in which, after it had lasted a little, he had described to her this experience. He called it a serenade, a low music that, outside one of the windows of the sleeping house, disturbed his rest at night. As timid as it was, and plaintive, he yet couldn't close his eyes for it, and when finally, rising on tiptoe, he had looked out, he had recognized in the figure below with a mandolin, all duskily draped in her grace, the raised, appealing eyes and the one irresistible voice of the ever-to-be-loved Italy. Sooner or later, that way, one had to listen. It was a hovering, haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim, pathetic shade crying out to be comforted. For this there was obviously but one way, as there were doubtless also many words for the simple fact that so primal Roman had a fancy for again seeing Rome. They would, accordingly, hadn't they better, go for a little. Maggie, meanwhile, making the too absurdly artful point with her father, so that he repeated it in his amusement to Charlotte Stant, to whom he was by this time conscious of addressing many remarks, that it was absolutely, when she came to think, the first thing Amorigo had ever asked of her. She doesn't count, of course, his having asked of her to marry him. This was Mr. Verver's indulgent criticism. But he found Charlotte, equally touched by the ingenuous Maggie, in easy agreement with him over the question. If the Prince had asked something of his wife every day in the year, this would be still no reason why the poor dear man should not, in a beautiful fit of homesickness, revisit without reproach his native country. What his father-in-law frankly counseled was that the reasonable, the really too reasonable pair, should, while they were about it, take three or four weeks of Paris as well, Paris being always for Mr. Verver, in any stress of sympathy, a suggestion that rose of itself to the lips. If they would only do that on their way back, or however they preferred it, Charlotte and he would go over to join them there for a small look, though even then assuredly, as he had it at heart to add, not on the least because they should have found themselves bored at being left together. The fate of this last proposal, indeed, was that it reeled, for the moment, under an assault of destructive analysis from Maggie, who, having as she granted to choose between being an unnatural daughter or an unnatural mother and electing for the former, to know what would become of the Principino if the house were cleared of everyone but the servants. Her question had fairly resounded, but it had afterwards, like many of her questions, dropped still more effectively than it had risen, the highest moral of the matter being, before the couple took their departure, that Mrs. Noble and Dr. Brady must mount unchallenged guard over the august little crib. If she hadn't supremely believed in the majestic value of the nurse, whose experience was in itself the amplest of pillows, just as her attention was a spreading canopy from which precedent and reminiscence dropped as thickly as parted curtains, if she hadn't been able to rest in this confidence she would fairly have sent her husband on his journey without her. In the same manner, if the sweetest, for it was so she qualified him, of little country doctors hadn't proved to her his wisdom by rendering irresistible, especially on rainy days and in direct proportion to the frequency of his calls, adapted to all weathers, that she should converse with him for hours over causes and consequences over what he had found to answer with his little five at home, she would have drawn scant support from the presence of a mere grandfather and a mere brilliant friend. These persons accordingly, her own predominance having thus for the time given way, could carry with a certain ease, and above all with mutual aid, their consciousness of a charge. So far as their office weighed they could help each other with it, which was, in fact, to become, as Mrs. Noble herself loomed larger for them, not a little of a relief and a diversion. Mr. Verver met his young friend at certain hours in the day nursery, very much as he had regularly met the child's fond mother, Charlotte having, as she clearly considered, given Maggie equal pledges and desiring never to fail of the last word for the daily letter she had promised to write. She wrote with high fidelity, she let her companion know, and the effect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself didn't write. The reason of this was partly the Charlotte told all about him, which she also let him know she did, and partly that he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was generally quite systematically eased and, as they said, done for. Committed, as it were, to this charming and clever young woman, who, by becoming for him a domestic resource, had become for him practically a new person, and committed especially in his own house, which somehow made his sense of it a deeper thing, he took an interest in seeing how far the connection could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and, thus, putting to the test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Asingham had said, at the last, about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one, though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been so usefully for Fanny. No Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help her to be felt, according to Fanny's diagnosis, as real. She was real, decidedly, from other causes, and Mr. Verver grew in time even a little amused at the amount of machinery Mrs. Asingham had seemed to see needed for pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than during those, at which we have just glanced, when Mrs. Noble made them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the Queen Mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the air. Treated on such occasions, as at best, a pair of dangling and merely nominal court functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the Petite's entrees but quite external to the state, which began and ended with the nursery, they could only retire, in quick and sociability, to what was left them of the palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to Rococo Chamberlain's moving among China lap dogs. Every evening after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him, seated at the piano and requiring no music. She went through his favorite things, and he had many favorites, with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice. She could play anything, she could play everything, always shockingly, she of course insisted, but always by his own vague measure, very much as if she might, slim, ingenuous, and strong, and with practice, passion, have been playing long tennis, or endlessly, and rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while on his comparatively shaded sofa and smoking, smoking, always smoking, and the great Fawn's drawing-room is everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations, while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte's piano, where the score was ever absent but between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest. It was a manner of passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air at the end, nonetheless, before they separated, had a way of seeming full of the echoes of talk. They separated in the hushed house, not quite easily, yet not quite awkwardly either, with tapers that twinkled in large, dark spaces, and for the most part so late that the last solemn servant had been dismissed for the night. Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there had been a full ward or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other voices, a ward or two that affected our friend even at the moment, and rather oddly as louder and rounder than any previous sound, and then he had lingered under pretext of an opened window to be made secure after taking leave of his companion in the hall and watching her glimmer away up the staircase. He had for himself another impulse then to go to bed. Picking up a hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape and lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace through one of the long drawing-room windows and moved to and fro there for an hour beneath the sharp autumn stars. It was where he had walked in the afternoon sun with fanny-assing him, and the sense of that other hour, the sense of the suggestive woman herself, was before him again, as in spite of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it had not yet been. He thought in a loose and almost agitated order of many things, the power that was in them to agitate having been part of his conviction that he should not soon sleep. He truly felt for a while that he should never sleep again until something had come to him, some light, some idea, some mere happy word, perhaps, that he had begun to want, but it had been till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. Can you really then come if we start early? That was practically all he had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And why in the world not, when I have nothing else to do, and should besides so immensely like it? This had has definitely been, on her side, the limit of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene, even of the littlest at all, though he perhaps didn't quite know why something like the menace of one hadn't proceeded from her stopping halfway upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content herself for their journey with a toothbrush and a sponge. There hovered about him at all events while he walked. Appearance is already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor yet so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him up to now that this particular bomb was a mixture of which Amorigo, as through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret, so that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakably acquired it through the young man's having amably passed it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was mistress in an equal degree of the regulated that developed art of placing him high in the scale of importance. That was even for his own thought a clumsy way of expressing the element of similarity in the agreeable effect they each produced on him, and that held him for a little only because this coincidence in their felicity caused him vaguely to connect or associate them in the matter of tradition, training, tact, or whatever else one might call it. It might almost have been, if such a link between them was to be imagined, that Amorigo had, a little, coached or incited their young friend, or perhaps rather that she had simply, as one of the signs of the general perfection Fanny Asingham commended in her, profited by observing, during her short opportunity before the start of the travelers, the pleasant application by the prints of his personal system. He might wonder what exactly it was that they so resembled each other in treating him like, from what noble and noble-propagated convention in cases in which the exquisite importance was to be neither too grossly attributed nor too grossly denied, they had taken their specific lesson. But the difficulty was here, of course, that one could really never know, couldn't know without having been one's self a personage, whether a pope, a king, a president, a peer, a general, or just a beautiful author. Before such a question as before several others when they recurred, he would come to a pause, leaning his arms on the old parapet and losing himself in a far excursion. He had, as to so many of the matters in hand, a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out in his unrest for some idea, working in the vast freshness of the night, at the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion, and so spreading beneath him make him feel that he floated. But he kept finding himself returned to, disturbingly enough, was the reflection, deeper than anything else, that in forming a new and intimate tie he should in a manner abandon, or at the best signally relegate, his daughter. He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost her, as was indeed inevitable, by her own marriage. He should reduce to definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the best an inconvenience that required some make-weight and deserved some amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that he should appear to adopt in doing it the sentiment, in fact the very conviction, entertained and quite sufficiently expressed by Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had suffered, putting it with extravagance at her hands. If she put it with extravagance, the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came, which she put with extravagance, too, from her persistence always in thinking, feeling, talking about him, as young. He had had glimpses of moments when to hear her thus and her absolutely unforced compunction, one would have supposed a special edge of the wrong she had done him to consist in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself, it wouldn't so much have mattered if he had been of common parental age, that he wasn't, that he was just her extraordinary equal in contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened out so wide for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace where he stood, the others with their steps below, the gardens, the park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange midnight sun. It all met him during these instances as a vast expanse of discovery, a world that looked so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had been allowed, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character, and verily an inordinate size. This elucination, or whatever he might have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to leave him gasping. The gasp of admiration had by this time, however, lost itself in an intensity that quickly followed, the way the wonder of it, since wonder was in question, truly had been the strange delay of his vision. He had these several days groped and groped for an object that lay at his feet, and as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking beyond, it had sat all the while at his hearthstone, once it now gazed up in his face. Once he had recognized it there, everything became coherent. The sharp point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his future to him, as a father, would be in his so managing that Maggie would less and less appear to herself to a forsaken him. And it not only wouldn't be decently humane, decently possible, not to make this relief easy to her, the idea shone upon him more than that as exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what might be otherwise possible. It stood there absolutely confronted with the material way in which it might be met. The way in which it might be met was by his putting his child at peace, and the way to put her at peace was to provide for his future, that is for hers, by marriage, by a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute. What he hadn't seen was what she could contribute to. When it had all supremely cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend's leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted. It wasn't only moreover that the word with a click so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle in such perfection fitted the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his remedy. Oh, if Charlotte didn't accept him, of course, the remedy would fail. But as everything had fallen together it was at least there to be tried, and success would be great. That was his last throb. If the measure of relief affected for Maggie, should it all prove to have been given by his own actual sense of felicity? He really didn't know when in his life he had thought of anything happier. To think of it merely for himself would have been, even as he had just lately felt, even doing all justice to that condition, yes, impossible. But there was a grand difference in thinking of it for his child. End of CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. OF THE GOLDEN BOWL. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James. Book II CHAPTER XII. It was at Brighton, above all, that this difference came out. It was during the three wonderful days he spent there with Charlotte that he'd acquainted himself further, though doubtless not even now quite completely, with the merits of his majestic scheme. And while, moreover, to begin with, he still but held his vision in place, studying it fairly with his hands, as he had often steadied for inspection, a precarious old pot, or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favor, those independent of what he might himself contribute, and that therefore, till he should speak, remain necessarily vague, that quantity, I say, struck him as positively multiplying, as putting on in the fresh Brighton air and on the sunny Brighton front a kind of tempting palpability. He liked, in this preliminary stage, to feel that he should be able to speak and that he would. The word itself being romantic, pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays, where handsome and ardent young men in uniforms, tights, cloaks, high boots, had it in soliloquies, ever on their lips. In the sense on the first day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second was over, conduced already to make him say to his companion that they must spend more than their mere night or two. At his ease on the ground of what was before him, he had all events definitely desired to be, and it was strongly his impression that he was proceeding step by step. He was acting, it kept coming back to that. Not in the dark, but in the high, golden morning. Not in precipitation, flurry, fever, dangers these of the path of passion properly so-called, but with the deliberation of a plan, a plan that might be a thing of less joy than a passion, but that probably would, in compensation for that loss, be found to have the essential property to wear even the decent dignity of reaching further and of providing for more contingencies. The season was, in local parlance, on. The elements were assembled. The big, windy hotel, the draughty social hall, swarmed with types, in Charlotte's constant phrase, and resounded with a den in which the wild music of gilded and befrogged bands, Croatian, Dalmatian, Carpathian, violently exotic and nostalgic, was distinguished as struggling against the perpetual popping of corks. Much of this would decidedly have disconcerted our friends if it hadn't all happened, more preponderantly, to give them the brighter surprise. The noble privacy of fawns had left them, had left Mr. Verver, at least, with a little accumulated sum of tolerance to spend on the high pitch and high color of the public sphere. The presence, as it had been for him, and as Maggie and Fanny Asingham had both attested, was out of the world, whereas the scene actually about him, with the very sea, a mere big, booming medium for excursions and aquariums, affected him a so plump in the conscious center that nothing could have been more complete for representing that pulse of life, which they had come to unanimity at home, on the subject of their advisedly not hereafter forgetting. The pulse of life was what Charlotte, in her way at home, had lately reproduced, and there were positively current hours when it might have been open to her companion to feel himself again indebted to her for introductions. He had brought her, to put it crudely, but it was almost as if she were herself and her greater gaiety, her livelier curiosity and intensity, her reddier, happier irony, taking him about and showing him the place. No one really, when he came to think, had ever taken him about before. It had always been he of old who took others, and who in particular took Maggie. This quickly fell into its relation with him as part of an experience, marking for him no doubt what people call considerably a time of life, a new and pleasant order, a flattered passive state that might become, why shouldn't it, one of the comforts of the future? Mr. Gooderman Seuss proved, on the second day, our friend had waited till then, a remarkably genial, a positively lustrous young man occupying a small neat house and a quarter of the place remote from the front, and living, as immediate and striking signs testified, in the bosom of his family. Our visitors found themselves introduced, by the operation of close contiguity, to a numerous group of ladies and gentlemen older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who mostly affected them as scarce less anointed for hospitality, and who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, of some anniversary gregariously and religiously kept, though they subsequently fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle, preponderantly and directly indebted for their being, in fact, to Mr. Gooderman Seuss. To the casual eye, a mere smart and shining youth of less than thirty summers, faultlessly appointed in every particular, he yet stood among his progeny, eleven in all, as he confessed without a sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes astride of such impersonal old noses, while he entertained the great American collector whom he had so long hoped he might meet, and whose charming companion, the handsome, frank, familiar young lady, presumably Mrs. Verver, noticed the graduated offspring, noticed the fat, ear-ringed ants in the glossy, cocknified, familiar uncles, inimitable of accent and assumption, and of an attitude of cruder intention than that of the head of the firm, noticed the place in short, noticed the treasure produced, noticed everything, as from the habit of a person finding her account at any time, according to a wisdom well-learned of life, and almost any funny impression. It really came home to her friend on the spot that this free range of observation in her, picking out the frequent funny with extraordinary promptness, would verily henceforth make a different thing for him of such experiences, of the customary hunt for the possible prize, the inquisitive play of his accepted monomania, which different thing could probably be a lighter and perhaps thereby a somewhat more boisterously refreshing form of sport. Such omen struck him as vivid in any case, when Mr. Guderman Seuss, with the sharpness of discrimination he had at first scarce seemed to promise, invited his imminent couple into another room, before the threshold of which the rest of the tribe, unanimously faltering, dropped out of the scene. The treasure itself here, the objects on behalf of which Mr. Verver's interest had been booked, established quickly enough their claim to engage the latter's attention. Yet at what point of his past did our friend's memory, looking back and back, catch him, in any such place, thinking so much less of where's artfully paraded than of some other and quite irrelevant presence? Such places were not strange to him when they took the form of bourgeois-backed parlours, a trifle ominously gray and grim from their north light, at watering-places prevailingly hungs of humbug, or even when they wore some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had been everywhere, pride and proud everywhere, going on occasions so far as to risk, he believed, life, health and the very bloom of honour. But where, while precious things extracted one by one from thrice locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental ilk, were impressively ranged before him, had he till now let himself in consciousness wander like one of the vague? He didn't betray it, ah, that he knew, but two recognitions took place for him at once, and one of them suffered a little unsweeteness by the confusion. Mr. Gooderman Seuss had truly, for the crisis, the putting down of his cards a rare manner. He was perfect master of what not to say to such a personage as Mr. Verver, while the particular importance that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves. His repeated act of passes between a featureless mahogany mubile and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal tees. The damascene tiles, successively and oh-so-tenderly un-muffled and revealed, lay there at last in their full harmony and their venerable splendor, but the tribute of appreciation and decision was, while the spectator considered, simplified to a point that but just failed of representing levity on the part of a man who had always acknowledged without shame in such affairs, the intrinsic charm of what was called discussion. The infinitely ancient, the immemorial, amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breathed upon it would seem than the cheek of royalty. This property of the ordered and matched array had inevitably all its determination for him, but his submission was, perhaps for the first time in his life, of the quick mind alone, the process really itself in its way, as fine as the perfection perceived and admired, every inch of the rest of him being given to the foreknowledge that an hour or two later he should have spoken. The burning of his ships, therefore, waited too near to let him handle his opportunity with his usual firm and sentient fingers, waited somehow on the predominance of Charlotte's very person, and her being there exactly as she was, capable, as Mr. Gooderman Seuss himself was capable, of the right felicity of silence, but with an embracing ease through it all that made deferred criticism as fragrant as some joy promised a lover by his mistress, or as a big bridal bouquet held patiently behind her. He couldn't otherwise have explained, surely, why he found himself thinking to his enjoyment of so many other matters than the felicity of his acquisition and the figure of his check quite equally high, any more than why, later on, would their return to the room in which they had been received and the renewed encompassment of the tribe, he felt quite merged in the elated circle formed by the girl's free response to the collective caress of all the shining eyes, and by her genial acceptance of the heavy cake and port wine that, as she was afterwards to note, added to their transaction for a finish, the touch of some mystic rite of old jewelry. This characterization came from her as they walked away, walked together in the waning afternoon, back to the breezy sea in the bustling front, back to the nimble and the flutter and the shining shops that sharpen the grin of solicitation on the mask of night. They were walking thus as he felt, nearer and nearer to where he should see his ships burn, and it was meanwhile for him quite as if this red glow would impart, at the harmonious hour, a lured grandeur to his good faith. It was meanwhile, too, a sign of the kind of sensibility often playing up in him that, fabulous as this truth may sound, he found a sentimental link, an obligation of delicacy, or perhaps even one of the penalties of its opposite, in his having exposed her to the north light, the quite properly hard business light of the room in which they had been alone with the treasure and its master. She had listened to the name of the sum he was capable of looking in the face. Given the relation of intimacy with him she had already, beyond all retraction accepted, the stir of the air produced at the other place by that high figure struck him as a thing that, from the moment she had exclaimed or protested as little as he himself had apologized, left him but one thing more to do. A man of decent feeling didn't trust his money, a huge lump of it, in such a way under a poor girl's nose, a girl whose poverty was, after a fashion, the very basis of her enjoyment of his hospitality, without seeing logically a responsibility attached. And this was to remain nonetheless true for the fact that twenty minutes later, after he had applied his torch, applied it with a sign or two of insistence, what might definitely result failed to be immediately clear. He had spoken, spoken as they sat together on the out-of-the-way bench observed during one of their walks and kept for the previous quarter of the present hour well in his memory's eye, the particular spot to which, between intense pauses and intense advances, he had all the while consistently led her. Below the great consolidated cliff, well on to where the city of Stucco sat most architecturally perched, with the rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front and above, the safe sense of the whole place yet prevailed in lamps and seats and flagged walks, hovering also overhead in the close neighborhood of a great replete community about to assist anew at the removal of dish covers. We've had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together that I hope it won't come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband. As if he had known she wouldn't, she of course couldn't at all gracefully and whether or no, reply with a rush, he had said a little more, quite as he had felt he must in thinking it out in advance. He had put the question on which there was no going back and which represented thereby the sacrifice of his vessels, and what he further said was to stand for the redoubled thrust of flame that would make combustion sure. This isn't sudden to me, and I've wondered at moments if you haven't felt me coming to it. I've been coming ever since we left Fonz. I really started while we were there. He spoke slowly, giving her as he desired, time to think. All the more that it was making her look at him steadily and making her also, in a remarkable degree, look well while she did so, a large and so far a happy consequence. She wasn't at all event shocked, which he had glanced at but for a handsome humility, and he would give her as many minutes as she liked. You mustn't think I'm forgetting that I'm not young. Oh, that isn't so. It's I that am old. You ARE young. This was what she had at first answered, and quite in the tone too of having taken her minutes. It had not been wholly to the point, but it had been kind, which was what he most wanted, and she kept for her next words to kindness, kept to her clear, lowered voice and unshrinking face. To me too it thoroughly seems that these days have been beautiful. I shouldn't be grateful to them if I couldn't more or less have imagined they're bringing us to this. She affected him somehow as if she had advanced a step to meet him, and yet were at the same time standing still. It only meant, however, doubtless that she was, gravely and reasonably thinking, as he exactly desired to make her. If she would but think enough she would probably think to suit him. It seems to me, she went on, that it's for you to be sure. Ah, but I am sure, said Adam Verver. On matters of importance I never speak when I'm not, so if you can yourself face such a union you needn't in the least trouble. She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild, slightly damp south-west, she met his eyes without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying, I won't pretend I don't think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me I mean, she pursued, because I'm so awfully unattached. I should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another, a motive outside of myself. In fact, she said so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humor. In fact, you know, I want to be married. It's, well, it's the condition. The condition? He was just vague. It's the state, I mean. I don't like my own. Miss, among us all, is too dreadful, except for a shopgirl. I don't want to be a horrible English old maid. Oh, you want to be taken care of? Very well, then, I'll do it. I dare say it's very much that. Only I don't see why, for what I speak of, she smiled. For a mere escape from my state, I need do quite so much. So much is merry me in particular. Her smile was as for true directness. I might get what I want for less. You think it's so much for you to do? Yes, she presently said. I think it's a great deal. Then it was that though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far, then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail, and he didn't quite know where they were. There rose for him with this the fact to be sure of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. Of course, yes, that's my disadvantage. I'm not the natural. I'm so far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty. I've the drawback that you've seen me always so inevitably in such another light. But she gave a slow head shake that made contradiction soft, made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete. And he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep. You don't understand me. It's of all that it is for you to do. Because of that I'm thinking. Oh, with this for him the thing was clearer. Then you needn't think. I know enough what it is for me to do. But she shook her head again. I doubt if you know. I doubt if you can. And why not, please, when I've had you so before me, that I'm old has at least that fact about it to the good, that I've known you long and from far back. Do you think you've known me, asked Charlotte Stant? He hesitated, for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him doubt. Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow projected forward of his ships behind him, definitely blazing and crackling. This quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted to its advantage by the pink glow. He wasn't rabid, but he wasn't either as a man of a proper spirit to be frightened. What is that, then, if I accept it? But as strong a reason as I can want for just learning to know you. She faced him always, kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same time in her odd way as for mercy. How can you tell whether if you did you would? It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. I mean when it's a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late. I think it's a question, he promptly enough made answer, of liking you the more just for your saying these things. You should make something, he added, of my liking you. I make everything, but are you sure of having exhausted all other ways? This of a truth enlarged his gaze. But what other ways? Why you've more ways of being kind than any one I ever knew. Take it, then, he answered, that I'm simply putting them all together for you. She looked at him on this, long again, still as if it shouldn't be said she hadn't given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with admiration. You are very, very honorable. It's just what I want to be. I don't see, she added, why you're not right. I don't see why you're not happy as you are. I cannot ask myself. I cannot ask you, she went on, if you're really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oddent we, she asked, to think a little of others? Oddent I at least in loyalty, at any rate in delicacy, to think of Maggie? With which intensely gentle so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained, She's everything to you. She has always been. Are you so certain that there's room in your life? For another daughter, is that what you mean? She had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up. He had not, however, disconcerted her. For another young woman, very much of her age and his relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion, said Charlotte Stant. Can't a man be all his life then, he almost fiercely asked, anything but a father? But he went on before she could answer. You talk about differences, but they've been already made, as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage, made, I mean, for me. She constantly thinks of it, that allows her no rest. To put her at peace is therefore, he explained, what I'm trying with you to do. I can't do it alone, but I can do it with your help. You can make her, he said, positively happy about me. About you, she thoughtfully echoed. But what can I make her about herself? Oh, if she's at ease about me, the rest will take care of itself. The case, he declared, is in your hands. She'll effectually put out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me. Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face. But it was all the more honorable to her, as he had just called it, that she should want to see each of the steps of his conviction. If you've been driven to the likes of me, may in it show that you've felt truly forsaken? Well, I'm willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that I feel consoled. But have you, she demanded, really felt so? He hesitated. Consoled? Forsaken? No, I haven't. But if it was her idea in short, that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. That is, if it's my idea, I happen you see to like my idea. Well, it's beautiful and wonderful, but isn't it possibly, Charlotte asked, not quite enough to marry me for? Why so, my dear child? Isn't a man's idea usually what he does marry for? Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps be a large question, or all events something of an extension of one they were immediately concerned with. Doesn't that a good deal depend on the sort of thing it may be? She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them, might differ, with which, however, giving no more time to it, she sounded another question. Don't you appear, rather, to put it to me that I may accept your offer for Maggie's sake? Somehow, she turned it over. I don't so clearly see her quite so much finding reassurance or even quite so much needing it. Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so ready to leave us? Ah, Charlotte, on the contrary, made much. She was ready to leave us because she had to be, from the moment the Prince wanted it she could only go with him. Perfectly, so that, if you see your way, she will be able to go with him in future as much as she likes. Charlotte appeared to examine for a minute in Maggie's interest this privilege, the result of which was a limited concession. You've certainly worked it out. Of course I've worked it out. That's exactly what I have done. She hadn't for a long time been so happy about anything as that you're being there with me. I was to be with you, said Charlotte, for her security. Well, Adam Verver rang out. This is her security. You've only, if you can't see it, to ask her. Ask her? The girl echoed it in wonder. Certainly in so many words, telling her you don't believe me. Still she debated. Do you mean write it to her? Write so, immediately, to-morrow. Oh, I don't think I can write it, said Charlotte Stant. When I write to her, and she looked amused for so different a shade, it's about the Principino's appetite in Dr. Brady's visits. Very good then. Put it to her face to face. We'll go straight to Paris to meet them. Charlotte at this rose with a movement that was like a small cry, but her unspoken sense lost itself while she stood with her eyes on him, he keeping his seat as for the help it gave him a little to make his appeal go up. Presently, however, a new sense had come to her, and she covered him kindly with the expression of it. I do think you know you must rather like me. Thank you, said Adam Verver. You will put it to her yourself, then? She had another hesitation. We go over, you say, to meet them? As soon as we can get back to fawns, and wait there for them if necessary till they come. Wait at fawns? Wait in Paris, that will be charming in itself. You take me to pleasant places, she turned it over. You propose to me beautiful things. It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You've made Brighton. Ah, she almost tenderly protested. With what I'm doing now? You're promising me now what I want. Aren't you promising me, he pressed, getting up? Aren't you promising me to abide by what Maggie says? Oh, she wanted to be sure she was. Do you mean she'll ask it of me? It gave him, indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but certain? She'll speak to you, she'll speak to you for me. This at last then seemed to satisfy her. Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so? He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, nonetheless, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. Of course I give you time. Especially, he smiled, as it's time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see I mean how I need you. I already see, said Charlotte, how you've persuaded yourself you do. But she had to repeat it. It isn't, unfortunately, all. Well, then, how you'll make Maggie right. Right? She echoed it as if the word went far. And—oh, she still critically murmured as they moved together away. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of the Golden Bowl. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Golden Bowl by Henry James. Book II Chapter 13. He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fons, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey. And Maggie's reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day, in which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noon-tide meal. His letter at Fons, a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly to inform, had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume. This doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference equally sensible in her relation to himself, and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to speak to her so far even as to tell her of the communication dispatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacies she should want, reigned between them, it being rudimentary in their actual order, that she mustn't be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease. It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris, which suggestively was brightened at a hundred-fold higher pitch, made between him and his companion, the tension made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity of present conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders, things verily he would scarce have known how to express, and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was hanging back with Charlotte till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something that was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common conventions, that was what was odd, had to be on this basis more thought of. Those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the brightened strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed, would have figured it with less of unrest, that Paris had in its way deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all far there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for you're going further still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself on the receipt of Maggie's missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home, had in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him. His personal modesty, his imagination of a prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn't much matter which. And yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay, and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. There was, after all, a hint of offense to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie certainly would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigor of conscience. His allowances of his spirit were all the same, consistent with the great gladness at the side of the term of his ordeal, for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over, the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte simply saying to him that she didn't like him enough. Notice he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough, nothing to contradict that had come out for him, so that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look for what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that, as a man so to speak, he properly pleased her. He said nothing, the words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her chair at his approach, murmured them out. We start tonight to bring you all our love and joy and sympathy. There they were, the words, and what did she want more? She didn't, however, as she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say they were enough, though he saw the next moment, that her silence was probably not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this change of color, and she had again with it, her apparent way of subjecting herself for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness of the condition he produced in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless, he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that little as she professed she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly she liked him enough, liked him enough to make him, old as he was ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. Do you begin a little to be satisfied? Still, however, she had to think. We've hurried them, you see. Why so breathless a start? Because they want to congratulate us. They want, said Adam Verver, to see our happiness. She wondered again, and this time also for him, as publicly as possible. So much is that. Do you think it's too much? She continued to think plainly. They weren't to have started for another week. Well, what then? Isn't our situation worth the little sacrifice? We'll go back to Rome as soon as you like with them. This seemed to hold her, as he had previously seen her held, just a trifle inscrutably by his allusions to what they would do together on a certain contingency. Worth it, the little sacrifice? For whom? For us, naturally, yes, she said. We want to see them for our reasons. That is, she rather dimly smiled. You do. You do, my dear, too, he bravely declared. Yes, then, I do, too. She, after an instant, ungrudging enough acknowledged. For us, however, something depends on it. Rather. But does nothing depend on it for them? What can? From the moment that, as appears, they don't want to nip us in the bud. I can imagine they're rushing up to prevent us, but an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little, such intense eagerness, I confess, she went on, more than a little puzzles me. You may think me, she also added, ungracious and suspicious, but the Prince can't at all want to come back so soon, he wanted quite too intensely to get away. Mr. Verver considered. Well, hasn't he been away? Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it. Besides, said Charlotte, he may not be able to join in the rosy view of our case that you impute to her. It can't in the least have appeared to him hither to a matter of course that you should give his wife a bouncing stepmother. Adam Verver at this looked grave. I'm afraid, then, he'll just have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts, and accept it, if he can imagine no better reason, just because she does. That, he declared, will have to do for him. His tone made her for a moment meet his face, after which— Let me, she abruptly said, see it again, taking from him the folded leaf that she had given back and he had kept in his hand. Isn't the whole thing, she asked when she had read it over, perhaps but away like another for their gaining time? He again stood staring, but the next minute, with that upward spring of his shoulders and that downward pressure of his pockets which she had already more than once, at disconcerted moments, determined in him, he turned sharply away and wandered from her in silence. He looked about in his small despair. He crossed the hotel court, which overarched and glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted with exotic trees and tubs, exotic ladies and chairs, the general exotic accent and present suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some dental, medical, surgical waiting room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. He went as far as the Port Cuchère, took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even somehow just here, by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte. It is incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as Amorigo, his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants, in the absence that is of special impediments to his so doing. The manner of it operated, she acknowledged with no great delay this natural possibility. No, nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in love. Well, isn't Amorigo immensely in love? She hesitated, but as for the right expression of her sense of the degree, but she after all adopted Mr. Ververs. Immensely? Then there you are. She had another smile, however, she wasn't there quite yet. That isn't all that's wanted. But what more? Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that she really believes? With which Charlotte became still more lucidly logical. The reality of his belief will depend in such a case on the reality of hers. The Prince may, for instance now, she went on, have made out to his satisfaction that Maggie may mainly desire to abound in your sense, whatever it is you do. He may remember that he has never seen her do anything else. Well, said Adam Verver, what kind of a warning will he have found in that? To what catastrophe will he have observed such a disposition in her to lead? Just to this one, with which she struck him as rising straighter and clearer before him than she had done even yet. Our little question itself. Her appearance had in fact at the moment such an effect on him that he could answer but in marveling mildness. Hadn't we better wait a while till we call it a catastrophe? Her rejoinder to this was to wait, though by no means as long as he meant. When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it was mildly too. What would you like, dear friend, to wait for? It lingered between them in the air, this demand, and they exchanged for the time a look which might have made each of them seem to have been watching in the other the signs of its overt irony. These were indeed immediately so visible a Mr. Verver's face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced them, and as if also to bring out at last under pressure, everything she had all the while been keeping back, she took a jump to pure plain reason. You haven't noticed for yourself, but I can't quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume, we assume if you like, Maggie wires her joy only to you. She makes no sign of its overflow to me. It was a point, and, staring a moment, he took account of it. But he had, as before, his presence of mind, to say nothing of his kindly humor. Why, you complain of the very thing that's most charmingly conclusive. She treats us already as one. Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there was something in the way he said things. She faced him in all her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and definitely showed it. I do like you, you know. Well, what could this do but stimulate his humor? I see what's the matter with you. You won't be quiet till you've heard from the prince himself. I think, the happy man added, that I will go and secretly wire to him that you'd like reply paid a few words for yourself. It could apparently but encourage her further to smile. Reply paid for him, you mean, or for me. Oh, I'll pay with pleasure anything back for you, as many words as you like. And he went on to keep it up. Not requiring either to see your message. She could take it visibly as he meant it. Should you require to see the princes? Not a bit. You can keep that also to yourself. On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a real question, she appeared to consider, and almost as if for good taste, that the joke had gone far enough. It doesn't matter, unless he speaks of his own movement, and why should it be, she asked, a thing that would occur to him. I really think, Mr. Verver concurred, that it naturally wouldn't. He doesn't know your morbid. She just wondered, but she agreed. No, he hasn't yet found it out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn't yet, and I'm willing to give him, meanwhile, the benefit of the doubt. So would this the situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared had she not too quickly had one of her restless relapses. Maggie, however, does know I morbid. She hasn't the benefit. Well, said Adam Verver, a little wearily at last, I think I feel that you'll hear from her yet. It had even fairly come over him, under recurring suggestion, that his daughter's omission was surprising, and Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more than three minutes. Oh, it isn't that I hold that I have a right to it, Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified, and the observation itself gave him a further push. Very well, I shall like it myself. At this, then, as if moved by his way of constantly, and more or less against his own contention, coming round to her, she showed how she could also always, and not less gently, come half way. I speak of it only as the missing grace, the grace that's in everything that Maggie does. It isn't my due, she kept it up, but taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful. Then come out to breakfast, Mr. Verver had looked at his watch. It will be here when we get back. If it isn't, and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room. If it isn't, it will have had but that slight fault. He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face, for it was a wondrous product of Paris purchased under his direct auspices the day before, he held it there a minute before giving it up. Well, you promised me then to be at peace. She looked while she debated at his admirable present. I promise you, quite forever, quite forever. Remember, he went on to justify his demand, remember that in wiring you she'll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me. It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demure. Naturally? Why our marriage puts him for you, you see, or puts you for him, into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged, it therefore gives him more to say to you about it. About it's making me his stepmother-in-law or whatever I should become, over which for a little she not undivertedly mused. Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that. Well, Amorigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like, in whichever he may be for you in sending you a message, he'll be at all. And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved as by a vague anxiety to add a question. Don't you think he's charming? Oh, charming, said Charlotte Stant. If he weren't, I shouldn't mind. No more should I, her friend harmoniously returned. Ah, but you don't mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I mean, as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I were you, she went on, if I had in my life for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don't know, she said, what in the world, that didn't touch my luck, I should trouble my head about. I quite understand you, yet doesn't it just depend, Mr. Verver asked, on what you call one's luck? It's exactly my luck that I'm talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you've made me all right. It's only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn't they, he explained, that make one so. It's the something else I want that makes them right. If you'll give me what I ask, you'll see. She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes, while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by another interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of dispersal for luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it for free talk should they had been moved to loudness, quite to themselves. She was ready for their adjournment, but she was also aware of a pedestrian youth in uniform, a visible emissary of the post-atelegraph, who had approached from the street, the small stronghold of the concierge and who presented there a missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung over his shoulder. The portraits meeting him on the threshold met equally across the court. Charlottes marked attention to his visit, so that within the minute she had advanced to our friends with her cap streamers flying and her smile of announcement as ample as her broad white apron. She raised aloft a telegraphic message, and as she delivered it, sociably discriminated. C'est foie si pour madame, with which she is genially retreated, leaving Charlottes in possession. Charlottes, taking it, held it at first unopened. Her eyes had come back to her companion, who had immediately and triumphantly greeted it. Ah, there you are. She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with the message he himself had put before her, studied its contents without a sign. He watched her without a question, and at last she looked up. I'll give you, she simply said, what you ask. The expression of her face was strange, but since when had a woman's, at moments of supreme surrender, not a right to be, he took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence, so that nothing more, for some instance, passed between them. Their understanding sealed itself. He already felt that she had made him right. But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had made her so. And always therefore without Maggie, where and fine would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled. Charlottes facing him, meanwhile, with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. What my child does for me. Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw Charlotte, rather than heard her reply. She held her paper wide open, but her eyes were all for his. It isn't Maggie, it's the Prince. I say, he gaily rang out, then it's best of all. It's enough. Thank you for thinking so, to which he added. It's enough for our question, but it isn't, is it? Quite enough for our breakfast. Dejeunade. She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document always before them. Don't you want to read it? He thought. Not if it satisfies you, I don't require it. But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. You can, if you like. He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. Is it funny? Just finally she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. No, I call it grave. Ah, then I don't want it. Very grave, said Charlotte Stant. Well, what did I tell you of him, he asked, rejoicing as they started, a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat. End of Chapter 13