 CHAPTER XIV Charlotte, halfway up the monumental staircase, had begun by waiting alone, waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her. She was, meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised, but she would not have cared if she had been, so little was it by this time, her first occasion of facing society, with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly enriched. For a couple of years now she had known, as never before, what it was to look well, to look that is as well as she had always felt from far back, that in certain conditions she might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London springtime, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present, so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith, as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood, in meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Asingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase, and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch, much in fact as if she had pressed a finger on a cord or a key, and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump. The sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she had not seen her. This was about the limit of what it could suggest. The air, however, had suggestions enough. It abounded in them, many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned. She was herself in truth crowned, and that all hung together, melted together, in light, in color, in sound, the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory that materials to work with had been all she required, and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use, to which might be added, lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was doubtless that helped her, while she waited to the right assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity for happiness, unless indeed the opportunity itself rather were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the precipitating cause. The ordered revelers, rustling and shining, with sweeps of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and yet for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal, the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to much crude contemplation, and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause, but she missed no countenance and invited no protection. She fairly liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was, exposed a little to the public, no doubt, and her unaccompanied state, but even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflections on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her own. She hoped no one would stop, she was positively keeping herself, it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the importance of something that had just happened, she knew how she should mark it, and what she was doing there made already a beginning. When presently therefore from her standpoint, she saw the Prince come back, she had an impression of all the place, as higher and wider, and more appointed for great moments. With its dome of lusters lifted, its ascents and descents more majestic, its marble tears more vividly overhung, its numerosity of royalties, foreign and domestic more unprecedented, its symbolism of state hospitality both emphasized and refined. This was doubtless a large consequence of a fairly familiar cause, a considerable inward stirrer to spring from the mere vision, striking as that might be, of Amorigo in a crowd. But she had her reasons, she held them there, she carried them in fact responsibly and overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan, her indifferent unattended eminence, and it was when he reached her, and she could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her relation, that she felt supremely justified. It was her notion, of course, that she gave a glimpse of but few of her grounds for this discrimination, indeed of the most evident alone. Yet she would have been half willing it should be guessed how she drew inspiration, drew support, and quantity sufficient for almost anything, from the individual value that, through all the picture, her husband's son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it from his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum about shining, overlooking, and overtopping. It was as if in separation, even the shortest, she half forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so that reappearance had in him each time a virtue of its own, a kind of disproportionate intensity suggesting his connection with the cult sources of renewal. What did he do when he was away from her that made him always come back only looking, as she would have called it? More so. Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he had almost resembled an actor who, between his moments on the stage, revisits his dressing room and before the glass, pressed by his need of effect, retouches his makeup. The prince was at present, for instance, though he had quitted her but ten minutes before, still more than then the person it pleased her to be left with, a truth that had all its force for her while he made her his care for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms. Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain was what poor wonderful man he couldn't help making it, and when she raised her eyes again on the ascent to Bob Asingham, still aloft in his gallery and still looking down at her, she was aware that, in spite of hovering and mourning inward voices, she even enjoyed the testimony rendered by his lonely vigil to the luster she reflected. He was always lonely at great parties, the dear Colonel. It wasn't in such places that the seed he sowed at home was ever reaped by him, but nobody could have seemed to mind it less to brave it with more bronzed indifference. So markedly that he moved about less like one of the guests than like some quite presentable person in charge of the police arrangements or the electric light. To Mrs. Verver, as will be seen, he represented with the perfect good faith of his apparent blankness something definite enough. Though her bravery was not thereby too blighted for her to feel herself calling him to witness that the only witchcraft her companion had used, within the few minutes, was that of attending Maggie, who had withdrawn from the scene to her carriage. Divided all events of Fanny's probable presence, Charlotte was, for a while after this, divided between the sense of it as a fact somehow to reckon with and deal with, which was a perception that made, in its degree, for the prudence, the pusillanimity of postponement of avoidance, and a quite other feeling, an impatience that presently ended by prevailing, an eagerness, only to be suspected, sounded, veritably arraigned, if only that she might have the bad moment over, if only that she might prove to herself, let alone to Mrs. Asingham also, that she could convert it to good, if only in short to be square, as they said, with her question. For herself indeed, particularly, it wasn't a question. But something in her bones told her that Fanny would treat it as one, and there was truly nothing that from this friend she was not bound in decency to take. She might hand things back with every tender precaution, with acknowledgments and assurances, but she owed it to them in any case, and it to all Mrs. Asingham had done for her, not to get rid of them without having well unwrapped and turned them over. Tonight, as happened, and she recognized it more and more with the ebbing minutes as an influence of everything about her, to-night exactly she would no doubt, since she knew why, be as firm as she might at any near moment again hoped to be for going through that process with the right temper and tone, she said after a little to the Prince, Stay with me, let no one take you, for I want her, yes, I do want her to see us together, the sooner the better. Said it to keep her hand on him through constant diversions, and made him in fact, by saying it, profess a momentary vagueness. She had to explain to him that it was Fanny Asingham she wanted to see, who clearly would be there, since the Colonel never either stirred without her, or once arrived, concerned himself for her fate, and she had further, after Amorigo had met her with, see us together, why in the world hasn't she often seen us together? To inform him that what had elsewhere and otherwise happened didn't now matter, and that she at any rate well knew, for the occasion, what she was about. You're strange, Caramia. He consentingly enough dropped. But for whatever strangeness he kept her, as they circulated, from being way-laid, even remarking to her afresh, as he had often done before, on the help rendered in such situations, by the intrinsic oddity of the London squash, a thing of vague, slow, senseless eddies, revolving as in fear of some menace of conversation suspended over it, the drop of which, with some consequent refreshing splash or splatter, yet never took place. Of course she was strange. This, as they went, Charlotte knew for herself. How could she be anything else when the situation holding her, and holding him for that matter, just as much, had so the stamp of it? She had already accepted her consciousness, as we have already noted, that a crisis for them all was in the air, and when such hours were not depressing, which was the form indeed in which she had mainly known them, they were apparently in a high degree exhilarating. Later on, in a corner to which, at sight of an empty sofa, Mrs. Asingham had, after a single attempt of arrest, led her with a certain earnestness, this vision of the critical was much more sharpened than blurred. Fanny had taken it from her. Yes, she was there with Amorigo alone, Maggie having come with them, and then within ten minutes changed her mind, repented and departed. So you're staying on together without her, the elder woman had asked, and it was Charlotte's answer to this that had determined for them, quite indeed according to the latter's expectation, the need of some seclusion and her companion's pounce at the sofa. They were staying on together alone and, oh distinctly, it was alone that Maggie had driven away, her father as usual, not having managed to come. As usual? Mrs. Asingham had seemed to wonder. Mr. Verver's reluctance is not having, she in fact quite intimated, hitherto struck her. Charlotte responded at any rate that his indisposition to go out had lately much increased, even though tonight, as she admitted, he had pleaded his not feeling well. Maggie had wished to stay with him, for the prince and she, dining out, had afterwards called in Portland Place, whence in the event they had brought her, Charlotte, on. Maggie had come but to oblige her father. She had urged the two others to go without her. Then she had yielded for the time to Mr. Verver's persuasion. But here, when they had, after the long wait in the carriage, fairly got in, here, once up the stairs, with the rooms before them, remorse had ended by seizing her. She had listened to no other remonstrance, and at presence therefore, as Charlotte put it, the two were doubtless making together a little party at home. But it was all right, so Charlotte also put it, there was nothing in the world they liked better than these snatched felicities, little parties, long talks, with, I'll come to you to-morrow, and, no, I'll come to you, make-believe renewals of their old life. They were fairly at times the dear things like children playing at paying visits, playing at Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Feing, each hoping that the other would really stay to tea. Charlotte was sure she should find Maggie there on getting home. A remark in which Mrs. Verver's immediate response to her friend's inquiry had culminated. She had, thus on the spot, the sense of having given her plenty to think about, and that moreover of liking to see it even better than she had expected. She had plenty to think about herself, and there was already something in fanny that made it seem still more. You say your husband's ill. He felt too ill to come. No, my dear, I think not. If he had been too ill, I wouldn't have left him. And yet Maggie was worried, Mrs. Assing am asked. She worries, you know, easily. She's afraid of influenza, of which he has had at different times, though never with the least gravity, several attacks. But you're not afraid of it. Charlotte had, for a moment, a pause. It had continued to come to her, that really to have her case out, as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate difficulties had often as referred themselves, would help her on the whole more than hinder. And under that feeling, all her opportunity, with nothing kept back, with the thing or two perhaps even thrust forward, seemed temptingly to open. Besides, didn't fanny at bottom half expect absolutely at the bottom half want things, so that she would be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn't get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear of which our young woman had already had glimpses that she might have gone too far, and her irrepressible interest in other lives. What had just happened, it pieced itself together for Charlotte, was that the Assingham pair, drifting like everyone else, had had somewhere in the gallery, in the rooms, an accidental concussion. Had it after the colonel, over his balustrade, had observed, in the favoring high light, her public junction with the Prince. His very dryness in this encounter had, as always, struck a spark from his wife's curiosity, and familiar on his side with all that she saw in things, he had thrown her, as a fine little bone to pick, some report of the way one of her young friends was going on with another. He knew perfectly, such at least was Charlotte's liberal assumption, that she wasn't going on with anyone, but she also knew that, given the circumstances, she was inevitably to be sacrificed, in some form or another, to the humorous intercourse of the inimitable couple. The Prince, meanwhile, had also, under coercion, sacrificed her. The ambassador had come up to him with a message from royalty, to whom he was led away, after which she had talked for five minutes with Sir John Brinder, who had been of the ambassador's company and who had rather artlessly remained with her. Fanny had then arrived inside of them at the same moment as someone else she didn't know, someone who knew Mrs. Asingham and also knew Sir John. Charlotte had left it to her friend's confidence to throw the two others immediately together and to find a way for entertaining her in closer quarters. This was the little history of the vision in her, that was now rapidly helping her to recognize a precious chance, the chance that might again soon be so good for the vivid making of a point. Her point was before her. It was sharp, bright, true. Above all, it was her own. She had reached it quite by herself. No one, not even Amorigo, Amorigo least of all, who would have nothing to do with it, had given her aid. To make it now with force for Fanny Asingham's benefit would see her further and the direction in which the light had dawned than any other spring she should, yet a wild doubtless be able to press. The direction was that of her greater freedom, which was all in the world she had in mind. Her opportunity had accordingly, after a few minutes of Mrs. Asingham's almost imprudently interested expression of face, positively acquired such a price for her that she may, for ourselves, while the intensity lasted, rather resemble a person holding out a small mirror at arm's length and consulting it with a special turn of the head. It was in a word, with this value of her chance that she was intelligently playing when she said an answer to Fanny's last question. Don't you remember what you told me, on the occasion of something or other, the other day, that you believed there's nothing I'm afraid of? So, my dear, don't ask me. May I ask you, Mrs. Asingham returned, how the case stands with your poor husband? Certainly, dear, only when you ask me as if I might perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to think. Mrs. Asingham hesitated, then blinking a little she took her risk. You didn't think that if it was a question of anyone's returning to him in his trouble, it would be better you yourself should have gone? Well, Charlotte's answer to this inquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humor, candor, clearness, and, obviously, the real truth. If we couldn't be perfectly frank and dear with each other, it would be ever so much better, wouldn't it, that we shouldn't talk about anything at all, which, however, would be dreadful, and we certainly at any rate haven't yet come to it. You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because don't you see, you can't upset me. I'm sure, my dear Charlotte, Fanny Asingham laughed. I don't want to upset you. Indeed, love, you simply couldn't, even if you thought it necessary. That's all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I'm, by no merit of my own, just fixed. Fixed as fast as a pin stuck up to its head in a cushion. I'm placed. I can't imagine anyone more placed. There I am. Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. I dare say, but your statement of your position, however you see it, isn't an answer to my inquiry. It seems to me at the same time, I confess, Mrs. Asingham added, to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being frank. How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay, and if she's willing to leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren't the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable? If they're not, Charlotte replied, it's only from their being in a way too evident. They're not grounds for me. They weren't when I accepted Adam's preference that I should come tonight without him. Just as I accept absolutely as a fixed rule, all his preferences. But that doesn't alter the fact, of course, that my husband's daughter, rather than his wife, should have felt she could, after all, be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour, seeing especially that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field, with which she produced, as it were, her explanation. I've simply to see the truth of the matter, see that Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers than of husbands, and my situation is such, she went on, that this becomes immediately, don't you understand, a thing I have to count with. Mrs. Asing him, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about from some inward spring in her seat. If you mean such a thing as that she doesn't adore the prince. I don't say she doesn't adore him. What I say is that she doesn't think of him. One of those conditions doesn't always at all stages involve the other. This is just how she adores him, Charlotte said. And what reason is there in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn't, as you say, show together. We've shown together, my dear, she smiled, before. Her friend for a little only looked at her, speaking then with abruptness. You ought to be absolutely happy, you live with such good people. The effect of it as well was an arrest for Charlotte, whose face, however, all whose fine and slightly hard radiance it had caused the next instant further to brighten. Does one ever put into words anything so factuously rash? It's a thing that must be said in prudence, for one, by somebody who's so good as to take the responsibility. The more that it gives one always a chance to show one's best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly you'll never have the distress or whatever of hearing me complain. Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not. And the elder woman's spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy. To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. With all our absence after marriage and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up, still the need of showing how for so long she simply kept missing him. She missed his company, a large allowance of which is in spite of everything else of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can, a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments, which has all the same everything in its favor, Charlotte hastened to declare, makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house. To make sure she doesn't fail of it, she's always arranging for it, which she didn't have to do while they live together. But she likes to arrange Charlotte steadily proceeded. It particularly suits her. And the result of our separate households is really for them more contact and more intimacy. Tonight, for instance, has been practically an arrangement. She likes some best alone. And it's the way, said our young woman, in which he best likes her. It's what I mean therefore by being placed. And the great thing is, as they say, to know one's place. Doesn't it all strike you, she wound up, as rather placing the prince, too? Fanny Asingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast, so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely would, apart from there not being at such a moment time for it, tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array, and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. So she picked out after consideration a solitary plum. So placed that you have to arrange? Certainly I have to arrange. And the prince also, if the effect for him is the same? Really, I think not less. And does he arrange, Mrs. Asingham asked, to make up his arrears? The question had risen to her lips. It was as if another morsel on the dish had tempted her. The sound of it struck her own ear immediately, as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended. But she quickly saw that she must follow it up at any risk with simplicity, and that what was simplest was the ease of boldness. Make them up, I mean, by coming to see you. Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair. She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle. He never comes. Oh! said Fanny Asingham, with which she felt a little stupid. There it is. He might so well, you know, otherwise. Otherwise? And Fanny was still vague. It passed this time over her companion, whose eyes, wandering to a distance, found themselves held. The prince was at hand again. The ambassador was still at his side. They were stopped a moment by a uniformed personage, a little old man of apparently the highest military character, bristling with medals and orders. This gave Charlotte time to go on. He has not been for three months, and then is with her friend's last word in her ear. Otherwise, yes. He arranges otherwise. And in my position, she added, I might, too. It's too absurd we shouldn't meet. You've met, I gather, said Fanny Asingham, tonight. Yes, as far as that goes. But what I mean is that I might place Ford as we both are, go to see him. And do you? Fanny asked with almost mistaken solemnity. The perception of this excess made Charlotte, whether for gravity or for irony, hang fire a minute. I have been, but that's nothing, she said, in itself, and I tell you of it only to show you how our situation works. It essentially becomes one, a situation for both of us. The Prince is, however, is his own affair. I meant but to speak of mine. Your situation's perfect, Mrs. Asingham presently declared. I don't say it isn't. Taken in fact all round, I think it is. And I don't, as I tell you, complain of it. The only thing is that I have to act as it demands of me. To act, said Mrs. Asingham with an irrepressible quaver. Isn't it acting, my dear, to accept it? I do accept it. What do you want me to do less? I want you to believe that you're a very fortunate person. Do you call that less? Charlotte asked with a smile. From the point of view of my freedom, I call it more. Let it take my position, any name you like. Don't let it at any rate, and Mrs. Asingham's impatience prevailed at last over her presence of mine. Don't let it make you think too much of your freedom. I don't know what you call too much, for how can I not see it as it is? You'd see your own quickly enough if the Colonel gave you the same liberty, and I haven't to tell you, with your so much greater knowledge of everything, what it is that gives such liberty most. For yourself personally, of course, Charlotte went on. You only know the state of neither needing it nor missing it. Your husband doesn't treat you as of less importance to him than some other woman. Ah, don't talk to me of other women. Fanny now overtly panted. Do you call Mr. Verver's perfectly natural interest in his daughter? The greatest affection of which he is capable? Charlotte took it up in all readiness. I do distinctly, and in spite of my having done all I could think of, to make him capable of a greater. I've done, earnestly, everything I could. I've made it month after month my study. But I haven't succeeded. It has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However, she pursued, I've hoped against hope, for I recognize that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned. And then, as she met in her friend's face, the absence of any such remembrance, he did tell me that he wanted me just because I could be useful about her, with which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. So you see, I am. It was on Fanny Asingham's lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn't see. She came, in fact, within an ace of saying, you strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work, since, by your account, Maggie has him not less but so much more on her mind. How in the world was so much of a remedy comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated. But she saved herself in time, conscious above all, that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was more in it than any admission she had made represented, and she had held herself familiar with admissions, so that not to seem to understand where she couldn't accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn't approve, and could still less with precipitation advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend's consistency. The only thing was that as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. I can't conceive, my dear, what you're talking about. Charlotte promptly rose, then, as might be, to meet it and her color for the first time perceptibly heightened. She looked for the minute as her companion had looked, as if twenty protests blocking each other's way had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was happy now above all for being made not in anger but in sorrow. You give me up, then. Give you up. You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend's loyalty. If you do, you're not just, Fanny. You're even, I think, she went on, rather cruel, and it's least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion. She spoke at the same time with the noblest moderation of tone and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendor, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases, with a perfection void of any vulgarity of triumph. She merely completed, for truth's sake, her demonstration. What is a quarrel with me but a quarrel with my right to recognize the conditions of my bargain? But I can carry them out alone, she said as she turned away. She turned to meet the ambassador and the prince, who, their colloquy with their field-martial ended, were now at hand and had already, between them, she was aware, addressed her a remark that failed to penetrate the golden glow in which her intelligence was temporarily bathed. She had made her point, the point she had foreseen she must make. She had made it thoroughly and once for all, so that no more making was required. And her success was reflected in the faces of the two men of distinction before her, unmistakably moved to admiration by her exceptional radiance. She at first but watched this reflection, taking no note of any less adequate form of it possibly presented by poor Fanny. Poor Fanny left to stare at her incurred score, chalked up in so few strokes on the wall. Then she took in what the ambassador was saying in French, when he was apparently repeating to her. A desire for your presence, madame, has been expressed on Treyholt Lu, and I've let myself in through the responsibility, to say nothing of the honor, of seeing, as the most respectable of your friends, that so Augustine and patience has not kept waiting. The greatest possible personage had in short, according to the odd formula of society subject to the greatest personage as possible, sent for her, and she asked in her surprise, what in the world does he want to do with me? Only to know, without looking, that Fanny's bewilderment was called to a still larger application, and to hear the prince say with authority, indeed with a certain prompt dryness, you must go immediately, it's a summons. The ambassador, using authority as well, had already somehow possessed himself of her hand, which he drew into his arm, and she was further conscious as she went off with him, that though still speaking for her benefit, Amorigo had turned to Fanny assing him. He would explain afterwards, besides which she would understand for herself. To Fanny, however, he had laughed, as a mark apparently that for this infallible friend no explanation at all would be necessary. CHAPTER XIV It may be recorded, none the less, that the prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded, along with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. They sent for Charlotte through you? No, my dear, as you see through the ambassador. Ah, but the ambassador and you, for the last quarter of an hour, have been for them as one. He's your ambassador. It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it, the more she saw in it. They've connected her with you. She's treated as your appendage. Oh, my appendage, the prince amusedly exclaimed. Caramia, what a name! She's treated, rather, say, as my ornament and my glory, and it's so remarkable a case for a mother-in-law that you surely can't find fault with it. You've ornaments enough, it seems, to me, as you've certainly glories enough without her, and she's not the least little bit, Mrs. Assingham observed, your mother-in-law. In such a matter, a shade of difference is enormous. She's no relation to you, whatever, and if she's known in high quarters but is going about with you, then—then— She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision. Then—then what? he asked, with perfect good nature. She had better in such a case not be known at all. But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them, said the young man, still amused, if they didn't want to see her? You surely don't need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself, that she does so above all on such an occasion as this, and looking as she does tonight. How so looking can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have success? Besides—he added, as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it—besides there is always the fact that we're of the same connection of—what is your word—the same concern. We're certainly not, with the relation of our respective Sposy, simply formal acquaintances. We're in the same boat. And the Prince smiled with a candor that added an accent to his emphasis. Fanny Asingham was full of the special sense of his manner. It caused her to turn for a moment's refuge to a corner of her general consciousness, in which she could say to herself that she was glad she wasn't in love with such a man. As was Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. Fanny It only appears to me of great importance that, now that you all seem more settled here, Charlotte should be known for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as in particular her husband's wife, known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don't know what you mean by the same boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver's boat. Fanny And, pray, am I not in Mr. Verver's boat, too? Fanny Why, but for Mr. Verver's boat I should have been by this time, and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths, away down, down, down. She knew, of course, what he meant, how it had taken his father-in-law's great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float. And with this reminder other things came to her. How strange it was that, with all allowances for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose, really, to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling at any rate, for herself. She was thinking that the pleasure she could take in this specimen of the class didn't suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant. Partly because it was one of those pleasures he inspired them, that, by their nature, couldn't suffer to whatever proof they were put. And partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense, assuredly, but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well-nigh and equivalent, and that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts that best suited his wife and her father, this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favor as against other matters. Yet it discouraged her, too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving and be able to show her that he moved on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it. Isn't it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common? And the effect for his interlocutress was still further to be deepened. I somehow feel half the time, as if he were her father-in-law, too, it's as if he had saved us both, which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don't you remember, he kept it up. How, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked in her presence of the advisability for her of some good marriage? And then as his friends' face and her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation. Well, we really began, then, as it seems to me the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right, and so was she. That it was exactly the thing as shown by its success. We recommend a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and taking us at our word she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn't it? Only what she has got, something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better, once you allow her the way it's to be taken. Of course, if you don't allow her that, the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom, which I judge she'll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it, nor to use it with any sort of retatisme. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The boat, you see. The Prince explained it no less considerably and lucidly. Is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream? I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you'll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing the same. It isn't even a question sometimes of one's getting to the dock. One has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion's track, for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination. Call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them when they occur, as inevitable, and above all as not endangering life or limb? We shan't drown, we shan't sink, at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver, too, moreover, do her the justice, visibly knows how to swim. He could easily go on, for she didn't interrupt him. Fanny felt now that she wouldn't have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence precious. There was not a drop of it that she didn't, in a manner, catch as it came for immediate bottling for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyze it. There were moments positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnameable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that gave them away, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What inconceivably was it like? Wasn't it, however, gross, such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their really treating their subject, of course, on some better occasion, and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? With this far-red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the headlight of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not on her side an igneous fatuous, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there the direct expense of what the prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile, too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought, on the matter of which he couldn't have improved, to complete his successful semily by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting. For Mrs. Verver, to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband's wife, something is wanted that you know they haven't exactly got. He should manage to be known, or at least to be seen, a little more as his wife's husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and then he makes more and more, as of course he has a perfect right to do, his own discriminations. He's so perfect, so ideal a father, and doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should really feel at base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticize him. To you, nevertheless, I may make just one remark, for you're not stupid, you always understood so blessedly what one means. He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him, should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him. She was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly as it were, so tight. She felt like the horse of the adage, brought, and brought by her own fault, to the water, but strong for the occasion and the one fact that she couldn't be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain in advance of his remark, that she heard it before it had sounded, that she had already tasted and fine the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility, but her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence. What I really don't see is why, from his own point of view, given that is his conditions so fortunate as they stood, he should have wished to marry at all. There it was, then, exactly what she knew would come, and exactly for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart as distressing to her. Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there, not to suffer odiously, helplessly, and public, which could be prevented but by her breaking off with whatever inconsequence, by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted an hour or two before to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had abruptly taken such vivid form, but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself to her sense become danger. Such light is from open crevices it let in, and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst, in fact, came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognize. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. I'm afraid, however, the prince said, that I, for some reason to stress you, for which I beg your pardon, we've always talked so well together. It has been from the beginning the greatest pull for me. Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse. She felt he had her now at his mercy, and he showed as he went on that he knew it. We shall talk again all the same, better than ever. I depend on it too much. Don't you remember what I told you, so definitely, one day before my marriage? That moving as I did in so many ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations, assumptions different from any I had known, I looked to you as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother to see me through. I beg you to believe, he added, that I looked to you yet. His very insistence had, fortunately the next moment, affected her as bringing her help, with which at least she could hold up her head to speak. Ah, you are through. You were through long ago, or if you aren't, you ought to be. Well, then, if I ought to be, it's all the more reason why you should continue to help me, because very distinctly I assure you I'm not. The new things, or ever so many of them, are still for me new things. The mysteries and expectations and assumptions still contain an immense element that I failed to puzzle out. As we've happened so luckily to find ourselves again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon as possible, come to see you. You must give me a good kind hour. If you refuse it me," and he addressed himself to her continued reserve, I shall feel that you deny with a stony stare your responsibility. At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. Oh, I deny responsibility to you, so far as I ever had it I've done with it. He had been all the while beautifully smiling, but she made his look, now, penetrate her again more. As to whom, then, do you confess it? Ah, Miakaro, that's, if to any one, my own business. He continued to look at her hard. You give me up, then. It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and it's coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying. Do you and she agree together for what you'll say to me? But she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. I think I don't know what to make of you. You must receive me at least, he said. Oh, please, not till I'm ready for you. And though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her, as if she were altogether afraid of him. CHAPTER XVI. 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 III. CHAPTER XVI. Later on, when their hired brome had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night beside her husband as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had in the past been active for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded at first in her corner of the carriage. It was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the windows of the brome, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It wouldn't, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction. And when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman and the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere-blind terror. It had become, for the occasion, preposterously terror, of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground. The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her. Since she found on trying, that Loretta's her prospect might hover there, she could nonetheless give it no name. The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw. Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were imbued. Since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause, she should surely be less vague about what she had produced. This further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one's connection with any matter was too indirect to be traced, it might be described also as too slight to be deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place, she had in fact recognized that she couldn't be as curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent. But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech. It's only their defending themselves so much more than they need. It's only that that makes me wonder. It's their having so remarkably much to say for themselves. Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing? To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added, what in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man's in a position in which he has nothing in life to do. Her silence seemed to characterize this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband's company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person, who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him. He has behaved beautifully. He did from the first. I've thought it all along wonderful of him, and I've more than once when I've had a chance told him so. Therefore, therefore, but it died away as she mused. Therefore he has a right for a change to kick up his heels. It isn't a question of course, however. She undivertedly went on. Of their behaving beautifully apart. It's a question of their doing as they should when together, which is another matter. And how do you think, then, the Colonel asked with interest, that when together they should do? The less they do, one would say the better, if you see so much in it. His wife at this appeared to hear him. I don't see in it what you'd see. And don't, my dear, she further answered, think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They're the last people really to make anything of that sort come in right. I'm surely never horrid or low, he returned, about any one but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends, as I see them myself. What I can't do with is the figures you make of them, and when you take to adding your figures up. But he exhaled it again in smoke. My additions don't matter when you've not to pay the bill. With which her meditation again bore her through the air. The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn't afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was, if I hadn't seen he wasn't, so, said Mrs. Asingham, could I? So, she declared, would I? It's perfectly true, she went on. It was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life not to be accepted. And I liked his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn't have faced it. Then, if she had not had confidence, we might have talked. But she had it to any amount. Did you ask her how much? Bob Asingham patiently inquired. He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward. But he had pressed this time, the sharpest spring of response. Never, never, it wasn't a time to ask. Asking is suggesting, and it wasn't a time to suggest. One had to make up one's mind as quietly as possible by what one could judge. And I judge as I say that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as, for so proud a creature, almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due. That is, to Mrs. Asingham? She said nothing for a little. There were, after all, alternatives. Maggie herself, of course, astonishing little Maggie. Is Maggie then astonishing, too? And he gloomed out of his window. His wife on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. I'm not sure that I don't begin to see more in her than, dear little person, as I've always thought. I ever suppose there was. I'm not sure that putting a good many things together I'm not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary. You certainly will if you can, the Colonel resignedly remarked. Again his companion said nothing. Then again she broke out. In fact, I do begin to feel it. Maggie's the great comfort. I'm getting hold of it. It will be she who'll see us through. In fact, she'll have to, and she'll be able. Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband's general sense of her method that caused him to overflow whimsically enough in his corner, and to an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in a communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example the aboriginal homeliness still so delightful of Mr. Verver. Oh, Lordy, Lordy. If she is, however, Mrs. Asingham continued, she'll be extraordinary enough. And that's what I'm thinking of. But I'm not indeed so very sure, she added, of the person to whom Charlotte ought indecency to be most grateful. I mean, I'm not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife. I shouldn't think you would be, love, the Colonel with some promptness responded. Charlotte is the wife of an incredible little idealist. His cigar, in short, once more, could alone express it. Yet what is that when one thinks, but just what she struck one is more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be? This memory for the full view Fanny found herself also invoking. It made her companion in truth slightly gape. An incredible little idealist, Charlotte herself. And she was sincere, his wife simply proceeded. She was unmistakably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it. And that, I see, happens to be another of the questions you can't ask her. You have to do it all, said Bob, asking him, as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up, though who's to come down on you if you break them, I don't quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses, like forfeits on Christmas Eve? To which, as his rivalry but drop from her, he further added, how much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it? I shall go on, Fanny assing him a trifle grimly declared, while there's a scrap as big as your nail, but were not yet luckily reduced only to that. She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver's obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. Even if her debt was not to the others, even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight. For what really did the Prince do, she asked herself, but generously trust her. What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong? That creates for her, upon my word, Mrs. Assingham pursued, a duty of considering him, of honorably repaying his trust which, well, which shall be really a fiend if she doesn't make the law of her conduct. I mean, of course, his trust that she wouldn't interfere with him, expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time. The brome was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel's next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united for the most part, but by his exhausted patience, so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best, his note. He at present, however, actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps. He literally asked, in short, an intelligent, well-nigh-asympathizing question. Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel, that, you mean, should taking it in the right way be precisely the ballast of her boat? Taking it in the right way? Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasized the proviso. But doesn't it rather depend on what she may most feel to be the right way? No, it depends on nothing, because there's only one way for duty or delicacy. Oh, delicacy! Bob, assing him, rather crudely murmured. I mean the highest kind, moral, Charlotte's perfectly capable of appreciating that, by every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone. Then you've made up your mind it's all poor Charlotte, he asked with an effect of abruptness. The effect, whether intended or not, reached her, brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which somehow the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort. Then you've made up yours differently. It really struck you that there is something? The movement itself apparently made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question. Perhaps that's just what she's doing, showing him how much she's letting him alone, pointing it out to him from day to day. Did she point it out by waiting for him tonight on the staircase in the manner you described to me? I really, my dear, described to you a manner. The colonel clearly from want of habit scarce recognize himself in the imputation. Yes, for once and away, in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn't tell me very much, that you couldn't for your life, but I saw for myself, that strange to say, you would receive your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it. She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion, confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time. It came over her that he had been struck with something, even he, poor dear man, and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value, for so recorded she felt none of it would escape, she should have it at hand for reference. Come, my dear, you thought what you thought, in the presence of what you saw you couldn't resist thinking. I don't ask more of it than that, and your idea is worth this time quite as much as any of mine, so that you can't pretend as usual that mine has run away with me. I haven't caught up with you. I stay where I am, but I see, she concluded, where you are, and I much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point to repair outside myself, which is where I like it. Now I can work round you. Their conveyance as she spoke stopped at their door, and it was on the spot another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key so that their household had gone to bed, and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob Asingham waited, conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn't turn his face, but he stared straight before him, and his wife had already perceived in the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire, proof that is of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. Leave it, he at last remarked, to them. Leave it, she wondered. Let them alone, they'll manage. They'll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah, there then you are. They'll manage in their own way, the colonel almost cryptically repeated. It had its effect for her, quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband's injurated conscience, it gave her a full in her face, the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful truly then, the evocation. So cleverly that's your idea, that no one will be the wiser. It's your idea that we shall have done all that's required of us if we simply protect them. The colonel, still in his place, declined, however, to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories in which one lost one's way, he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, nonetheless, he had his point to make, for which he took another instant, but he made it for the third time in the same fashion. They'll manage in their own way, with which he got out. Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared without following him at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall, lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crushed hat, according to his want, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance, so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval, and still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Wasn't it simply what had been written in the prince's own face beneath what he was saying? Didn't it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn't in fine, the pledge that they would manage in their own way, the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband's tone somehow fitted Amorigo's look. The one that had for her so strangely peeped from behind over the shoulder of the one in front. She had not then read it. But wasn't she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn't to be squared. And while she heard her companion call across to her. Well, what's the matter? She also took time to remind herself that she had decided she couldn't be frightened. The matter? Why, it was sufficiently the matter with all this that she felt a little sick. For it was not the prince that she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness and Charlotte she had at the most perhaps postulated. It would be she somehow felt more easy to deal with. Therefore, if he had come so far, it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back and fairly drew her forth, after which on the pavement, under the street lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something grave, their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm, and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost resembled a return from a funeral. Unless indeed it resembled more the hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home for but to bury, as decently as possible, her mistake. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 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 dot org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Golden Bowl by Henry James. Book 3, Chapter 17. It appeared thus that they might enjoy together extraordinary freedom, the two friends, from the moment they should understand their position aright. Would the Prince himself, from an early stage, not unnaturally, Charlotte had made a great point of their so understanding it. She had found frequent occasion to describe to him this necessity, and her resignation tempered, or her intelligence at least quickened, by irrepressible irony. She applied at different times different names to the propriety of their case. The wonderful thing was that her sense of propriety had been from the first, especially alive about it. There were hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the commonest tact, as if this principle alone would suffice to light their way. There were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs. She talked now as if it were indicated at every turn by finger posts of almost ridiculous prominence. She talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar. And she, even on occasion, delivered herself in the sense that as her situation was unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. Do she once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like-strange order had been prescribed in his own case. Isn't the immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that we have to do nothing in life at all? Nothing except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one's not being more of a fool than one can help. That's all, but that's as true for one time as for another. There has been plenty of doing, and there will doubtless be plenty still, but it's all theirs every inch of it. It's all a matter of what they've done to us. And she showed how the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as everything came and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair. No more extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims than this of forcing them against their will, into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid. She was to remember not a little, meanwhile, the particular prolonged silent look with which the Prince had met her allusion to these primary efforts that escape. She was inwardly to dwell on the element of the unuttered that her tone had caused to play up in his irresistible eyes, and this because she considered with pride and joy that she had on the spot disposed of the doubt, the question, the challenge, or whatever else might have been, that such a look could convey. He had been sufficiently off his guard to show some little wonder as to their having plotted so very hard against their destiny, and she knew well enough, of course, what in this connection was at the bottom of his thought, and what would have sounded out more or less if he had not happily saved himself from words. All men were brutes enough to catch when they might at such chances for dissent, for all the good it really did them, but the Prince's distinction was in being one of the few who could check himself before acting on the impulse. This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy. If her friend had blurted or bungled, he would have said in his simplicity. Did we do everything to avoid it when we faced your remarkable marriage? Quite handsomely, of course, using the plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after Mr. Verver had dispatched to Rome the news of their engagement. That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them, an acceptance quite other than perfunctory, she had never destroyed. Though reserved for no eyes but her own, it was still carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place, from which very privately she sometimes took it out to read it over. A la guerre, comme à la guerre, then. It had been couched in the French tongue. We must lead our lives as we see them, but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own. The message had remained ambiguous. She had read it in more lights than one. It might mean that even without her his career was uphill work for him, a daily fighting matter on behalf of a good appearance, and that thus, if they were to become neighbors again, the event would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean, on the other hand, that he found he was happy enough and that, accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, nonetheless, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself had not asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an inquiry, everything implied, was beneath him, just as it was beneath herself to mention to him, uninvited, that she had instantly offered an imperfect honesty to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word, she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby foreborn to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would, in all probability, straight way have dished her marriage, that all her future had, in fact, for the moment, hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver's delicacy, as she supposed they must call it, and that her position, and the matter of responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight. For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time in its measured allowance, had originally much helped him, helped him in the sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up, in spite of which it was just this accessory element that seemed at present, with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else, separations, delays, and intervals, but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had on the whole expected, less strangely for the state of being married, even as he was married, and there was a logic in the matter he knew, a logic that but gave this truth a sort of solidity of evidence. Mr. Verver decidedly helped him with it, with his wedded condition, helped him really so much that it made all the difference. In the degree in which he rendered at the service on Mr. Verver's part was remarkable, as indeed what service from the first of their meeting had not been. He was living, he had been living these four or five years, on Mr. Verver's services, a truth scarcely less plain if he dealt with them for appreciation, one by one, than if he poured them all together into the general pot of his gratitude and let the things simmer to a nourishing broth. To the latter way with them he was undoubtedly most disposed, yet he would even thus, on occasion, pick out a piece to taste on its own merits. Wondrous that such hours could seem the savor of the particular treat at his father-in-law's expense that he more and more struck himself as enjoying. He had needed months and months to arrive at a full appreciation. He couldn't originally have given offhand a name to his deepest obligation, but by the time the name had flowered in his mind he was practically living at the ease guaranteed him. Mr. Verver then, in a word, took care of his relation to Maggie, as he took care, and apparently always would, of everything else. He relieved him of all anxiety about his married life in the same manner in which he relieved him on the score of his bank account. And as he performed the latter office by communicating with the bankers, so the former sprang as directly from his good understanding with his daughter. This understanding had, wonderfully, that was in high evidence, the same deep intimacy as the commercial, the financial association founded far down on a community of interest. And the correspondence for the Prince carried itself out in identities of character, the vision of which, fortunately, rather tended to amuse than to, as might have happened, irritate him. Those people and his free synthesis lumped together, capitalists and bankers, retired men of business, illustrious collectors, American fathers-in-law, American fathers, little American daughters, little American wives. Those people were of the same large lucky group, as one might say. They were all, at least, of the same general species and had the same general instincts. They hung together, they passed each other the word, they spoke each other's language. They did each other turns. In this last connection, it, of course, came up for our young man at a given moment, that Maggie's relation with him was also, on the perceived basis, taken care of, which was, in fact, the real upshot of the matter. It was a funny situation, that is, it was funny just as it stood. Their married life was in question, but the solution was, not less strikingly, before them. It was all right for himself, because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie's comfort, and it was all right for Maggie, because he worked it so for her husband's. The fact that time, however, was not, as we have said, wholly on the Prince's side, might have shown for particularly true one dark day, on which, by an odd but not unprecedented chance, the reflections just noted offered themselves as his main recreation. They alone, it appeared, had been appointed to fill the hours for him, and even to fill the great square house in Portland Place, where the scale of one of the smaller saloons fitted them but loosely. He had looked into this room on the chance that he might find the Princess at T., but though the fireside service of the repast was shiningly present, the mistress of the table was not, and he had waited for her, if waiting it could be called, while he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. He could have named to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at this moment, and her not coming in, as the half hour elapsed, became in fact quite positively, however perversely, the circumstance that kept him on the spot. Just there he might have been feeling, just there he could best take his note. This observation was certainly by itself meager amusement for a dreary little crisis, but his walk to and fro, and in particular his repeated pause at one of the high front windows, gave each of the ebbing minutes, nonetheless, after a time, a little more of the quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. These throbs scarce expressed, however, the impatience of desire any more than they stood for sharp disappointment. The series together resembled perhaps more than anything else those fine waves of clearness, through which, for a watcher of the East, dawn at last trembles into rosy day. The illumination indeed was all for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of thought. The material outlook was all the while a different matter. The march afternoon, judged at the window, had blundered back into autumn. It had been raining for hours, and the color of the rain, the color of the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses, of life altogether, and so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable dirty brown. There was at first even for the young man no faint flush in the fact of the direction taken, while he happened to look out by a slow jogging four-wheeled cab, which, awkwardly deflecting from the middle course at the apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the left-hand pavement, and so at last, under further instructions, floundered to a full stop before the prince's windows. The person within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to be a lady who left the vehicle to wait, and putting up no umbrella quickly crossed the wet interval that separated her from the house. She but flitted and disappeared, yet the prince, from his standpoint, had had time to recognize her, and the recognition kept him for some minutes motionless. Charlotte stamped at such an hour, and a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof. Charlotte stamped, turning up for him at the very climax of his special intervision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, while he stood waiting, a singular intensity, though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had not come, or had come only for Maggie. Perhaps on learning below that the princess had not returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing a word on a card. He should see at any rate, and meanwhile, controlling himself would do nothing. This thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him. She would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to him be all of her own choosing, and his view of a reason for leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into sight, while the superficial conditions were so against her, was a harmony with conditions that were far from superficial, and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her presence. The value deepened strangely more over, with the rigor of his own attitude, with the fact, too, that, listening hard, he neither heard the house door close again, nor saw her go back to her cab, and it had risen to a climax by the time he had become aware, with his quick and sense, that she had followed the butler up to the landing from which his room opened. If anything could further, then, have added to it, the renewed pause outside, as if she had said to the man, wait a moment, would have constituted this touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle, and had then busied himself all deliberately with the fire, she made it easy for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and to meet her provisionally on the question of Maggie. While the butler remained, it was Maggie that she had come to see, and Maggie that, in spite of this attendance high blankness on the subject of all possibilities on that lady's part, she would cheerfully by the fire wait for. As soon as they were alone together, however, she mounted, as with the whiz and the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact, saying straight out, as she stood and looked at him. What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do? It was as if he then knew on the spot why he had been feeling for hours as he had felt, as if he in fact knew, within the minute, things he had not known even while she was panting, as from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, nonetheless, that she knew still more than he, in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them, and his vision of alternative, she could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions, opened out altogether with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him through the gained advantage of it, her right hand resting on the marble, and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He couldn't have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged, for he remembered no occasion in Rome, from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence, the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter, of a dull dress and a black, bold-rised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hats and the frock's own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense of the past revived for him, nevertheless, as it had not yet done. It made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present, that this poor quantity's scarce-retained substance enough, scarce remains sufficiently there, to be wounded or shocked. What had happened in short was that Charlotte, and he had, by a single churn of the wrist of fate, led up to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed, been placed face to face in a freedom that partook extraordinarily of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage was such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he'd seem to hear it tell him why it kept recurring, but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was, and to which he had lived, quite intimately, by the end of a quarter of an hour, that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in for softness, as with billows of Eiderdown. On that morning, in the park, there had been, however, dissimulated doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasized confidence. The emphasis for their general comfort was what Charlotte had come to apply. In as much as, though it was not what she definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone, even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied. It was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her rickety growler and the conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what it had become of her carriage and why above all she was not using it in such weather. It's just because of the weather, she explained. It's my little idea. It makes me feel as I used to, what I could do as I liked. End of Chapter 17.