IX

So much mute communication was doubtless, all this time, marvellous,

and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene, prematurely,

a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of

reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really

little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each

in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing

allusive, nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or

immediately after luncheon—except indeed so far as their failure soon

again to meet might be itself an accident charged with reference. The

hour or two after luncheon—and on Sundays with especial rigour, for

one of the domestic reasons of which it belonged to Maggie quite

multitudinously to take account—were habitually spent by the Princess

with her little boy, in whose apartment she either frequently found her

father already established or was sooner or later joined by him. His

visit to his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his

day, against all interventions, and this without counting his grandson’s

visits to HIM, scarcely less ordered and timed, and the odd bits, as he

called them, that they picked up together when they could—communions

snatched, for the most part, on the terrace, in the gardens or the park,

while the Principino, with much pomp and circumstance of perambulator,

parasol, fine lace over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance,

took the air. In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great

house the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily

accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the small

child an heir-apparent—in the nursery of nurseries the talk, at these

instituted times, was always so prevailingly with or about the master

of the scene that other interests and other topics had fairly learned to

avoid the slighting and inadequate notice there taken of them. They came

in, at the best, but as involved in the little boy’s future, his past,

or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead

their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing perhaps, in

truth, had done more than this united participation to confirm in the

elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more

deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver’s

behalf, we have made some mention. It was of course an old story and a

familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link

between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every

ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma

and a grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process,

might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with

the place of immediate male parent swept bare and open to the next

nearest sympathy.

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what

the Prince might be or might do for his son—the sum of service, in

his absence, so completely filled itself out. It was not in the least,

moreover, that there was doubt of him, for he was conspicuously addicted

to the manipulation of the child, in the frank Italian way, at such

moments as he judged discreet in respect to other claims: conspicuously,

indeed, that is, for Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to

speak to her husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak

to her father of the extravagance of her husband. Adam Verver had,

all round, in this connection, his own serenity. He was sure of

his son-in-law’s auxiliary admiration—admiration, he meant, of his

grand-son; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the

instinct—or it might fairly have been the tradition—of the latter’s

making the child so solidly beautiful as to HAVE to be admired? What

contributed most to harmony in this play of relations, however, was the

way the young man seemed to leave it to be gathered that, tradition

for tradition, the grandpapa’s own was not, in any estimate, to go for

nothing. A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively

in the Princess herself—well, Amerigo’s very discretions were his way

of taking account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir

were, in fine, not more angular than any others to be observed in him;

and Mr. Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression

of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from

this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours. It

was as if the grandpapa’s special show of the character were but another

side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came

back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception—that

of the Prince’s inability, in any matter in which he was concerned,

to CONCLUDE. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be

demonstrated—on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last

was, after all, the point; he really worked, poor young man, for

acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how,

when you came to that, COULD you know that a horse wouldn’t shy at

a brass-band, in a country road, because it didn’t shy at a

traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines

without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little, thus,

from month to month, the Prince was learning what his wife’s father

had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off—he had been

brought, up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought

it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr.

Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt

that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive

side. He didn’t know—he was learning, and it was funny for him—to

how many things he HAD been brought up. If the Prince could only strike

something to which he hadn’t! This wouldn’t, it seemed to him, ruffle

the smoothness, and yet MIGHT, a little, add to the interest.

What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was

their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together—at any

cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them

out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends

were gathered, and cause them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along

a covered walk in the “old” garden, as it was called, old with an

antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of

brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out

of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it,

1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before them

a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the greenness,

through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest trees

spaciously clustered and where they would find one of the quietest

places. A bench had been placed, long ago, beneath a great oak that

helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to

rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude

and figure a bosky horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and

the low sun made a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade;

Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as, over

her charming bare head, she now handled it, gave, with the big straw

hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped

back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was

“sequestered”—they had praised it for that together, before, and liked

the word; and after they had begun to linger there they could have

smiled (if they hadn’t been really too serious, and if the question

hadn’t so soon ceased to matter), over the probable wonder of the others

as to what would have become of them.

The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgment of

their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way

that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind? They each

knew that both were full of the superstition of not “hurting,” but might

precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at

this moment, whether that was to be, after all, the last word of their

conscientious development. Certain it was, at all events, that,

in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs. Rance, the

attendance at tea, just in the right place on the west terrace, might

perfectly comprise the four or five persons—among them the very

pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted, announced and now

brought—from the couple of other houses near enough, one of these the

minor residence of their proprietor, established, thriftily, while he

hired out his ancestral home, within sight and sense of his profit.

It was not less certain, either, that, for once in a way, the group in

question must all take the case as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at

any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr. Verver

and his daughter, to see their reputation for a decent friendliness,

through any momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their

absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo’s possible funny Italian anxiety;

Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware, conveniently

amenable to this friend’s explanations, beguilements, reassurances,

and perhaps in fact rather more than less dependent on them as his new

life—since that was his own name for it—opened out. It was no secret

to Maggie—it was indeed positively a public joke for her—that she

couldn’t explain as Mrs. Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking

explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the manner

of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition

of this luxury had to be met. He didn’t seem to want them as yet for

use—rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the

kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed,

beautiful, general, slightly indolent lack of more dissipated, or even

just of more sophisticated, tastes.

However that might be, the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily

recognised—and not least by herself—as filling in the intimate little

circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she

had taken, with her kind, melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible

engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that

sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of

leisure. It naturally led her position in the household, as, she called

it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good

couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form

of protest. She was there to keep him quiet—it was Amerigo’s own

description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more

visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit.

Fanny herself limited indeed, she minimised, her office; you didn’t

need a jailor, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink

ribbon. This was not an animal to be controlled—it was an animal to

be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was

educative—which Maggie was so aware that she herself, inevitably,

wasn’t; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge

of was his mere intelligence. This left, goodness knew, plenty of

different calls for Maggie to meet—in a case in which so much pink

ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature.

What it all amounted to, at any rate, was that Mrs. Assingham would be

keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out

their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less

neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with them

there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first

time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he

was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of people, strange

English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so little

as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was

practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she hadn’t

yet learned to see him as meeting such exposure in her absence. How did

he move and talk, how above all did he, or how WOULD he, look—he who,

with his so nobly handsome face, could look such wonderful things—in

case of being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder?

There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie

herself had her own odd way—which didn’t moreover the least irritate

him—of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her

as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused himself with

declaring, this love of chinoiseries; but she actually this evening

didn’t mind—he might deal with her Chinese as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener

occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs. Assingham’s, a

word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory

which we have just found in our path. It wasn’t that the Princess could

be indebted to another person, even to so clever a one as this friend,

for seeing anything in her husband that she mightn’t see unaided; but

she had ever, hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude

any better description of a felt truth than her little limits—terribly

marked, she knew, in the direction of saying the right things—enabled

her to make. Thus it was, at any rate, that she was able to live more

or less in the light of the fact expressed so lucidly by their common

comforter—the fact that the Prince was saving up, for some very

mysterious but very fine eventual purpose, all the wisdom, all the

answers to his questions, all the impressions and generalisations, he

gathered; putting them away and packing them down because he wanted his

great gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to let it

off. He wanted first to make sure of the whole of the subject that was

unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he had

collected would find their use. He knew what he was about—-trust him

at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big noise. And Mrs.

Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was about. It was the happy

form of this assurance that had remained with Maggie; it could always

come in for her that Amerigo knew what he was about. He might at moments

seem vague, seem absent, seem even bored: this when, away from her

father, with whom it was impossible for him to appear anything but

respectfully occupied, he let his native gaiety go in outbreaks of

song, or even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of

intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at times

reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was

for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still

had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his

affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as

he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the

Sabine hills, which she had, at the time of their engagement, seen and

yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as

the “perched” place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the

pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as

the head and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods

over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed

all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and

charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use—all

without counting the cloud of mortgages that had, from far back, buried

them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the

layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius, and actually

making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow

excavation. Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail

for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an

idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices—sacrifices

resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr. Verver—necessary for winning

them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife

meanwhile—one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay

about—was that she never admired him so much, or so found him

heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in

which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw

other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once

for all, to constitute HER substance. There was really nothing they had

talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of

the license and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established

for each: she going so far as to put it that, even should he some day

get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would,

after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it,

charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply

moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open

to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart,

at these light moments, that his course wouldn’t then be difficult,

inasmuch as, so simply constituted as he was on all the precious

question—and why should he be ashamed of it?—he knew but one way with

the fair. They had to be fair—and he was fastidious and particular, his

standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation with

them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary, properly

human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His interest, she

always answered, happened not to be “plain,” and plainness, all round,

had little to do with the matter, which was marked, on the contrary, by

the richest variety of colour; but the working basis, at all events, had

been settled—the Miss Maddocks of life been assured of their importance

for him. How conveniently assured Maggie—to take him too into the

joke—had more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since

it fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she

might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This

was one of her rules-full as she was of little rules, considerations,

provisions. There were things she of course couldn’t tell him, in so

many words, about Amerigo and herself, and about their happiness and

their union and their deepest depths—and there were other things she

needn’t; but there were also those that were both true and amusing,

both communicable and real, and of these, with her so conscious, so

delicately cultivated scheme of conduct as a daughter, she could make

her profit at will. A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on

most of the elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it

involved, this serenity, innumerable complete assumptions: since so

ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spreading about them, of

confidence solidly supported, might have suggested for persons of poorer

pitch the very insolence of facility. Still, they weren’t insolent—THEY

weren’t, our pair could reflect; they were only blissful and grateful

and personally modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, when

great things were great, when good things were good, and when safe

things were safe, and not, therefore, placed below their fortune by

timidity which would have been as bad as being below it by impudence.

Worthy of it as they were, and as each appears, under our last possible

analysis, to have wished to make the other feel that they were, what

they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly

met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity. Their

rightness, the justification of everything—something they so felt

the pulse of—sat there with them; but they might have been asking

themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything

so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had

housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but mightn’t the

moment possibly count for them—or count at least for us while we watch

them with their fate all before them—as the dawn of the discovery that

it doesn’t always meet ALL contingencies to be right? Otherwise why

should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt—the expression of the

fine pang determined in her a few hours before—rise after a time to her

lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion’s intelligence

of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all.

“What is it, after all, that they want to do to you?” “They” were for

the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs. Rance was the symbol,

and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to

appear not to know what she meant. What she meant—when once she had

spoken—could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after

they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great

defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie

presently contributed an idea in saying: “What has really happened is

that the proportions, for us, are altered.” He accepted equally, for

the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her

even when she added that it wouldn’t so much matter if he hadn’t been

so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to

declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited.

Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have

had to wait long—if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was

a way. “Since you ARE an irresistible youth, we’ve got to face it. That,

somehow, is what that woman has made me feel. There’ll be others.”

X

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him. “Yes,

there’ll be others. But you’ll see me through.”

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

“Oh no. Through my holding out.”

Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness.

“Why SHOULD you hold out forever?”

He gave, none the less, no start—and this as from the habit of taking

anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious. But it was quite

written upon him too, for that matter, that holding out wouldn’t be,

so very completely, his natural, or at any rate his acquired, form.

His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long

time—for a man so greatly beset. This appearance, that is, spoke but

little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses—and all in

spite of his being a small, spare, slightly stale person, deprived of

the general prerogative of presence. It was not by mass or weight or

vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than

he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail. There was even

something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his

relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the

stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the

footlights. He would have figured less than anything the stage-manager

or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be,

at the best, the financial “backer,” watching his interests from the

wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry.

Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed

propriety of his greater stoutness. He had lost early in life much of

his crisp, closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a

small neat beard, too compact to be called “full,” though worn equally,

as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and

chin. His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable

features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was CLEAR,

and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept

and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage,

as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and

uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver’s eyes that both

admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the

modest area the outward extension of a view that was “big” even when

restricted to stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically

large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their

ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor’s

vision out or most opened themselves to your own. Whatever you might

feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents

say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their

range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight

of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them. If other

importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they

were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend’s dress,

adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every

day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black “cut away”

coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking

trousers, chequered in black and white—the proper harmony with which,

he inveterately considered, was a sprigged blue satin necktie; and,

over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and

seasons, a white duck waistcoat. “Should you really,” he now asked,

“like me to marry?” He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it

MIGHT be an idea; which, for that matter, he would be ready to carry out

should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it

seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a

truth, in the connection, to utter. “What I feel is that there is

somehow something that used to be right and that I’ve made wrong. It

used to be right that you hadn’t married, and that you didn’t seem to

want to. It used also”—she continued to make out “to seem easy for the

question not to come up. That’s what I’ve made different. It does come

up. It WILL come up.”

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

pensive.

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

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near

him, pass his arm about her. “I guess I don’t feel as if you had ‘moved’

very far. You’ve only moved next door.”

“Well,” she continued, “I don’t feel as if it were fair for me just to

have given you a push and left you so. If I’ve made the difference for

you, I must think of the difference.”

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

“That’s just what I don’t yet know. But I must find out. We must think

together—as we’ve always thought. What I mean,” she went on after a

moment, “is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some

alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you.”

“An alternative to what?”

“Well, to your simply missing what you’ve lost—without anything being

done about it.”

“But what HAVE I lost?”

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she

more and more saw it. “Well, whatever it was that, BEFORE, kept us from

thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It

was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or

rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now

that I’m married to some one else you’re, as in consequence, married to

nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People

don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to THEM.”

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

be?”

“It’s enough of a reason, yes. But to BE enough of a reason it has to be

too much of a trouble. I mean FOR you. It has to be too much of a fight.

You ask me what you’ve lost,” Maggie continued to explain. “The not

having to take the trouble and to make the fight—that’s what you’ve

lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were—because I

was just as _I_ was—that’s what you miss.”

“So that you think,” her father presently said, “that I had better get

married just in order to be as I was before?”

The detached tone of it—detached as if innocently to amuse her by

showing his desire to accommodate—was so far successful as to draw from

her gravity a short, light laugh. “Well, what I don’t want you to feel

is that if you were to I shouldn’t understand. I SHOULD understand.

That’s all,” said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. “You don’t go so far as to wish

me to take somebody I don’t like?”

“Ah, father,” she sighed, “you know how far I go—how far I COULD go.

But I only wish that if you ever SHOULD like anybody, you may never

doubt of my feeling how I’ve brought you to it. You’ll always know that

I know that it’s my fault.”

“You mean,” he went on in his contemplative way, “that it will be you

who’ll take the consequences?”

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

the bad.”

“Well, that’s handsome.” He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her

closer and holding her more tenderly. “It’s about all I could expect of

you. So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square. I’ll

let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up.

But am I to understand meanwhile,” he soon went on, “that, ready as you

are to see me through my collapse, you’re not ready, or not AS ready,

to see me through my resistance? I’ve got to be a regular martyr before

you’ll be inspired?”

She demurred at his way of putting it. “Why, if you like it, you know,

it won’t BE a collapse.”

“Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if

I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don’t WANT to like

it. That is,” he amended, “unless I feel surer I do than appears very

probable. I don’t want to have to THINK I like it in a case when I

really shan’t. I’ve had to do that in some cases,” he confessed—“when

it has been a question of other things. I don’t want,” he wound up, “to

be MADE to make a mistake.”

“Ah, but it’s too dreadful,” she returned, “that you should even have to

FEAR—or just nervously to dream—that you may be. What does that show,

after all,” she asked, “but that you do really, well within, feel a

want? What does it show but that you’re truly susceptible?”

“Well, it may show that”—he defended himself against nothing. “But it

shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we’re

leading now, numerous and formidable.”

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which,

however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular. “Do you

feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?”

“Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to

the same thing. I think she’d do anything.”

“Oh well, I’d help you,” the Princess said with decision, “as against

HER—if that’s all you require. It’s too funny,” she went on before he

again spoke, “that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk

of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I’m bound to say, too

funny. The thing is,” Maggie developed under this impression, “that I

don’t think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don’t

at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so

it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I’m sure, to Fanny

Assingham.”

Mr. Verver—as if from due regard for these persons—considered a little.

“What life would they like us to lead?”

“Oh, it’s not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together.

SHE thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater.”

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

“Ah yes”—her reply was prompt—“but Amerigo doesn’t mind. He doesn’t

care, I mean, what we do. It’s for us, he considers, to see things

exactly as we wish. Fanny herself,” Maggie pursued, “thinks he’s

magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for

accepting the ‘social limitations’ of our life, for not missing what we

don’t give him.”

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

easy.”

“It IS easy—that’s exactly what I think. If there were things he DID

miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he

would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He COULD be a Hero—he WILL

be one if it’s ever necessary. But it will be about something better

than our dreariness. _I_ know,” the Princess declared, “where he’s

magnificent.” And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as

she had begun. “We’re not, all the same, committed to anything stupid.

If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we CAN be grander. There’s

nothing to prevent.”

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

“No—it’s for the amusement.”

“For whose? For Fanny’s own?”

“For everyone’s—though I dare say Fanny’s would be a large part.” She

hesitated; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring

out, which she finally produced. “For yours in particular, say—if

you go into the question.” She even bravely followed it up. “I haven’t

really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done

for you than is done.”

Mr. Verver uttered an odd vague sound. “Don’t you think a good deal is

done when you come out and talk to me this way?”

“Ah,” said his daughter, smiling at him, “we make too much of that!” And

then to explain: “That’s good, and it’s natural—but it isn’t great. We

forget that we’re as free as air.”

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

we don’t.”

She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little

by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that

belied a light tone. “What do you want,” he demanded, “to do to me?” And

he added, as she didn’t say: “You’ve got something in your mind.” It had

come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session

there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of

this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for

her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to

be vague in him. There had been from the first something in her anxious

eyes, in the way she occasionally lost herself, that it would perfectly

explain. He was therefore now quite sure.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve.”

She had a silence that made him right. “Well, when I tell you you’ll

understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I

got this morning. All day, yes—it HAS been in my mind. I’ve been asking

myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you

if you could stand just now another woman.”

It relieved him a little, yet the beautiful consideration of her manner

made it in a degree portentous. “Stand one—?”

“Well, mind her coming.”

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

“There—you see! I’ve at all events been thinking whether you’d take

this particular person but as a worry the more. Whether, that is, you’d

go so far with her in your notion of having to be kind.”

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

HER notion of it.

“Well,” his daughter returned, “you know how far, in a general way,

Charlotte Stant goes.”

“Charlotte? Is SHE coming?”

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

ask her.”

Mr. Verver continued to gaze, but rather as if waiting for more. Then,

as everything appeared to have come, his expression had a drop. If this

was all it was simple. “Then why in the world not?”

Maggie’s face lighted anew, but it was now another light. “It isn’t a

want of tact?”

“To ask her?”

“To propose it to you.”

“That _I_ should ask her?”

He put the question as an effect of his remnant of vagueness, but this

had also its own effect. Maggie wondered an instant; after which, as

with a flush of recognition, she took it up. “It would be too beautiful

if you WOULD!”

This, clearly, had not been her first idea—the chance of his words had

prompted it. “Do you mean write to her myself?”

“Yes—it would be kind. It would be quite beautiful of you. That is, of

course,” said Maggie, “if you sincerely CAN.”

He appeared to wonder an instant why he sincerely shouldn’t, and indeed,

for that matter, where the question of sincerity came in. This virtue,

between him and his daughter’s friend, had surely been taken for

granted. “My dear child,” he returned, “I don’t think I’m afraid of

Charlotte.”

“Well, that’s just what it’s lovely to have from you. From the moment

you’re NOT—the least little bit—I’ll immediately invite her.”

“But where in the world is she?” He spoke as if he had not thought of

Charlotte, nor so much as heard her name pronounced, for a very long

time. He quite in fact amicably, almost amusedly, woke up to her.

“She’s in Brittany, at a little bathing-place, with some people I don’t

know. She’s always with people, poor dear—she rather has to be; even

when, as is sometimes the case; they’re people she doesn’t immensely

like.”

“Well, I guess she likes US,” said Adam Verver. “Yes—fortunately she

likes us. And if I wasn’t afraid of spoiling it for you,” Maggie added,

“I’d even mention that you’re not the one of our number she likes

least.”

“Why should that spoil it for me?”

“Oh, my dear, you know. What else have we been talking about? It costs

you so much to be liked. That’s why I hesitated to tell you of my

letter.”

He stared a moment—as if the subject had suddenly grown out of

recognition. “But Charlotte—on other visits—never used to cost me

anything.”

“No—only her ‘keep,’” Maggie smiled.

“Then I don’t think I mind her keep—if that’s all.” The Princess,

however, it was clear, wished to be thoroughly conscientious. “Well, it

may not be quite all. If I think of its being pleasant to have her, it’s

because she WILL make a difference.”

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

“Ah then—there you are!” And the Princess showed in her smile her small

triumphant wisdom. “If you acknowledge a possible difference for the

better we’re not, after all, so tremendously right as we are. I mean

we’re not—as satisfied and amused. We do see there are ways of being

grander.”

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

grander?”

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

think. Really grander.”

He thought; for if this was a sudden opening he wished but the more to

meet it. “Because she’s so handsome?”

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

great.”

“Great—?”

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

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

“Well, she has been brave and bright,” said Maggie. “That mayn’t sound

like much, but she has been so in the face of things that might well

have made it too difficult for many other girls. She hasn’t a

creature in the world really—that is nearly—belonging to her. Only

acquaintances who, in all sorts of ways, make use of her, and distant

relations who are so afraid she’ll make use of THEM that they seldom let

her look at them.”

Mr. Verver was struck—and, as usual, to some purpose. “If we get her

here to improve us don’t we too then make use of her?”

It pulled the Princess up, however, but an instant. “We’re old,

old friends—we do her good too. I should always, even at the

worst—speaking for myself—admire her still more than I used her.”

“I see. That always does good.”

Maggie hesitated. “Certainly—she knows it. She knows, I mean, how

great I think her courage and her cleverness. She’s not afraid—not of

anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she

trembled for her life. And then she’s INTERESTING—which plenty of

other people with plenty of other merits never are a bit.” In which fine

flicker of vision the truth widened to the Princess’s view. “I myself of

course don’t take liberties, but then I do, always, by nature, tremble

for my life. That’s the way I live.”

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

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

“You’ll not persuade me that you’re not as good as Charlotte Stant,” he

still placidly enough remarked.

“I may be as good, but I’m not so great—and that’s what we’re talking

about. She has a great imagination. She has, in every way, a great

attitude. She has above all a great conscience.” More perhaps than ever

in her life before Maggie addressed her father at this moment with a

shade of the absolute in her tone. She had never come so near telling

him what he should take it from her to believe. “She has only twopence

in the world—but that has nothing to do with it. Or rather indeed”—she

quickly corrected herself—“it has everything. For she doesn’t care. I

never saw her do anything but laugh at her poverty. Her life has been

harder than anyone knows.”

It was moreover as if, thus unprecedentedly positive, his child had an

effect upon him that Mr. Verver really felt as a new thing. “Why then

haven’t you told me about her before?”

“Well, haven’t we always known—?”

“I should have thought,” he submitted, “that we had already pretty well

sized her up.”

“Certainly—we long ago quite took her for granted. But things change,

with time, and I seem to know that, after this interval, I’m going to

like her better than ever. I’ve lived more myself, I’m older, and

one judges better. Yes, I’m going to see in Charlotte,” said the

Princess—and speaking now as with high and free expectation—“more than

I’ve ever seen.”

“Then I’ll try to do so too. She WAS”—it came back to Mr. Verver

more—“the one of your friends I thought the best for you.”

His companion, however, was so launched in her permitted liberty of

appreciation that she for the moment scarce heard him. She was lost

in the case she made out, the vision of the different ways in which

Charlotte had distinguished herself.

“She would have liked for instance—I’m sure she would have liked

extremely—to marry; and nothing in general is more ridiculous, even

when it has been pathetic, than a woman who has tried and has not been

able.”

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

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

“But she has not been able?”

“Well, there are more cases, in Europe, in which it doesn’t come to

girls who are poor than in which it does come to them. Especially,” said

Maggie with her continued competence, “when they’re Americans.”

Well, her father now met her, and met her cheerfully, on all sides.

“Unless you mean,” he suggested, “that when the girls are American there

are more cases in which it comes to the rich than to the poor.”

She looked at him good-humouredly. “That may be—but I’m not going to be

smothered in MY case. It ought to make me—if I were in danger of being

a fool—all the nicer to people like Charlotte. It’s not hard for ME,”

she practically explained, “not to be ridiculous—unless in a very

different way. I might easily be ridiculous, I suppose, by behaving as

if I thought I had done a great thing. Charlotte, at any rate, has done

nothing, and anyone can see it, and see also that it’s rather strange;

and yet no one—no one not awfully presumptuous or offensive would

like, or would dare, to treat her, just as she is, as anything but quite

RIGHT. That’s what it is to have something about you that carries things

off.”

Mr. Verver’s silence, on this, could only be a sign that she had caused

her story to interest him; though the sign when he spoke was perhaps

even sharper. “And is it also what you mean by Charlotte’s being

‘great’?”

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

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

to marry?”

Maggie, on her side as well, waited as if to bring it out with effect;

but she after a minute either renounced or encountered an obstacle. “I’m

afraid I’m not sure.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Well, I don’t KNOW”—and, qualifying again, she was earnestly emphatic.

“I only make it out for myself.”

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

She had another pause. “I don’t think I want even for myself to put

names and times, to pull away any veil. I’ve an idea there has been,

more than once, somebody I’m not acquainted with—and needn’t be or

want to be. In any case it’s all over, and, beyond giving her credit for

everything, it’s none of my business.”

Mr. Verver deferred, yet he discriminated. “I don’t see how you can give

credit without knowing the facts.”

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

misfortune.”

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

“Well,” said Maggie, “I can do that. Isn’t it always a misfortune to

be—when you’re so fine—so wasted? And yet,” she went on, “not to wail

about it, not to look even as if you knew it?”

Mr. Verver seemed at first to face this as a large question, and then,

after a little, solicited by another view, to let the appeal drop.

“Well, she mustn’t be wasted. We won’t at least have waste.”

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

all I want.”

And it would apparently have settled their question and ended their talk

if her father had not, after a little, shown the disposition to revert.

“How many times are you supposing that she has tried?”

Once more, at this, and as if she hadn’t been, couldn’t be, hated to be,

in such delicate matters, literal, she was moved to attenuate. “Oh, I

don’t say she absolutely ever TRIED—!”

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

she done?”

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

loved—and she has lost.”

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

Maggie hesitated, but it cleared up. “Once is enough. Enough, that is,

for one to be kind to her.”

Her father listened, yet not challenging—only as with a need of some

basis on which, under these new lights, his bounty could be firm. “But

has she told you nothing?”

“Ah, thank goodness, no!”

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

“Because, you mean, it’s just what they’re supposed to do?” She looked

at him, flushed again now; with which, after another hesitation, “Do

young men tell?” she asked.

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

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

“I see—I see,” he quickly returned.

But she spoke the next moment as if she might, odiously, have been

sharp. “What happens at least is that where there’s a great deal of

pride there’s a great deal of silence. I don’t know, I admit, what _I_

should do if I were lonely and sore—for what sorrow, to speak of, have

I ever had in my life? I don’t know even if I’m proud—it seems to me

the question has never come up for me.”

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

mean I guess you’re proud enough.”

“Well then, I hope I’m humble enough too. I might, at all events, for

all I know, be abject under a blow. How can I tell? Do you realise,

father, that I’ve never had the least blow?”

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

“Well, you’ll realise when I HAVE one!” she exclaimed with a short laugh

that resembled, as for good reasons, his own of a minute before. “I

wouldn’t in any case have let her tell me what would have been dreadful

to me. For such wounds and shames are dreadful: at least,” she added,

catching herself up, “I suppose they are; for what, as I say, do I know

of them? I don’t WANT to know!”—she spoke quite with vehemence. “There

are things that are sacred whether they’re joys or pains. But one

can always, for safety, be kind,” she kept on; “one feels when that’s

right.”

She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with

that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit

of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after

year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object

with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite

with another—the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique”

of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and

immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern

impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps

forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality,

the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the

smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost

in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a

precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him,

daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified,

“generalised” in its grace, a figure with which his human connection was

fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, something

shyly mythological and nymphlike. The trick, he was not uncomplacently

aware, was mainly of his own mind; it came from his caring for precious

vases only less than for precious daughters. And what was more to the

point still, it often operated while he was quite at the same time

conscious that Maggie had been described, even in her prettiness, as

“prim”—Mrs. Rance herself had enthusiastically used the word of

her; while he remembered that when once she had been told before him,

familiarly, that she resembled a nun, she had replied that she was

delighted to hear it and would certainly try to; while also, finally,

it was present to him that, discreetly heedless, thanks to her long

association with nobleness in art, to the leaps and bounds of fashion,

she brought her hair down very straight and flat over her temples, in

the constant manner of her mother, who had not been a bit mythological.

Nymphs and nuns were certainly separate types, but Mr. Verver, when he

really amused himself, let consistency go. The play of vision was at all

events so rooted in him that he could receive impressions of sense even

while positively thinking. He was positively thinking while Maggie stood

there, and it led for him to yet another question—which in its turn

led to others still. “Do you regard the condition as hers then that you

spoke of a minute ago?”

“The condition—?”

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

everything’?”

Maggie had scarcely to reflect—her answer was so prompt. “Oh no. She’s

beyond nothing. For she has had nothing.”

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

of perspective.”

Maggie didn’t know about the law, but she continued definite. “She’s

not, for example, beyond help.”

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

he said, “with pleasure.”

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

True as this might be, however, there was one thing more—he was an

angel with a human curiosity. “Has she told you she likes me much?”

“Certainly she has told me—but I won’t pamper you. Let it be enough for

you it has always been one of my reasons for liking HER.”

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

humorously observed.

“Oh it isn’t, thank goodness, that she’s in love with you. It’s not, as

I told you at first, the sort of thing for you to fear.”

He had spoken with cheer, but it appeared to drop before this

reassurance, as if the latter overdid his alarm, and that should be

corrected. “Oh, my dear, I’ve always thought of her as a little girl.”

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

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

“It’s exactly what she is.”

Mr. Verver had got up as he spoke, and for a little, before retracing

their steps, they stood looking at each other as if they had really

arranged something. They had come out together for themselves, but it

had produced something more. What it had produced was in fact expressed

by the words with which he met his companion’s last emphasis. “Well, she

has a famous friend in you, Princess.”

Maggie took this in—it was too plain for a protest. “Do you know what

I’m really thinking of?” she asked.

He wondered, with her eyes on him—eyes of contentment at her freedom

now to talk; and he wasn’t such a fool, he presently showed, as not,

suddenly, to arrive at it. “Why, of your finding her at last yourself a

husband.”

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

looking.”

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

on.