I
The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him;
he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more
convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they
have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to
which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London
much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a
case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself,
and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of
that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine
afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to
either of those places that these grounds of his predilection,
after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned
with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into
Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively
short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in
which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the
forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel,
brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled
together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the
loot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention--not even, for that matter,
when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces
shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned
hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of
parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the
Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since,
though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the
streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August
afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was too
restless--that was the fact--for any concentration, and the last
idea that would just now have occurred to him in any connection
was the idea of pursuit.
He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before,
and what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the
sense of how he had been justified. Capture had crowned the
pursuit--or success, as he would otherwise have put it, had
rewarded virtue; whereby the consciousness of these things made
him, for the hour, rather serious than gay. A sobriety that might
have consorted with failure sat in his handsome face,
constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time oddly and,
as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue
eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to
be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a
"refined" Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at
three o'clock, his fate had practically been sealed, and that
even when one pretended to no quarrel with it the moment had
something of the grimness of a crunched key in the strongest lock
that could be made. There was nothing to do as yet, further, but
feel what one had done, and our personage felt it while he
aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were married, so
definitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled the date
to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He
was to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady on
whose behalf, and on whose father's, the London lawyers had
reached an inspired harmony with his own man of business, poor
Calderoni, fresh from Rome and now apparently in the wondrous
situation of being "shown London," before promptly leaving it
again, by Mr. Verver himself, Mr. Verver whose easy way with his
millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the arrangements,
the principle of reciprocity. The reciprocity with which the
Prince was during these minutes most struck was that of
Calderoni's bestowal of his company for a view of the lions. If
there was one thing in the world the young man, at this juncture,
clearly intended, it was to be much more decent as a son-in-law
than lots of fellows he could think of had shown themselves in
that character. He thought of these fellows, from whom he was so
to differ, in English; he used, mentally, the English term to
describe his difference, for, familiar with the tongue from his
earliest years, so that no note of strangeness remained with him
either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for
the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly,
even for his relation with himself--though not unmindful that
there might still, as time went on, be others, including a more
intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with
violence, the larger or the finer issue--which was it?--of the
vernacular. Miss Verver had told him he spoke English too well--
it was his only fault, and he had not been able to speak worse
even to oblige her. "When I speak worse, you see, I speak
French," he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him
know, as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so
dreamed of making good, of making better; to say nothing of his
evident feeling that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not
a person to rise to. The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial,
charming, like every answer the parties to his new arrangement
had yet had from him--was that he was practising his American in
order to converse properly, on equal terms as it were, with Mr.
Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of it, he
said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the
observation that positively, of all his observations yet, had
most finely touched her.
"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There
are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man
I've ever seen in my life."
"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily
inquired.
It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The
things, or many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was
seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other
things that, with the other people known to the young man, had
failed of such a result. "Why, his 'form,'" he had returned,
"might have made one doubt."
"Father's form?" She hadn't seen it. It strikes me he hasn't got
any."
"He hasn't got mine--he hasn't even got yours."
"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh, yours,
my dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I've made
that out. So don't doubt it. It's where it has brought him out--
that's the point."
"It's his goodness that has brought him out," our young woman
had, at this, objected.
"Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out.
Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people in." He
had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. "No,
it's his WAY. It belongs to him."