"Why," Mrs. Assingham asked after an instant, "should it surprise you?"
He just thought. "Oh it does n't!"
"She saw of course as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we all were. She did n't need each (195) of us to go by appointment to her room at night, or to take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No doubt even she was rather impatient."
"OF the poor things?" Mr. Verver had here enquired while he waited.
"Well, of your not yourselves being so--and of your not in particular.
I have n't the least doubt in the world, par exemple, that she thinks you too meek."
"Oh she thinks me too meek?"
"And she had been sent for, on the very face of its to work right in.
All she had to do after all was to be nice to you."
"To--a--ME?" said Adam Verver.
He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. "To you and to every one. She had only to be what she is--and to be it all round. If she's charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she 'acted'--as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them--the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and SO other, than themselves, COULD be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it's she who's the real thing."
"Ah it's she who's the real thing? As HE had n't hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so doubtless he had now a little appeared to offer submission in his appeal. "I see, I see--he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without wanting at the same time to be sure (196) of what the real thing was. "And what would it be--a--definitely that you understand by that?"
She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. "Why exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will."
"Oh--of course never!"
It not only remained with them and hung about them, it positively developed and deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as "real"--just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter's marriage. The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great "finds "; it continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified.
Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling on his own side that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty. As it had served him (197) to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernardino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter's betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached, and as to which he had made out contentedly that further news was to be obtained from a certain Mr. Gutermann-Seuss of Brighton. It was all at bottom in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, despite the general tendency of the "devouring element" to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest scattered and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires. Adam Verver had in other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own little book, without having for a day raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those fortunate bachelors or other gentlemen of pleasure who so manage their entertainment of compromising company that even the austerest housekeeper, occupied and competent below-stairs, never feels obliged to give warning.
That figure has however a freedom for us that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to come (198) to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he found himself practically alone at Fawns with his young friend; Amerigo and Maggie having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going abroad for a month, since his amusement was now scarce less happily assured than his security. An impulse eminently natural had stirred within the Prince; his life, as for some time established, was deliciously dull, and thereby on the whole what he best liked; but a small gust of yearning had swept over him, and Maggie repeated to her father with infinite admiration the pretty terms in which, after it had lasted a little, he had described to her this experience. He called it a "serenade," a low music that, outside one of the windows of the sleeping house, disturbed his rest at night.
