The Golden Bowl

a couple of weeks after, they were again interrupting their stay, but this time with the question of their

been observed to be gathering themselves for departure, and it was with that difference made that the sense of the whole situation showed most fair — the sense of how right they had been to engage for so ample a residence, and of all the pleasure so fruity an autumn there could hold in its lap. This was what had occurred, that their lesson had been learned; and what Mrs. Assingham had dwelt upon was that without Charlotte it would have been learned but half. It would certainly not have been taught by Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches if these ladies had remained with them as long as at one time seemed probable. Charlotte’s light intervention had thus become a cause, operating covertly but none the less actively, and Fanny Assingham’s speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within him, fairly to startle him, as the indication of something irresistible. He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked to recover the sight — little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all entertained for a stiffish series of days. She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was happening — happening, that is, as a result of her influence. “Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,” Mrs. Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie — the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend — an odd little taste, as he would have described it, fo

it?” Mr. Verver had

ection, of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t, certainly, like to make people suffer — not, in general, as is the case with so many of us,

be liked?” her com

ted to put you — and to put Maggie about you. So far as that went she had a plan. But it was o

t have taken it up. “Ah, she want

sked after an instant,

ught. “Oh,

didn’t need each of us to go, by appointment, to her room at night, or take her out

Mr. Verver had here in

R not in particular. I haven’t the least doubt in t

thinks me

ace of it, to work right in. All she had

ME?” said

lp 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

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 w

xactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her e

f cours

structed. 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 to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino 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

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. Timid as it was, and plaintive, he yet couldn’t close his eyes for it, and when finally, rising on tiptoe, he had looked out, he had recognised in the figure below with a mandolin, all duskily draped in her grace, the raised appealing eyes and the one irresistible voice of the ever-to-beloved Italy. Sooner or later, that way, one had to listen; it was a hovering, haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim, pathetic shade crying out to be comforted. For this there was obviously but one way — as there were doubtless also many words for the simple fact that so prime a Roman had a fan

former — wanted to know what would become of the Principino if the house were cleared of everyone but the servants. Her question had fairly resounded, but it had afterwards, like many of her questions, dropped still more effectively than it had risen: the highest moral of the matter being, before the couple took their departure, that Mrs. Noble and Dr. Brady must mount unchallenged guard over the august little crib. If she hadn’t supremely believed in the majestic value of the nurse, whose experience was in itself the amplest of pillows, just as her attention was a spreading canopy from which precedent and reminiscence dropped as thickly as parted curtains — if she hadn’t been able to rest in this confidence she would fairly have sent her husband on his journey without her. In the same manner, if the sweetest — for i

son — and committed, especially, in his own house, which somehow made his sense of it a deeper thing — he took an interest in seeing how far the connection could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and in thus putting to the test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said, at the last, about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one, though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been, so usefully, for Fanny — no Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help her to be felt, according to Fanny’s diagnosis, as real. She was real, decidedly, from other causes, and Mr. Verver grew in time even a little amused at the amount of machinery Mrs. Assingham had seemed to see needed for pointing it. She w

ssion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations — while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him l

ng for. “Can you really then come if we start early?”— that was practically all he had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And “Why in the world not, when I’ve nothing else to do, and should, besides, so immensely like it?”— this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene, even of the littlest, at all — though he perhaps didn’t quite know why something like the menace of one hadn’t proceeded from her stopping half-way upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge. There hovered about him, at all events, while he walked, appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor yet so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory, incidents of being a father-inlaw. It had struck him, up to now, that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, as through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakably acquired it, through the young man’s having amiably passed it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of

d, by Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had suffered — putting it with extravagance — at her hands. If she put it with extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came — which she put with extravagance too — from her persistence, always, in thinking, feeling, talking about him, as young. He had had glimpses of moments when to hear her thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would have supposed the special edge of the wrong she had done him to consist in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself: it wouldn’t so much have mattered if he had been of common parental age. That he wasn’t, that he was just her extraordinary equal and contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn

t peace was to provide for his future — that is for hers — by marriage, by a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute — what he hadn’t seen was what she could contribute TO. When it had all supremely cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend’s leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted. It wasn’t only moreover that the word, with a click, so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfect