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THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 11 page

'O/the poor doings?' Mr Verver had here inquired while he waited.

'Well, of your not yourselves being so - and of your not in particular. I haven't the least doubt in the world, par exemplef® that she thinks you too meek.'

'Oh, she thinks me too meek?'

'And she had been^sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in. All she had to do, after all, was to be nice to you.'

'To - a - meV said Adam Verver.

He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. 'To you and to everyone. 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 diem - die extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, man memselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, dien one saw mem lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was mat it's she who's die real thing.'

'Ah, it's she who's die real diing?' As he had not hitherto taken it home as completely as die Miss Lutches and Mrs Ranee, so, doubdess, 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 widiout wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what die real thing was. 'And what would it be - a - definitely diat you understand by diat?'

She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. 'Why, exacdy what mose women memselves want to be, and what her effect on mem is to make them recognise that rfiey never will.'

'Oh - of course never!'

It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and deepened, after mis talk, diat die luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, widi the diing 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 die importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great 'finds' - continued, beyond any odier, to keep him attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps


THE GOLDEN BOWL


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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 morocco61 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 Luini62 he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to thje 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;63 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, in spite of 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 die 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 that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, mat 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



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