Henry James, The Golden Bowl, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, London, Toronto, 1992. 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. (opening, 5)
It was not indeed 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 the far-off victories. (5)
…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 victories. (5)
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, (6)
There are two parts of me’—yes, he had been moved to go on. ‘One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the boundless b[e]tises of other people—especially of their infamous waste of money that might have come to me. Those things are written—literally in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they’re abominable. Everybody can get at them, and you’ve both of you wonderfully looked them in the face. But there’s another part, very much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown, unimportant—unimportant save to you—personal quantity. About this you’ve found out nothing.’ (9)
‘The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history.’
‘Oh I’m not afraid of history!’ She had been sure of that. ‘call it the bad part, if you like—yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else,’ Maggie Verver had also said, ‘that made me originally think of you? It wasn’t—as I should suppose you must have seen—what you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste—the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about. (10)
What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thought while he loitered—what he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. ‘You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.’ (10-11)
You’re at any rate a part of his collection,’ she had explained—‘one of the things that can only be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you—you belongs to a class about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de mus[e]e.’ (12)
Humble as he was, at the same time he was not so humble as if he had known himself frivolous or stupid. (15)
He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? his life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition, which was in its turn too much the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of archives. (15)
…his younger brother, who had married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister and her husband, the anglicized of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the most disponsible of ex-deputies and of relatives—a scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie’s plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the altar. (16)
For what, for whom indeed but himself and the high advantages attached, was he about to marry an extraordinary charming girl whose ‘prospects’, of the solid sort, were as guaranteed as her amiability? (17)
The Prince’s notion of a recompense to women—similar in this to his notion of an appeal—was more or less to make love to them. Now he hadn’t, as he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs Assingham—nor did he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days to mark them off, the women to whom he hadn’t made love: it represented—and that was what pleased him in it—a different stage of existence from the times at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. (19)
He remembered to have read as a boy a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife’s countryman—which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination American could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole—or was it the South?—than any one had every done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, include Mrs Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so [19] disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks. (20)
He waited a minute too, then answered her with a question. ‘You say you “liked” it, your undertaking to make my engagement possible. It remains beautiful for me that you did; … ‘I scarce know what to make,’ she said, ‘of such an enquiry. If you haven’t by this time found out yourself, what meaning can anything I say have for you? Don’t you really after all feel,’ she added while nothing came from him—‘aren’t you conscious every minute of the perfection of the creature of whom I’ve put you into possession?’ (24)
It was not to be concealed that he worked upon her, but of course she had always liked him. ‘I should be interested,’ she presently remarked, ‘to see some sense you don’t possess.’
Well, he produced one on the spot. ‘The moral, dear Mrs Assingham. I mean always as you others consider it. I’ve of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the “lightning elevator” in one of Mr Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it’s as short in almost any case to turn round and come down again.’ (26)
He was funny, while they talked, about his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known. (26)
…seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact however neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been recordedly her birthplace and ‘Europe’ punctually her discipline. (28)
These friends were in the game—that of playing with the disparity between her aspects and her character. (28)
Colonel Bob had, a few years after his marriage, left the army, which had clearly by that time done its laudable all for the enrichment of his personal experience, and he could thus give his whole time to the gardening in question. (29)
There reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things—such things as American girls accepted as ‘good enough’—hadn’t begun to be; so that the pleasant pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage. (29)
He had been thinking the case over and making up his mind. A handsome clever odd girl staying with one was a complication. … ‘She can come, you know, at any time, to us.’
‘Oh no, you must keep her for that. But why not after?’ (35)
He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something intently made for exhibition fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower, (37)
He was somehow glad, on finding himself alone with Charlotte, that he hadn’t been guilty of that inconsequence. (39)
Once more, as a man conscious of having known many women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as certain as sunrise or the coming round of saints’ days, the doing by the woman of the thing that gave her away. She did it, ever, inevitably, infallibly—she couldn’t possible not do it. It was her nature, it was her life, and the man could always expect it without lifting a finger. This was his, the man’s, any man’s, position and strength—that he had necessarily the advantage, that he only had to wait with a decent patience to be placed, in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other creature was her weakness and her deep misfortune—not less, no doubt, than her beauty. It produced for the man that extraordinary mixture [40] of pity and profit in which his relation with her, when he was not a mere brute, mainly consisted; and gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of being always nice to her, nice about her, nice for her. She always dressed her act up, of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged it, showing in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but one thing in the world, equal to her abjection: she would let it be known for anything, for everything, but the truth of which it was made. That was what, exactly, Charlotte Stant would be doing now; that was the present motive and support, to a certainty, of each of her looks and motions. She was the twentieth woman, she was possessed by her doom, but her doom was also to arrange appearances, and what now concerned him was to learn how she proposed. He would help her, would arrange with her—to any point in reason; the only thing was to know what appearance could best be produced and best be preserved. Produced and preserved on her part of course; since on his own there had been luckily no folly to cover up, nothing but a perfect accord between conduct and obligation. (40)
‘I’ve been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I wanted to see her happy—and it doesn’t strike me I find you too shy to tell me I shall.’ (41)
…just as he could still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous element in Maggie’s wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her. (42)
…so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting on her lips that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian. … Her account of the mystery didn’t suffice: her recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; (43)
‘Ah but it isn’t, is it,’ she asked, ‘a question of that?’ (46)
…thin, with facial, with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a consequent looseness of apparel that, combined with a choice of queer light shades and of strange straw-like textures, of the aspect of Chinese mats, provocative of wonder at his sources of supply, suggested the habit of tropic islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs. His smooth round head, with the particular shade of its white hair, was like a [52] silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The hollows of his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes within them were like little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew everything that could be known about life, which he regarded as, for far the greater part, a matter of pecuniary arrangement. His wife accused him of a want alike of moral and intellectual reaction, or rather indeed of a complete incapacity for either. He never went even so far as to understand what she meant, and it didn’t at all matter, since he could be in spite of the limitation a perfectly social creature. … This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose meaning he knew that he could neglect. He edited for their general economy the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams. (52)
‘Wouldn’t this be the same one,’ the Colonel asked, ‘who really discovered what you call the connexion?’
She gave him a look. ‘The connexion’s a true thing—the connexion’s perfectly historic. Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind. (62)
‘Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive ones—and all excellent, all charming.’ She spoke with an absence of all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost her nothing. (63)
She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband’s flat common sense. ‘In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? (65)
He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. ‘The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?’
His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. ‘The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her the chance to be magnificent.’ (68)
‘it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor—something precisely that no rich person could ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.’ (71)
The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered longest, the small but interesting dealing in the Bloomsbury street who was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive—this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the other while they considered the object… (79)
He was clearly the master and devoted to his business—the essence of which, in his conception, might precisely have been this particular secret that he possessed for worrying the customer so little that it fairly threw over their relation a sort of solemnity. (80)
‘He likes his things—he loves them,’ she was to say; ‘and it isn’t only—it isn’t perhaps even at all—that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could’ and he prefers at any rates to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people—he knows them when he sees them; and that’s why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. didn’t you see’—she was to ask it with an insistence—‘the way he looked on us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he’ll remember us’… (81)
Of decent old gold, old silver, old broze, of old chased and jeweled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter where the shopman’s slim light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuff-boxes presented to—or by—the too-questionable great; [81] cups, trays, taper-strands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative re-enforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. They looked, the visitors, they touched, they vaguely pretended to consider, but with skepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. (82)
‘You’re Italian then, are you?’
But the reply came in English. ‘Oh dear no.’
‘Youre English?’
To which the answer was this time, with a smile, in briefest Italian. ‘Che!’ The dealer waived the question—he practically disposed of it by turning straightaway toward a receptacle to which he hadn’t yet resorted and from which, after unlocking it, he extracted a square box, of some twenty inches in height, covered with worn-looking leather. He placed the box on the counter, pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or of some material once richly gilt. He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. ‘My Golden Bowl,’ he observed—and it sounded on [85] his lips as if it said everything. He left the important object—for as ‘important’ it did somehow present itself—to produce its certain effect. Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height. As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer. Charlotte, with care, immediately took it up, while the Prince, who had after a minute shifted his position again, regarded it from a distance.
It was heavier than Charlotte had thought. ‘Gold, really gold?’ she asked of their companion.
He waited. ‘Look a little, and perhaps you’ll make out.’ (85-6)
Her host meanwhile at any rate answered her question. ‘Ah I’ve had it a long time without selling it. I think I must have been keeping it, madam, for you.’
‘You’ve kept it for me because you’ve thought I mightn’t see what’s the matter with it?’
He only continued to face her—he only continued to appear to follow the play of her mind. ‘What is the matter with it?’
‘Oh it’s not for me to say; it’s for you honestly to tell me. Of course I know something must be.’
‘But if it’s something you can’t find out isn’t that as good as if it were nothing?’ (87)
He looked graver for her at this than he had looked all the morning. ‘Do you propose it seriously—without wishing to play me a trick?’
She wondered. ‘What trick would it be?’
He looked at her harder. ‘You mean you really don’t know?’
‘But know what?’
‘Why what’s the matter with it. You didn’t see, all the while?’
She only continued however to stare. ‘How could you see—out in the street?’
‘I saw before I went out. It was because I saw that I did go out. I didn’t want to have another scene with you before that rascal, and I judged you’d presently guess for yourself. (90)
‘I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.’
‘But it’s exquisite,’ Charlotte, as if with an interest in it now made even tendered and stranger, found herself moved to insist.
‘Of course it’s exquisite. That’s the danger.’
Then a light visibly came to her—a light in which her friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflexion of it, as she smiled at him, was in her own face. ‘The danger—I see—is because you’re superstitious.’
‘Per Dio I’m superstitious! A crack’s a crack—and an omen’s an omen.’
‘You’d be afraid—?’
‘Per bacco!’
‘For your happiness?’
‘For my happiness.’
‘For your safety?’
‘For my safety.’
She just paused. ‘For your marriage?’
‘For my marriage. For everything.’
She thought again. ‘Thank goodness then that if there be a crack we know it! But it we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know—!’ And she smiled with the sadness of it. ‘We can never then give each other anything.’
He considered, but he met it. ‘Ah but one does know. I do at least—and by instinct. I don’t fail. That will always protect me.’ (91)
Thus had grown in him a little habit—his innermost secret, not confided even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everything—thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making-believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved in the preservation by an adult of one of childhood’s toys. (96)
Amiability, of a truth, is an aid to success; it has even been known to be the principle of large accumulations; but the link, for the mind, is none the less fatally missing between proof, on such a scale, of continuity, if of nothing more insolent, in one field, and accessibility to distraction in every other. (97)
His real inability to maintain the pretence, however, had perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day… (97)
His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted had he analyzed, was in finding it so taken for granted that as he had money he had force. … wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. (99)
It was as if his son-in-law’s presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law, had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future—very richly and handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now practically taken, was still pretty much the same ‘big fact’, the sky had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded, quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. (102)
The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally to have been pronounced calculable or not, hadn’t, naturally, been the miracle of a night, (102-3)
He had accused her of not taking him seriously, and she had replied—as from her it couldn’t fright him—that she took him religiously, adoringly. (104)
…whereas when one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase. (106)
He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnets about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; … It consorted so with Mr Verver’s consciousness of the way in which at a given moment he had stared at his Pacific… His ‘peak in Darien’ was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. (107)
These were wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that threw her back for his pity into a past more remote than he liked their common past, their young affection, to appear. (108)
Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and addicted to silent pleasure—as he was accessible to silent pains—he even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, (108)
It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift primarily to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final rites. (110)
…a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price. (110)
To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press—the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife’s death. (113)
…his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were really not of a sort to be met by one’s self. (115)
…when his visitor said, or as good as said, ‘I’m restrained, you see, because of Mr Rance, and also because I’m proud and refined; but if it wasn’t for Mr Rance and for my refinement and my pride!’—the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented many-paged letters, (115)
…while Maggie had induced her husband, not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith— (115)
Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr Verver and his daughter, (121)
It was no secret to Maggie—it was indeed positively a pubic 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, (121)
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; (122)
There was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the licence and intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the licence and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established for each; (125)
…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; (125)
It used also’—she continued to make out—‘to seem easy for the question not to come up. (129)
…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; (141)
The double door of the house stood open to an effect of hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful windless waiting golden hour under the influence of which Adam Verver met his genial friend… (144)
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, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing, so to speak, what could be said about her: (145)
My companion’s only a little awkward, for I don’t in the least mean that Charlotte was consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them—but she didn’t know it.’ (145)
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, (147)
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. 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 recognized in the figure … Italy… (149)
She was directly and immediately real, real on a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than during those—at which we have just glanced—when mrs Noble made them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled [152] to the petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs. (152)
Every evening after diner Charlotte Stant played to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music she went through his ‘favourite things’ … 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 piano, where the score was every absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest. (152)
…in spite of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it hadn’t yet been. (153)
He had as to so many of the matters in hand a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out, in his unrest, for some idea, lurking in the vast freshness of the night, (154)
The season was, in local parlance, ‘on’, the elements were assembled; the big windy hotel, the draughty social hall, swarmed with ‘types’, in Charlotte’s constant phrase, and resounded with a din in which the wild music of gilded and befrogged bands, Croatian, Dalmation, Carpathian, violently exotic and nostalgic, was distinguished as struggling against the perpetual popping of corks. (158)
The noble privacy of Fawns had left them—had left Mr Verver at least—with a little accumulated sum of tolerance to spend on the high pitch and high colour of the public sphere. (158)
…the fat ear-ringed aunts and the glossy cockneyfied, familiar uncles, inimitable of accent and assumption, (159)
…that made deferred criticism as fragrant as some joy promised a lover by his mistress, (161)
Below the great consolidated cliff, well on to where the city of stucco sat most architecturally perched, with the rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front and above, the safe sense of the whole place yet prevailed in lamps and seats and flagged walks, (163)
This enunciation of motive the next moment however sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. (167)
What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte’s simply saying to him that she didn’t like him enough. This he wouldn’t have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough… She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that—as a man, so to speak—he properly pleased her. (172)
He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face—for it was a wondrous product of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before— (177)
…the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use—to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. (184)
…she fairly liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was—exposed a little to the public, no doubt, in her unaccompanied state, but, even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflexions on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her own. (184)
It was as if in separation, even the shortest, she half-forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so that reappearance had in him each time a virtue of its own—a kind of disproportionate intensity suggesting his connexion with occult sources of renewal. (185)
..she’d be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn’t get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have ‘gone too far’ (189)
…he must have thrown her, as a fine little bone to pick, some report… (190)
Well, Charlotte’s answer to this enquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the real truth. (191)
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intension in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the [193] ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. She picked out after consideration a solitary plum. ‘So placed that you have to arrange?’ (194)
‘You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend’s loyalty? If you do you’re not just, Fanny; you’re even, I think,’ she went on, ‘rather cruel; and it’s least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.’ She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high pale lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases, with a perfection void of any vulgarity of triumph. (197)
‘It only appears to me of great importance that—now that you all seem more settled here—Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as in particular her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. (199)
She found his eloquence precious; there wasn’t a drop of it that she didn’t in a manner catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flash of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyze it. (202)
‘It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need—it’s only that that makes me wonder. It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.’ (206)
With the Prince himself, form an early stage, not unnaturally, Charlotte had made a great point of their so understanding it; she had found frequent occasion to describe to him this necessity, (214)
He had looked into this room on the chance he might find [218] the Princess at tea; but though the fireside service of the repast was shiningly present the mistress of the table was not, and he had waited for her, if waiting it could be called while he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. (219)
This observation was certainly by itself meagre amusement for a dreary little crisis; (219)
…a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab which, awkwardly deflecting form the middle course, at the apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the left-hand pavement and so at last, under further instructions, floundered to a full stop before the Prince’s windows. The person within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to be a lady who left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no umbrella, quickly crossed the wet interval that separated her form the house. (219)
The harmony of her breaking into sight while the superficial conditions were so against her… (220)
What had happened in short was that Charlotte and he had by a single turn of the wrist of fate—‘led up’ to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed. (222)
It had helped her a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. (222)
The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate—in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. (223)
…speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return—for curiosity and evne really a little from anxiety—to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key rarely used: it had always irritated Adam—one of the few things that did—to find servants standing up so inhumanely straight when they came home in the small hours after parties. ‘So I had but to slip in each time with my cab at the door and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went—without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose,’ she asked, ‘become of one?—not so much sentimentality or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn’t matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really even was; or as the least simple as a ma[i]tresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They must even in their odd way,’ she declared, ‘have some idea.’ (227)
…when he thought at his ease of the way person who were capable really entertained—or at least with any refinement—the passion of personal loyalty, (233)
To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; (234)
There was always, to cover all ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of Mrs Verver’s day, (235)
It had been established in the two households at an early stage and with the highest good humour that Charlotte was a, was the, ‘social success’, whereas the Princess, though kind, though punctilious, though charming, though in fat the dearest little creature in the world and the Princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly never be, (235)
There were possibilities of dullness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters of an hour that turned up like false [235] pieces in a debased currency, of which she made, on principle, very nearly as light as if she hadn’t been clever enough to distinguish. (236)
They had brought her in—on the crude expression of it—to do the ‘worldly’ for them, [236] and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. (237)
This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt, quite equally provide for—that would be, to balance, just in a manner Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognize it. (237)
This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s that might prevail there. (237)
What further propped up the case moreover was that the ‘world’, by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be added, did on occasion wake up to opportunity and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations. (238)
…a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince knew, Maggie’s anxiety had conferred with Charlotte’s ingenuity… (239)
Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser presence, he quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame and that had in fact kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father’s party and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the importance of his importance; (240)
The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, (242)
It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, …it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion. (242)
Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider—looking as it did well over the heads of all lower growths; (246)
The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s—these matters and others would be all now as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. (250)
She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; (251)
I only say that she’s fixed, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by own act, placed her. It’s you who have seemed haunted with the possibility for her of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.’ (253)
It’s enough for me that she’ll always be of necessity much more afraid for herself, really, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.’ (254)
She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. (255)
…it was impossible for the same reasons that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, (255)
…she none the less signaled to him as definitely as if she had fluttered a white handkerchief from a window. (256)
…the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. (257)
…she could’t detain Mr Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ampler drapery. (261)
…this vision of being ‘reduced’ interfered not at all with the measure of his actual ease. (262)
There were other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning. (263)
But it was to Charlotte he wished to make the offering, and as he moved along the terrace, which rendered visible parts of two sides of the house, he looked up at all the windows that were open to the April morning and wondered which… (264)
The larger step had been since the evening before intensely in his own mind, (264)
…their cup was full; which cup their very eyes, holding it fast, carried and steadied and began, as they tasted it, to praise. (265)
He hadn’t struggled nor snatched; he was taking but what had been given him; the pearl dropped itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand. Here precisely it was, incarnate; its size and its value grew as Mrs Verver appeared, afar off, in one of the smaller doorways. (266)
‘We must see the old king; we must “do” the cathedral,’ he said; ‘we must know all about it. If we could but take,’ he exhaled, ‘the full opportunity!’ (266)
‘But the train for Gloucester?’
‘A local one—11.22; with several stops, … So that we’ve time. Only,’ she said, ‘we must employ our time.’ (269)
But to hear her cry and yet do her best not to was quickly enough too much for him; he had known her at other times quite not make the repressive effort, (280)
To doubt, for the first time,’ Mrs Assingham wound up, ‘of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world.’ (281)
It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn’t all for the fiftieth time obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. (288)
The state of things existing hasn’t grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they’ve done. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?’
Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it. ‘Yes—they are. To be so abjectly innocent—that is to be victims of fate.’
‘And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent--?’
It took her another minute, but she roe to the full height. ‘Yes. That is they were… (290)
It illustrates the misfortune,’ said Mrs Assingham gravely, ‘of being too, too charming.’
This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again did his best. ‘Yes, but to whom?—doesn’t it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming?’
‘To each other in the first place—obviously. And then both of them together to Maggie.’
‘To Maggie?’ he wonderingly echoed.
‘To Maggie.’ She was not crystalline. ‘By have accepted, from the first, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly themselves—her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life.’ (291)
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. ‘And what does the Prince work like?’
She fixed him in return. ‘Like a Prince!’ Whereupon, breaking short off to ascend to her room, she presented her highly-decorated back—in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument. (295)
Princess…This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and reuond it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up all the while at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out as yet where she might have entered had she wished. She hadn’t wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd besides was that though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, [303] so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedently near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one’s putting off one’s shoes to enter and even verily of one’s paying with one’s life if found there as an interloper. She hadn’t certainly arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted. (304)
That last truth had been distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the quite explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked to them again and again that they must, on all the showing, to keep such terms, be people of the highest amiability… (305)
…the diversion she to some extent successfully found in referring her crisis, so far as was possible, to the mere working of her own needs. (307)
It must be added, however, that she would have been at a loss to determine—and certainly at first—to which order, that of self-control or that of large expression, the step she had taken the afternoon of her husband’s return from Matcham with his compaion properly belonged. (307)
She had put her thought to the proof, and the proof had shown its edge; this was what was before her, that she was no longer playing with blunt and idle tools, (308)
This unquenchable variety in his appeal to her interest, what did it mean but that—reduced to the flatness of mere statement—she was married [316] by good fortune to an altogether dazzling person? (317)
…it yet took her but an instant to sound at any risk the note she had been privately practicing. If she had practiced it the day before, at dinner, on Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs Verver, (325)
…and I must add moreover that she at last found herself rather oddly [for “I” or the princess?] wondering what else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming. (327)
She had been present at the process as personally as she might have present at some other domestic incident—the hanging of a new picture say, or the fitting of the Principino with his first little trousers. (328)
The earlier elements flushed into life again, the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of accompanying expression… (328)
Charlotte’s attitude had in short its moments of flowering into pretty excesses of civility, self-effacements in the presence of others, sudden little formalisms of suggestion and recognition, that might have represented her sense of the duty of not ‘losing sight’ of a social distinction. This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, (329)
The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the baot might have put off again and left her. (332)
This new perception bristled for her, as we have said, with off intimations, (332)
…the warmly-washing wave had traveled far up the strand. She had subsequently lived for hours she couldn’t count under the dizzying smothering welter—positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl; (333)
…a witness availing himself in time of the lightest pretext to re-enter. (333)
She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar. (334)
…an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman’s imagination broke in a small vain wave. (337)
Her ladyship’s assumption was that she kept, at every moment of her life, every advantage—it made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous; so she didn’t distinguish the little proturberant eyes of smaller social insects, (338)
He brought it out straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, (340)
There were thus some five wonderful minutes during which they loomed, to her sightless eyes, on either side of her, larger than they had ever loomed before, larger than life, larger than thought, (341)
Fanny, who hadn’t been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show at this one in new orange-coloured velvet with multiplied turquoises, not less than with a confidence as different as possible, her hostess inferred, from her too-marked betrayal of a belittled state at Matcham. Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this balance—which seemed for the hour part of a general rectification; she liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland Place, a spot exempt on all sorts of grounds from jealous jurisdictions, her friend could feel as ‘good’ as any one and could in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the luster of a little Princess. (353)
She knew from this instant, knew in advance and as well as anyting would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove there was nothing the matter with her. (360)
…she did all these tings so that he should sufficiently fail to dream of what they might be for. (363)
…it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid—lying like gods together, all careless of mankind.’
‘Do you consider that we’re languid?’—that form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. (368)
…and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte’s view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with. (379)
What would become of her father, she hauntedly asked, if his wife, on the one side, should begin to press him to call his daughter to order, (379)
Because—don’t you see?—I am mild. I can bear anything.’
‘Oh “bear”!’ Mrs Assingham fluted. (387)
…the hospitality of the Ververs met her convenience and ministered to her ease, destitute as the Colonel had kept her, from the first, of any rustic retreat, any leafy bower of her own, any fixed base for the stale season now at hand. (391)
…a vulgar indelicate pestilential woman, (391)
This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. ‘Easily?’ (393)
…which was now bearing, for Mrs Verver’s stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit. (402)
Therefore to be free, to be free to act other than abjectly for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. (406)
Wouldn’t he get tired—to put it only at that—of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? (407)
It may be said of her that during these [407] passages she plucked her sensations by the way, detached nervously the small wild blossoms of her dim forest, so that she could smile over them at least with the spacious appearance, for her companions, for her husband above all, of bravely, of altogether frivolously, going a-maying. (408)
…the character and office of one of those revolving subordinate presences that float in the wake of greatness. (408)
…the idea, irresistible, intense, of going to pay at the Museum a visit to Mr Crichton. Mr Crichton, as Mrs Assingham could easily remember, was the most accomplished and obliging of public functionaries, whom every one knew and who knew every one—who had from the first in particular lent himself freely, and for the love of art and history, to becoming one of the steadier lights of Mrs Verver’s adventurous path. The custodian of one of the richest departments of the great national collection of precious things, he could feel for the sincere private collector and urge him on his way even when condemned to be present at his capture of trophies sacrificed by the country to parliamentary thrift. He carried his amiability to the point of saying that since London, under pettifogging views, had to miss from time to time its rarest opportunities, he was almost consoled to see such lost causes invariably wonder at last one by one, with the tormenting tinkle of their silver bells, into the wondrous, the already famous fold beyond the Mississippi. (409)
Was it that she had put on too many things, overcharged herself with jewels, wore in particular more of them than usual, and bigger ones, in her hair?—a question her visitor presently answered by attributing this appearance largely to the bright red spot, red as some monstrous ruby, that burned in either of her cheeks. These two items of her aspect had promptly enough their own light for Mrs Assingham, who made out by it that nothing more pathetic could be imagined than the refuge and disguise her agitation had instinctively asked of the arts of dress, multiplied to extravagance, almost to incoherence. (413)
…in one of the other shops, that of a small antiquarian, a queer little foreign man who had shown her a number of things, shown her finally something that, struck with it as rather a rarity and thinking it would, compared to some of her ventures, quite superlatively do, she had brought— (416)
Mrs Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney… It was brave the firm and rich, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable. (424)
‘But there are others,’ her friend went on, ‘that stare us in the face and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be enough for us. your father has been extraordinary.’ (430)
His fear of staying away, as a marked symptom, had at least proved greater than his fear of coming in; he had come in even at the risk of bringing it with him—and ah what more did she require now than her sense, established within the first minute or two, that he had brought it, however he might be steadying himself against dangers of betrayal by some wrong word, and that it was shut in there between them, the successive moments throbbing under it the while as the pulse of fever throbs under the doctor’s thumb? (436)
It was extraordinary, this quality in the taste of her wrong which made her completed sense of it seem rather to soften than to harden, and it was the more extraordinary the more she had to recognize it; (438)
…split between conviction and action. They had begun to cese on the spot, surprisingly, to be connected; conviction, that is, budged no inch, only planting its feet the more firmly in the soil—but action began to hover like some lighter and larger but easier form, excited by its very power to keep above ground. It would be free, it would be independent, it would go in—wouldn’t it?—for some prodigious and superior adventure of its own. (438)
As his father-in-law’s wife Mrs Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and prohibitive form; (443)
…his serenity, or at any rate for the firm outer shell of his dignity, all marvelous enamel, (450)
Fanny Assingham… She was there inordinately as a value, but as a value only for the clear negation of everything. She was exactly their general sign of unimpaired beatitude… (456)
This measured for Maggie the ground they had all travelled together since that unforgotten afternoon of the none so distant year, that determinant September Sunday when, sitting with her father in the park, as in commemoration of the climax both of their old order and of their old danger, she had proposed to him that they should ‘call in’ Charlotte (457)
There was moreover frankly a sharpness of point in it that she enjoyed; it gave an accent to the truth she wished to illustrate—the truth that the surface of her recent life, thick-sown with the flower of earnest endeavour, with every form of the unruffled and the undoubting, suffered no symptom anywhere to peep out. (458)
She fairly exhaled her admiration. ‘You’re like nobody else—you’re extraordinary.’ (462)
…yet if her sense hadn’t been absolutely closed to the possibility in him of any thought of wounding her she might have taken his undisturbed manner, the perfection of his appearance of having recovered himself, for one of those intentions of high impertinence by the aid of which great people, les grands seigneurs, persons of her husband’s class and type, always know how to re-establish a violated order. (464)
She sought to discover—for she was capable of that—what he had meant by keeping the sharer of his guilt in the dark about a matter touching her otherwise so nearly; (470)
Even the conviction that Charlotte was but awaiting some chance really to test her trouble upon her lover’s wife left Maggie’s sense meanwhile open as to the sight of gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself. The [472] cage was the deluded condition, and Maggie, as having known delusion—rather!—understood the nature of cages. She walked round Charlotte’s—cautiously and in a very wide circle; and when inevitably they had to communicate she felt herself comparatively outside and on the breast of nature: she saw her companion’s face as that of a prisoner looking through the bars. So it was that through bars, bars richly gilt but firmly though discreetly planted, Charlotte finally struck her as making a grim attempt; from which at first the Princess drew back as instinctively as if the door of the cage had suddenly been opened from within. (472)
She was asking herself at last how they could bear it—for, though cards were as nought to her and she could follow no move, so that she was always on such occasions out of the party, … Her father, she knew, was a high adept, one of the greatest—she had been ever, in her stupidity, his small, his sole despair; (473)
…she hovered on the terrace, where the summer night was so soft that she scarce needed the light shawl she had picked up. several of the long windows of the occupied rooms stood open to it, and the light came out in vague shafts and fell upon the old smooth stones. The hour was moonless and starless and the air heavy and still—which was why, in her evening dress, she need fear no chill and could get away, in the outer darkness, from that provocation of opportunity which had assaulted her, within on her sofa, as a beast might have leaped at her throat. (475)
By the time she was at her companion’s side, for that matter, by the time Charlotte had, without a motion, without a word, simply let her approach and stand there, her head was already on the block, so that the consciousness that everything had gone blurred all perception of whether or no the axe had fallen. Oh the ‘advantage’, it was perfectly enough, in truth, with Mrs Verver; for what was Maggie’s own sense but that of having been thrown over on her back with her neck from the first half-broken and her helpless face staring up? that position only could account for the positive grimace of weakness and pain produced there by Charlotte’s dignity. (481)
Not yet since his marriage had Maggie so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte’s leave and under Charlotte’s direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should look at him were prescribed to her; quite even as if she had been defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that the challenge wasn’t, as might be said, in his interest and for [482] his protection, but pressingly, insistently in Charlotte’s, for that of her security at any price. She might verily by this dumb demonstration have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie herself, a sum of money that she properly was to find. She must remain safe and Maggie must pay—what she was to pay with being her own affair. (483)
She knew too well—that she was showing; so that successful vagueness, to save some scrap of her dignity from the imminence of her defeat, was already a lost cause, and the one thing left was if possible, at any cost, even that of stupid inconsequence, to try to look as if she weren’t afraid. (484-5)
…and the consequence of this enquiry had been for the pair just such another stroll together away form the rest of the party and off into the park as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends—that of their long talk on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind discussion of which at their enjoyed leisure Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the ‘first beginning’ of their present situation. (488)
They were husband and wife—oh so immensely!—as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented as in the past by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, (490)
‘And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?’
‘Oh I don’t say she condones—!’ A scruple in Maggie raised its crest. ‘Besides, I’m speaking of what was.’ (494)
The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly or sinking otherwise than in play was impossible (496)
‘Then there exactly you are!’ she triumphed. ‘Everything that touches you, everything that surrounds you, goes on by your splendid indifference and your incredible permission—at your expense.’ (499)
The sense that he wasn’t a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness—made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted union, to smile almost without pain. (504)
‘Well then--!’ His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that, august and almost stern, produced for all its intimacy no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears. (505)
It had been in short by this light ideally conclusive, so that no ghost of anything if referred to could ever walk again. (508)
There had been, through life, as we know, few quarters in which the Princess’s fancy could let itself loose; but it shook off restraint when it plunged into the figured void of the detail of that relation. This was a realm it could people with images—again and again with fresh ones; they swarmed there like the strange combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight, they loomed into the definite and faded into the vague, their main present sign for her being however that they were always, that they were duskily, agitated. Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure by the very intensity of the bliss—this had dropped from her; she had ceased to see, as she lost herself, the pair of operative, of high Wagnerian lovers (she found deep within her these comparisons) interlocked in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one’s dream of an old German forest. The picture was veiled on the contrary with the dimness of trouble; behind which she felt indistinguishable the process of forms that had lost all so pitifully their precious confidence. (508)
Maggie had a day of still waiting after allowing him time to learn how unreservedly she had lied for him—of waiting as for the light of she scarce knew what slow-shining reflexion of this knowledge in her personal attitude. (510)
She had had, as we know, her vision of the gilt bars bent, of the door of the cage forced open from within and creature imprisoned roaming at large—a movement on the creature’s part that was to have even for the short interval its impressive beauty, but of which the limit, and in yet another direction, had loomed straight into view during her last talk under the great trees with her father. (511)
Maggie, wonderfully, in the summer days, felt it forced upon her that that was one way, after all, of being a genial wife; and it was never so much forced upon her as at these odd moments of her encountering the sposi, as Amerigo called them, under the coved ceilings of Fawns while, so together yet at the same time so separate, they were making their daily round. (513)
‘The largest of the three pieces had the rare peculiarity that the garlands looped round it, which as you see are the finest possible vieux Saxe, aren’t of the same origin of period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They’ve been put on at a later time by a process known through very few examples, and through none so important as this, which is really quite unique—so that though the whole thing is a little baroque its value as a specimen is I believe almost inestimable.’ (517)
Maggie had sat down with the others to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, … A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene (521)
He conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell—conversed mainly with the indefinite wandering smile of the entertainers, … He might nevertheless have been so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently served him—made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. (522)
Something grave had happened somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her choice of suppositions: (522)
When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods—all of which drowsed below her at this hour in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have appeared to sit in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, hadn’t caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. (528)
It was noted on the occasion of that anxious lady’s last approach to her young friend at Fawns that her sympathy had ventured, after much accepted privation, again to become inquisitive, (542)
It was true that Mrs Assingham could at such times somewhat restore the balance by not wholly failing to guess her thought. Her thought however just at present had more than one face—had a series that it successively presented. These were indeed the possibilities involved in the adventure… (544)
Maggie hated, she scorned, to compare hours and appearances, to weigh the idea of whether there hadn’t been moments during these days when an assignation in easy conditions, a snatched interview in an air the season had so cleared of prying eyes, mightn’t perfectly work. (544)
…vindictive flights… (545)
…of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the émigré, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery. (546)
She was going to know, she felt, later on—was going to know with compunction doubtless on the very morrow, (554)
‘In that case he’ll leave you Charlotte to take care of in our absence. You’ll have to carry her off somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with her here. I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything, quite beautifully. You’ll be able to do as you like.’
She couldn’t have been sure beforehand and really hadn’t been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion. (555)
At this he raised his eyes, which melt her own, and she held him while she delivered herself of something that had been with her these last minutes. ‘You spoke just now of Charlotte’s not having learned from you that I “know”. Am I to take from you then that you accept and recognize my knowledge?’
He did the enquiry all the honours—visibly weighed its importance and weighed his response. ‘You think I might have been showing you that a little more handsomely?’
‘It isn’t a question of any beauty,’ said Maggie; ‘it’s only a question of the quantity of truth.’
‘Oh the quantity of truth!’ the Prince richly though ambiguously murmured.
‘That’s a thing by itself, yes. But there are also such things all the same as questions of good faith.’
‘Of course there are!’ the Prince hastened to reply. After which he brought up more slowly: ‘If ever a man since the beginning of time acted in good faith--!’ But he dropped it, offering it simply for that.
For that then when it had had time somewhat to settle like some handful of gold-dust thrown into the air, for that then Maggie showed herself as deeply and strangely taking it. ‘I see.’ And she even wished this form to be as complete as she could make it. ‘I see.’
The completeness had clearly after an instant struck him as divine. ‘Ah my dear, my dear, my dear--!’ It was all he could say.
She wasn’t talking however at large. ‘You’ve kept up for so long a silence—!’
‘Yes, yes, I know what I’ve kept up. but will you do,’ he asked, ‘still one thing more for me?’ [560]
It was as if for an instant it had with her new exposure made her turn pale. ‘Is there even one thing left?’
‘Ah my dear, my dear, my dear!’—it had pressed again in him the fine spring of the unspeakable.
There was nothing however that the Princess herself couldn’t say. ‘I’ll do anything if you’ll tell me what.’
‘Then wait.’ And his raised Italian hand, with its play of admonitory fingers, had never made gesture more expressive. His voice dropped a tone—! ‘Wait,’ he repeated. ‘Wait.’
She understood, but it was as if she wished to have it from him. ‘Till they’ve been here, you mean?’
‘Yes, till they’ve gone. Till they’re away.’
She kept it up. ‘Till they’ve left the country?’
She had her eyes on him for clearness; these were the conditions of a promise—so that he put the promise practically into his response. ‘Till we’ve ceased to see them—for as long as God may grant! Till we’re really alone.’ (561)
The time was stale, it was to be admitted, for incidents of magnitude; the September hush was in full possession at the end of the dull day, and a couple of long windows stood open to the balcony that overhung the desolation—the balcony form which Maggie, in the springtime, had seen Amerigo and Charlotte look down together at the hour of her return… (563)
‘Isn’t it my right to correct her—?’
Maggie let his question ring—ring long enough for him to hear it himself; only then she took it up. (564)
The question of the amount of correction to which Charlotte had laid herself open rose and hovered for the instant only to sink conspicuously by its own weight; so high a pitch she seemed to give to the unconsciousness of questions, so resplendent a show of serenity she succeeded in making. The shade of the official, in her beauty and security, never for a moment dropped; it was a cool high refuge, the deep arched recess of some coloured and gilded image, in which she sat and smiled and waited, drank her tea, referred to her husband and remembered her mission. (565)
Charlotte throned, as who should say, between her hostess and her host, the whole scene having crystallized, as soon as she took her place, to the right quiet luster; the harmony wasn’t less sustained for being superficial, and the only approach to a break in it was while Amerigo remained standing long enough for his father-in-law, vaguely wondering, to appeal to him, invite or address him, and then in default of any such word selected for presentation to the other visitor a plate of petits fours. (566)
‘It’s all right, eh?’
‘Oh my dear—rather!’
He had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an instant afterwards symbolized another truth, so that they looked about at everything else to give them this extension. … Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness—quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs Verver and the Prince fairly ‘placed’ themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. (567)
It meant something for the Princess that her husband had thus got their son out of the way, not bringing him back to his mother; but everything now, as she vaguely moved about, struck her as meaning so much that the unheard chorus swelled. (572)
Here it was then, the moment, the golden fruit that had shone from afar; only what were these things in the fact, for the hand and for the lips, when tested, when tasted—what were they as a reward? Closer than she had ever been to the measure of her course and the full face of her act, she had an instant of the terror that, when there has been suspense, always precedes, on the part of the creature to be paid, the certification of the amount. Amerigo knew it, the amount; he still held it, and the delay in his return, making her heart beat too fast to go on, was like a sudden, blinding light on a wild speculation. (573)
