The Golden Bowl by Henry James (free ebook reader for android TXT) 📕

account of it. But he had, as before, his presence of mind⁠—to say nothing of his kindly humour. “Why, you complain of the very thing that’s most charmingly conclusive! She treats us already as one.”

Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there was something in the way he said things⁠—! She faced him in all her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and definitely showed it. “I do like you, you know.”

Well, what could this do but stimulate his humour? “I see what’s the matter with you. You won’t be quiet till you’ve heard from the Prince himself. I think,” the happy man added, “that I’ll go and secretly wire to him that you’d like, reply paid, a few words for yourself.”

It could apparently but encourage her further to smile. “Reply paid for him, you mean⁠—or for me?”

“Oh, I’ll pay, with pleasure, anything back for you⁠—as many words as you like.” And he went on, to keep it up. “Not requiring either to see your message.”

She could take it, visibly, as he meant it. “Should you require to see the Prince’s?”

“Not a bit. You can keep that also to yourself.”

On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a real question, she appeared to consider⁠—and almost as if for good taste⁠—that the joke had gone far enough. “It doesn’t matter. Unless he speaks of his own movement⁠—! And why should it be,” she asked, “a thing that would occur to him?”

“I really think,” Mr. Verver concurred, “that it naturally wouldn’t. He doesn’t know you’re morbid.”

She just wondered⁠—but she agreed. “No⁠—he hasn’t yet found it out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn’t yet; and I’m willing to give him meanwhile the benefit of the doubt.” So with this the situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared had she not too quickly had one of her restless relapses. “Maggie, however, does know I’m morbid. She hasn’t the benefit.”

“Well,” said Adam Verver a little wearily at last, “I think I feel that you’ll hear from her yet.” It had even fairly come over him, under recurrent suggestion, that his daughter’s omission was surprising. And Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more than three minutes.

“Oh, it isn’t that I hold that I’ve a right to it,” Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified⁠—and the observation itself gave him a further push.

“Very well⁠—I shall like it myself.”

At this then, as if moved by his way of constantly⁠—and more or less against his own contention⁠—coming round to her, she showed how she could also always, and not less gently, come half way. “I speak of it only as the missing grace⁠—the grace that’s in everything that Maggie does. It isn’t my due”⁠—she kept it up⁠—“but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful.”

“Then come out to breakfast.” Mr. Verver had looked at his watch. “It will be here when we get back.”

“If it isn’t”⁠—and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room⁠—“if it isn’t it will have had but that slight fault.”

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—he held it there a minute before giving it up. “Will you promise me then to be at peace?”

She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. “I promise you.”

“Quite forever?”

“Quite forever.”

“Remember,” he went on, to justify his demand, “remember that in wiring you she’ll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me.”

It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur. “ ‘Naturally’⁠—?”

“Why, our marriage puts him for you, you see⁠—or puts you for him⁠—into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it.”

“About its making me his stepmother-in-law⁠—or whatever I should become?” Over which, for a little, she not undivertedly mused. “Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that.”

“Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you a message, he’ll be it all.” And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. “Don’t you think he’s charming?”

“Oh, charming,” said Charlotte Stant. “If he weren’t I shouldn’t mind.”

“No more should I!” her friend harmoniously returned.

“Ah, but you don’t mind. You don’t have to. You don’t have to, I mean, as I have. It’s the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I were you,” she went on⁠—“if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don’t know,” she said, “what in the world⁠—that didn’t touch my luck⁠—I should trouble my head about.”

“I quite understand you⁠—yet doesn’t it just depend,” Mr. Verver asked, “on what you call one’s luck? It’s exactly my luck that I’m talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you’ve made me all right. It’s only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn’t they,” he explained, “that make one so: it’s the something else I want that makes them right. If you’ll give me what I ask, you’ll see.”

She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes, while she still