Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 21
[Charlotte and Prince] “If it didn’t sound so vulgar I should say that we’re—fatally, as it were—SAFE. Pardon the low expression—since it’s what we happen to be. We’re so because they are. And they’re so because they can’t be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. That’s the way she’s inevitably WITH us,” said Charlotte over her smile. “We hang, essentially, together.”
Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. “Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together.”
His friend had a shrug—a shrug that had a grace. “Cosa volete?” The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. “Ah, beyond doubt, it’s a case.”
He stood looking at her. “It’s a case. There can’t,” he said, “have been many.”
“Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,” she smiled, “I confess I should like to think. Only ours.”
[Charlotte and Prince]His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself—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. It had already told them, with an hourly voice, that it had a meaning—a meaning that their associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through the sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day, and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive taste of it; yet it was all, none the less, as if their response had remained below their fortune. How to bring it, by some brave, free lift, up to the same height was the idea with which, behind and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of which, as in that of the sun-chequered greenwood of romance, his spirit thus, at the opening of a vista, met hers.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 