Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 12
[Adam Verver] “We’ve had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together, that I hope it won’t come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband.”
[Charlotte Stant] “To me too it thoroughly seems that these days have been beautiful. I shouldn’t be grateful to them if I couldn’t more or less have imagined their bringing us to this.”
[Adam Verver] Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far—then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know where they were. There rose for him, with this, the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. “Of course, yes—that’s my disadvantage: I’m not the natural, I’m so far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty. I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, so inevitably, in such another light.”
[Adam and Charlotte] “No—I haven’t. But if it’s her idea—!” If it was her idea, in short, that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. “That is if it’s my idea. I happen, you see, to like my idea.”
“Well, it’s beautiful and wonderful. But isn’t it, possibly,” Charlotte asked, “not quite enough to marry me for?”
“Why so, my dear child? Isn’t a man’s idea usually what he does marry for?”
[Adam and Charlotte]“Wait—a—at Fawns?”
“Wait in Paris. That will be charming in itself.”
“You take me to pleasant places.” She turned it over. “You propose to me beautiful things.”
“It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You’ve made Brighton—!”
“Ah!”—she almost tenderly protested. “With what I’m doing now?”
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