Book ONE, PART 1, chapter 2:
[Fanny and the prince]. He looked about, to put himself more in relation with the place; then, after an hesitation, seemed to speak certain words instead of certain others. “Oh, I know where I AM—! I do decline to be left, but what I came for, of course, was to thank you. If to-day has seemed, for the first time, the end of preliminaries, I feel how little there would have been any at all without you. The first were wholly yours.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Assingham, “they were remarkably easy. I’ve seen them, I’ve HAD them,” she smiled, “more difficult. Everything, you must feel, went of itself. So, you must feel, everything still goes.”
The Prince quickly agreed. “Oh, beautifully! But you had the conception.”
“Ah, Prince, so had you!”
He looked at her harder a moment. “You had it first. You had it most.”
She returned his look as if it had made her wonder. “I LIKED it, if that’s what you mean. But you liked it surely yourself. I protest, that I had easy work with you. I had only at last—when I thought it was time—to speak for you.”
“All that is quite true. But you’re leaving me, all the same, you’re leaving me—you’re washing your hands of me,” he went on. “However, that won’t be easy; I won’t BE left.” And he had turned his eyes about again, taking in the pretty room that she had just described as her final refuge, the place of peace for a world-worn couple, to which she had lately retired with “Bob.” “I shall keep this spot in sight. Say what you will, I shall need you. I’m not, you know,” he declared, “going to give you up for anybody.”
“If you’re afraid—which of course you’re not—are you trying to make me the same?” she asked after a moment.
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; it’s charming and unforgettable. But, still more, it’s mysterious and wonderful. WHY, you dear delightful woman, did you like it?”
[Of Fanny and the prince.] The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion—or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty.
[Fanny and the prince speaking of Charlotte]. “I quite understand, of course, that, given her great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be present. She has acted impulsively—but she has acted generously.”
“She has acted beautifully,” said the Prince.
“I say ‘generously’ because I mean she hasn’t, in any way, counted the cost. She’ll have it to count, in a manner, now,” his hostess continued. “But that doesn’t matter.”
[Of the prince.] The young man’s expression became, after this fashion, something vivid and concrete—a beautiful personal presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince was, for Mrs. Assingham’s benefit, in view of the people. He seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years; he was beautiful, innocent, vague
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