Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 11

[Charlotte Stant’s effect on Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches]He traced his impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she had begun by using about Charlotte Stant. She simply “cleared them out”—those had been the three words, thrown off in reference to the general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in, the “halcyon” days the full beauty of which had appeared to shine out for them after Charlotte’s arrival.

[Of Adam Verver] It was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in spite of the general tendency of the “devouring element” to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires.

If the Prince had asked something of his wife every day in the year, this would be still no reason why the poor dear man should not, in a beautiful fit of homesickness, revisit, without reproach, his native country.

[Verver contemplating the similar, respectful manner with which Charlotte and the prince treat him] He might wonder what exactly it was that they so resembled each other in treating him like—from what noble and propagated convention, in cases in which the exquisite “importance” was to be neither too grossly attributed nor too grossly denied, they had taken their specific lesson; but the difficulty was here of course that one could really never know—couldn’t know without having been one’s self a personage; whether a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a General, or just a beautiful Author.

[Adam Verver] He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost her—as was indeed inevitable—by her own marriage; he should reduce to definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the best an inconvenience, that required some makeweight and deserved some amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that he should appear to adopt, in doing it, the sentiment, in fact the very conviction, entertained, and quite sufficiently expressed, by Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had suffered—putting it with extravagance—at her hands. If she put it with extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came—which she put with extravagance too—from her persistence, always, in thinking, feeling, talking about him, as young.

[Adam Verver] He was afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace where he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as a vast expanse of discovery, a world that looked, so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had been a loud, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and, verily, an inordinate size.

[Adam Verver] Once he had recognised it there everything became coherent. The sharp point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his future to him, as a father, would be in his so managing that Maggie would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him. And it not only wouldn’t be decently humane, decently possible, not to make this relief easy to her—the idea shone upon him, more than that, as exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely confronted with the material way in which it might be met.

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?”

Book ONE Part 2 Chapter 13

[Adam and Charlotte] Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them—it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn’t be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.

[Adam and Charlotte] As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping.

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.”

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 14

[Charlotte and Fanny speaking] Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair. She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle. “He never comes.”

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 15

[Fanny of the Prince.] He was a huge expense assuredly—but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent.

[Fanny and Prince]. At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility—to YOU. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”
He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look, now, penetrate her again more. “As to whom then do you confess it?”

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 16

[Fanny and Colonel]. “He has behaved beautifully—he did from the first. I’ve thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve had a chance, told him so. Therefore, therefore—!” But it died away as she mused.
“Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?”
“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart. It’s a question of their doing as they should when together—which is another matter.”

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 17

[Charlotte to Prince] “‘Do’?” she once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly, occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like strange order had been prescribed in his own case. “Isn’t the immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that we have to ‘do’ nothing in life at all?—nothing except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one’s not being more of a fool than one can help. That’s all—but that’s as true for one time as for another. There has been plenty of ‘doing,’ and there will doubtless be plenty still; but it’s all theirs, every inch of it; it’s all a matter of what they’ve done TO us.” And she showed how the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as everything came, and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair: no more extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims than this of forcing them against their will into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 18

[Prince, Charlotte]. The Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest.
“Taking, you mean, YOUR carriage?”
“I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not a question,” she smiled, “of a carriage the more or the less. It’s not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It’s so beautiful,” she said, “that it’s not a question of anything vulgar or horrid.” Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he fell in. “I went out—I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important. It has BEEN—it IS important. I know as I haven’t known before the way they feel. I couldn’t in any other way have made so sure of it.”

[Prince, Charlotte].“Ah,” he in turn protested, “don’t put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home,” he added, “shall you say that you’ve been doing?”
“I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.”
“All day?”
“Yes—all day.

[Prince, Charlotte].“Ah,” Charlotte instantly said, “isn’t it for us, only, to do that?” She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. “I think we want no one’s aid.”
She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name, and could act on, was something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the glory of which—as it almost might be called—what he gave her back had the value of what she had, given him. “They’re extraordinarily happy.”
Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. “Beatifically.”
“That’s the great thing,” he went on; “so that it doesn’t matter, really, that one doesn’t understand. Besides, you do—enough.”

[Prince, Charlotte].“Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,” the Prince hastened to add, “we can.” With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. “It’s all too wonderful.”
Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beautiful.”
And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. “It’s sacred,” he said at last.

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 19

To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. 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.

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 20

It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again, to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn’t bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him.

What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense.

“They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping—so far as they ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of—whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.

“If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planet,” Kim said. “It is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.” Jim Yon Kim

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.

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 22

[Prince] But there were more things before him than even these; things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty.

[Prince] But though all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own.

[Charlotte, Prince] She had come to the sill, on which she leaned to look down, and she remained there a minute smiling at him. He had been immediately struck with her wearing a hat and a jacket—which conduced to her appearance of readiness not so much to join him, with a beautiful uncovered head and a parasol, where he stood, as to take with him some larger step altogether. The larger step had been, since the evening before, intensely in his own mind, though he had not fully thought out, even yet, the slightly difficult detail of it; but he had had no chance, such as he needed, to speak the definite word to her, and the face she now showed affected him, accordingly, as a notice that she had wonderfully guessed it for herself.

[Charlotte, Prince, Golden Bowl] “I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel! But do you remember,” she asked, “apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you wouldn’t have? Just before your marriage”—she brought it back to him: “the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop.”

[Charlotte, Prince] She hesitated—but it was only her way. “I thought you would think. We have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They are food for superstition if you like. It’s beautiful,” she went on, “that it should be Gloucester; ‘Glo’ster, Glo’ster,’ as you say, making it sound like an old song. However, I’m sure Glo’ster, Glo’ster will be charming,” she still added; “we shall be able easily to lunch there, and, with our luggage and our servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours. We can wire,” she wound up, “from there.”

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 23

[Fanny of the Prince and Charlotte] “Well?” he asked as she paused.
“Well, shows that I’m right—for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. They’re beautiful,” she declared.
“The Prince and Charlotte?”
“The Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”
“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of themselves.”
The Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”
Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes—of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”
He turned it over. “That danger BEING the blindness—?”
“That danger being their position. What their position contains—of all the elements—I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily—for that’s the mercy—everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”

[Of Fanny and the Colonel] Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny’s drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone—the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself

Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 24

“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”
“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. That’s where we are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. “In presence of what?”
“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off.”
She had paused there before him while he wondered. “You mean she’ll get the Prince back?

“To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT”—and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes—”will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. “Good night!”
There was something in her manner, however—or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather jolly!”
“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.
“I mean it’s rather charming.”
“‘Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.
“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be. Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim—”only I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on.”

[Fanny speaking]. “I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who COULD keep off ravening women—without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something, of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean—it looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face! But all I can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn’t quite make out either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting.”

[Fanny and Colonel] “And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent—?”
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. “Yes. That is they WERE—as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s were beautiful—of THAT I had my faith. They WERE—I’d go to the stake. Otherwise,” she added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”

[Fanny and Colonel] Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”
“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with expression, “he’s—beautifully—a case. They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be—and that’s what makes so much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”

Book TWO Part 4 Chapter 25

[Maggie] It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. 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.

[Maggie] She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father—the least little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend.

[Maggie of the Prince] He would be late—he would be very late; that was the one certainty that seemed to look her in the face. There was still also the possibility that if he drove with Charlotte straight to Eaton Square he might think it best to remain there even on learning she had come away. She had left no message for him on any such chance; this was another of her small shades of decision, though the effect of it might be to keep him still longer absent. He might suppose she would already have dined; he might stay, with all he would have to tell, just on purpose to be nice to her father. She had known him to stretch the point, to these beautiful ends, far beyond that; he had more than once stretched it to the sacrifice of the opportunity of dressing.

[Maggie]She had glanced repeatedly at the clock, but she had refused herself the weak indulgence of walking up and down, though the act of doing so, she knew, would make her feel, on the polished floor, with the rustle and the “hang,” still more beautifully bedecked.

[Maggie] THAT was at the bottom of her mind, that their equilibrium was everything, and that it was practically precarious, a matter of a hair’s breadth for the loss of the balance. It was the equilibrium, or at all events her conscious fear about it, that had brought her heart into her mouth; and the same fear was, on either side, in the silent look she and Amerigo had exchanged. The happy balance that demanded this amount of consideration was truly thus, as by its own confession, a delicate matter; but that her husband had also HIS habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them, after all, more closely together. It would have been most beautifully, therefore, in the name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy at their feeling so exactly the same about it, that she might have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of her behaviour to ring out—on the subject of that poor little behaviour which was for the moment so very limited a case of eccentricity.

[What Maggie communicates, but doesn’t actually say, to the Prince] “‘Why, why’ have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining together? Well, because I’ve all day been so wanting you alone that I finally couldn’t bear it, and that there didn’t seem any great reason why I should try to. THAT came to me—funny as it may at first sound, with all the things we’ve so wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each other. You’ve seemed these last days—I don’t know what: more absent than ever before, too absent for us merely to go on so. It’s all very well, and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the very brim, begins to flow over.

[Maggie, Prince] Still, she could actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking, though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking little person’s state of mind no mere crudity of impatience. Something had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro. Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie’s spirit, was always, at first, positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long since anything had been so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present emotion to the sense of possession.

Book TWO Part 4 Chapter 26

[Maggie, Prince] 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, by good fortune, to an altogether dazzling person? That was an old, old story, but the truth of it shone out to her like the beauty of some family picture, some mellow portrait of an ancestor, that she might have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long intermission.

But what perhaps most came out in the light of these concatenations was that it had been, for all the world, as if Charlotte had been “had in,” as the servants always said of extra help, because they had thus suffered it to be pointed out to them that if their family coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking its complement of wheels. Having but three, as they might say, it had wanted another, and what had Charlotte done from the first but begin to act, on the spot, and ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth?

[Maggie] She said to herself, in her excitement, that it was perfectly simple: to bring about a difference, touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all her father, so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn’t ready with a reason—not, that is, with what she would have called a reasonable one. She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt, all her life, at her father’s side and by his example, only in reasonable reasons; and what she would really have been most ashamed of would be to produce for HIM, in this line, some inferior substitute.

[Maggie]By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially, with her morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily greater than her consciousness of anything else; and I must add, moreover, that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming.

[Maggie]. Then, however, immediately, and even though superficially, there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was, once more, practically a little sacrificed. “I must do everything,” she had said, “without letting papa see what I do—at least till it’s done!” but she scarce knew how she proposed, even for the next few days, to blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her stepmother had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been rather snatched again thereby from her husband’s side, so, on the other hand, this had, with as little delay, entailed some very charming assistance for her in Eaton Square.

Book TWO Part 4 Chapter 27

Six other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matcham, made up the company, and each of these persons had for Maggie the interest of an attested connection with the Easter revels at that visionary house. Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly left behind it an ineffaceable charm—this air of beatific reference, less subdued in the others than in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them, together, an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman’s imagination broke in a small vain wave.

[Maggie of Lady Castledean] 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 protuberant eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range, from the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings.

[Adam] He brought it out straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea of what they should lose by breaking the charm: “I guess we won’t go down there after all, will we, Mag?—just when it’s getting so pleasant here.” That was all, with nothing to lead up to it; but it was done for her at a stroke, and done, not less, more rather, for Amerigo and Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost breathlessly measured it, was prodigious.

[The prince]. He KNEW HOW to resort to it—he could be, on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was, precisely, a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn’t resist.

[Maggie to the prince]“It’s as if we had been missing each other, had got a little apart—though going on so side by side. But the good moments, if one only waits for them,” she hastened to add, “come round of themselves. Moreover you’ve seen for yourself, since you’ve made it up so to father; feeling, for yourself, in your beautiful way, every difference, every air that blows; not having to be told or pushed, only being perfect to live with, through your habit of kindness and your exquisite instincts.

[Maggie to the prince]“Your taking the child down yourself, those days, and your coming, each time, to bring him away—nothing in the world, nothing you could have invented, would have kept father more under the charm. Besides, you know how you’ve always suited him, and how you’ve always so beautifully let it seem to him that he suits you. Only it has been, these last weeks, as if you wished—just in order to please him—to remind him of it afresh.”

[Maggie and prince]“And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?”
“I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even,” she said quite gaily, “go together down to Fawns.”
“You could be so very content without me?” the Prince presently inquired.

[Maggie and prince]“We shall simply go on as we are.”
“Well, we’re going on beautifully,” he answered—though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place. As Maggie said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea.

Book TWO Part 4 Chapter 28

[‘Young friend’ =Maggie] The perception of this high result caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend, from moment to moment, quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had, in some marvellous, sudden, supersubtle way, become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully, divinely retributive.

[Maggie wanting to say this to Adam] She was powerless, however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him, “Yes, this is by every appearance the best time we’ve had yet; but don’t you see, all the same, how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession, in short, of our life?”

[Maggie wanting to say this to Prince] She couldn’t—and he knew it—say what was true: “Oh, you ‘use’ her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever so differently and separately—not at all in the same way or degree. There’s nobody we really use together but ourselves, don’t you see?—by which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other of us; so why, as a matter of course, in such a case as this, drag in Charlotte?”

[Maggie, Prince] She couldn’t so challenge him, because it would have been—and there she was paralysed—the NOTE. It would have translated itself on the spot, for his ear, into jealousy; and, from reverberation to repercussion, would have reached her father’s exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact, of old—the time, so strangely, seemed already far away—an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability, round about them, of everything.

[Maggie and Father] They had never availed themselves of any given quarter-of-an-hour to gossip about fundamentals; they moved slowly through large still spaces; they could be silent together, at any time, beautifully, with much more comfort than hurriedly expressive. It appeared indeed to have become true that their common appeal measured itself, for vividness, just by this economy of sound; they might have been talking “at” each other when they talked with their companions, but these latter, assuredly, were not in any directer way to gain light on the current phase of their relation.

[Principino] She saw, of a sudden, everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from it with any number of remote matters, struck herself, for instance, as acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in the exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season, for a turn in the Regent’s Park. This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already proceeded there under high attendance: all of which considerations were defensive for Maggie, all of which became, to her mind, part of the business of cultivating continuity.

[Maggie of Father] She groaned to herself, while the vain imagination lasted, “WHY did he marry? ah, why DID he?” and then it came up to her more than ever that nothing could have been more beautiful than the way in which, till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amerigo hadn’t interfered.

Book TWO Part 4 Chapter 29

[Maggie and Father]. It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he came up again, as she might have said, smiling. “Well, I don’t know. We get nothing but the fun, do we?”
“No,” she had hastened to declare; “we certainly get nothing but the fun.”
“We do it all,” he had remarked, “so beautifully.”
“We do it all so beautifully.” She hadn’t denied this for a moment. “I see what you mean.”
“Well, I mean too,” he had gone on, “that we haven’t, no doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty.”
“Enough? Enough for what?”
“Enough not to be selfish.”
“I don’t think YOU are selfish,” she had returned—and had managed not to wail it.
“I don’t say that it’s me particularly—or that it’s you or Charlotte or Amerigo. But we’re selfish together—we move as a selfish mass. You see we want always the same thing,” he had gone on—”and that holds us, that binds us, together. We want each other,” he had further explained; “only wanting it, each time, FOR each other. That’s what I call the happy spell; but it’s also, a little, possibly, the immorality.”

But the beauty of it is, at the same time, that we ARE doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We HAVE worked it, and what more can you do than that?

He had hesitated, but only a moment. “I never told you so.”
“Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me.”
“But I never told HER,” her father had answered.
“Are you very sure?” she had presently asked.
“Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her, and how right I was, and how fortunate, to have that for my basis. I told her all the good I thought of her.”
“Then that,” Maggie had returned, “was precisely part of the good. I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully understand.”
“Yes—understand everything.”