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

Book ONE, Part 1, chapter 3

[Prince admiring Charlotte]. He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something intently made for exhibition, for a prize.

This was HIS, the man’s, any man’s, position and strength—that he had necessarily the advantage, that he only had to wait, with a decent patience, to be placed, in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other creature was her weakness and her deep misfortune—not less, no doubt, than her beauty. It produced for the man that extraordinary mixture of pity and profit in which his relation with her, when he was not a mere brute, mainly consisted; and gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of being always nice to her, nice about her, nice FOR her.

{On Charlotte’s facility with Italian.] It wasn’t a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops or lighted brands—it wasn’t at least entirely that, for he had known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make interesting. He was polyglot himself, for that matter—as was the case too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom, more than for himself, was it anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her lips, that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian.

“And you must help, dear,” Charlotte said unperturbed—”as you’ve helped, so beautifully, in such things before.” With which, before Mrs. Assingham could meet the appeal, she had addressed herself to the Prince on a matter much nearer to him. “YOUR marriage is on Friday?—on Saturday?”

Book ONE, Part 1, chapt 4.
{Fanny and the Colonel] “Then why won’t that do,” the Colonel asked, “for you to think it’s what she has come for?”
“How will it do, HOW?”—she went on as without hearing him.
“That’s what one keeps feeling.”
“Why shouldn’t it do beautifully?”
“That anything of the past,” she brooded, “should come back NOW? How will it do, how will it do?”

Book ONE, Part I, chapt. 5

(The Prince) This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether.

Book ONE, Part I, chap 6

(Prince and Charlotte) He didn’t, no doubt, want to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation—this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired “type” in faces at hucksters’ stalls. Therefore, on this occasion, she had found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared—well, so for them. “He likes his things—he loves them,” she was to say; “and it isn’t only—it isn’t perhaps even at all—that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers, at any rate, to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people—he knows them when he sees them; and that’s why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. Didn’t you see”—she was to ask it with an insistence—”the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he’ll remember us”—she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. “But it was after all”—this was perhaps reassuring—”because, given his taste, since he HAS taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck—he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we’re beautiful—aren’t we?—and he knows. Then, also, he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he’s all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it—that is a regular way.”

(Shopman and Charlotte discussing bowl)She wondered. “Even if I were to scrape off the gold?”
He showed, though with due respect, that she amused him. “You couldn’t scrape it off—it has been too well put on; put on I don’t know when and I don’t know how. But by some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process.”

(Shopman and Charlotte discussing bowl) “Does crystal then break—when it IS crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness.”
Her friend, in his way, discriminated. “Its beauty is its BEING crystal. But its hardness is certainly, its safety. It doesn’t break,” he went on, “like vile glass. It splits—if there is a split.”

Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 7

[Ms. Rance and Adam Verver] Should she frankly denounce him for a sneak he would simply go to pieces; but he was, after an instant, not afraid of that. Wouldn’t she rather, as emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly, treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?—show at least that they needn’t mind even though the vast table, draped in brown holland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be pursued, to be genially hunted.

[Adam Verver as collector] He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty—and he didn’t after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success; now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the immense meaning it had waited for.

Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 8

[Adam] There on one side was the ugliness his middle time had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents, was the beauty with which his age might still be crowned. He was happier, doubtless, than he deserved; but THAT, when one was happy at all, it was easy to be.

[Adam Verver about Grandson] He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take the small clutching child from his nurse’s arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—reduce it, he said, to that—in his easy weeks at Fawns

[Adam Verver about first marriage] He could call back his prior, his own wedded consciousness—it was not yet out of range of vague reflection. He had supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their boy, in New York—the grand climax of their recent American period, brought to so right an issue—the happy pair struck him as having carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern his imagination, at any rate, to follow them.

Maggie herself was capable; Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum: such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe—such was the impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes—but her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him, and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should prove at this time of day possible.

Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 9

[Of the principino] It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa.

[Of the principino] He was sure of his son-in-law’s auxiliary admiration—admiration, he meant, of his grand-son; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the instinct—or it might fairly have been the tradition—of the latter’s making the child so solidly beautiful as to HAVE to be admired?

[Of a lack of the prince’s] It was no secret to Maggie—it was indeed positively a public joke for her—that she couldn’t explain as Mrs. Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition of this luxury had to be met. He didn’t seem to want them as yet for use—rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed, beautiful, general, slightly indolent lack of more dissipated, or even just of more sophisticated, tastes.

[Of the prince’s property in Italy] He might at times reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills, which she had, at the time of their engagement, seen and yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as the “perched” place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head and front of the princedom.

Book ONE, Part 2, chapter 10

[Adam Verver’s eyes] There was something in Adam Verver’s eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was “big” even when restricted to stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor’s vision out or most opened themselves to your own.

[Maggie to her father, suggesting the visit of Charlotte] “You’ve got something up your sleeve.”
She had a silence that made him right. “Well, when I tell you you’ll understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes—it HAS been in my mind. I’ve been asking myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you if you could stand just now another woman.”
It relieved him a little, yet the beautiful consideration of her manner made it in a degree portentous. “Stand one—?”
“Well, mind her coming.”
He stared—then he laughed. “It depends on who she is.”
“Charlotte? Is SHE coming?”
“She writes me, practically, that she’d like to if we’re so good as to ask her.”
Mr. Verver continued to gaze, but rather as if waiting for more. Then, as everything appeared to have come, his expression had a drop. If this was all it was simple. “Then why in the world not?”
Maggie’s face lighted anew, but it was now another light. “It isn’t a want of tact?”
“To ask her?”
“To propose it to you.”
“That I should ask her?”
He put the question as an effect of his remnant of vagueness, but this had also its own effect. Maggie wondered an instant; after which, as with a flush of recognition, she took it up. “It would be too beautiful if you WOULD!”
This, clearly, had not been her first idea—the chance of his words had prompted it. “Do you mean write to her myself?”
“Yes—it would be kind. It would be quite beautiful of you. That is, of course,” said Maggie, “if you sincerely CAN.”

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