The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

girl had bravely said; “for what then would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?”

The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily clear⁠—he couldn’t call it anything else⁠—she had looked, in her prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. “The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of history!” She had been sure of that. “Call it the bad part, if you like⁠—yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else,” Maggie Verver had also said, “that made me originally think of you? It wasn’t⁠—as I should suppose you must have seen⁠—what you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste⁠—the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about. If I’ve read but two or three yet, I shall give myself up but the more⁠—as soon as I have time⁠—to the rest. Where, therefore”⁠—she had put it to him again⁠—“without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?”

He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. “I might have been in a somewhat better pecuniary situation.” But his actual situation under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that, having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had kept no impression of the girl’s rejoinder. It had but sweetened the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one’s bath aromatic. No one before him, never⁠—not even the infamous Pope⁠—had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was it but history, and of their kind very much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colour⁠—of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people’s, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts while he loitered⁠—what he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. “You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.”

“Of course we are. That’s just what makes everything so nice for us.”

“Everything?” He had wondered.

“Well, everything that’s nice at all. The world, the beautiful, world⁠—or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much.”

He had looked at her a moment⁠—and he well knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: “You see too much⁠—that’s what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don’t, at least,” he had amended with a further thought, “see too little.” But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless.

He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs⁠—nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad⁠—that is as good⁠—as herself.

“Oh, he’s better,” the girl had freely declared “that is he’s worse. His relation to the things he cares for⁠—and I think it beautiful⁠—is absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over here⁠—it’s the most romantic thing I know.”

“You mean his idea for his native place?”

“Yes⁠—the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. It’s the work of his life and the motive of everything he does.”

The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again⁠—smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. “Has it been his motive in letting me have you?”

“Yes, my dear, positively⁠—or in a manner,” she had said.

“American City isn’t, by the way, his native town, for, though he’s not old, it’s a young thing compared with him⁠—a younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. You’re at any rate a part of his collection,” she had explained⁠—“one of the things that can only be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you⁠—you belong to a class about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de musee.”

“I see. I have the great sign of it,” he had risked⁠—“that I cost a lot of money.”

“I haven’t the least idea,” she had gravely answered, “what you cost”⁠—and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying it. He had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the best of that. “Wouldn’t you find out if it were a question of parting with me? My value would in that case be estimated.”

She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well before her. “Yes, if you mean that I’d pay rather than lose you.”

And then there came again what this had made him say. “Don’t talk