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

in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them⁠—but she didn’t know it.”

“Ah, she didn’t know it?” Mr. Verver had asked with interest.

“Well, I think she didn’t”⁠—Mrs. Assingham had to admit that she hadn’t pressingly sounded her. “I don’t pretend to be sure, in every connection, of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t, certainly, like to make people suffer⁠—not, in general, as is the case with so many of us, even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with her. She likes, that is⁠—as all pleasant people do⁠—to be liked.”

“Ah, she likes to be liked?” her companion had gone on.

“She did, at the same time, no doubt, want to help us⁠—to put us at our ease. That is she wanted to put you⁠—and to put Maggie about you. So far as that went she had a plan. But it was only after⁠—it was not before, I really believe⁠—that she saw how effectively she could work.”

Again, as Mr. Verver felt, he must have taken it up. “Ah, she wanted to help us?⁠—wanted to help me?”

“Why,” Mrs. Assingham asked after an instant, “should it surprise you?”

He just thought. “Oh, it doesn’t!”

“She saw, of course, as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we all were. She didn’t need each of us to go, by appointment, to her room at night, or take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No doubt even she was rather impatient.”

“Of the poor things?” Mr. Verver had here inquired while he waited.

“Well, of your not yourselves being so⁠—and of your not in particular. I haven’t the least doubt in the world, par exemple, that she thinks you too meek.”

“Oh, she thinks me too meek?”

“And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in. All she had to do, after all, was to be nice to you.”

“To⁠—a⁠—me?” said Adam Verver.

He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. “To you and to everyone. She had only to be what she is⁠—and to be it all round. If she’s charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she ‘acted’⁠—as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them⁠—the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it’s she who’s the real thing.”

“Ah, it’s she who’s the real thing?” As he had not hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so, doubtless, he had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal. “I see, I see”⁠—he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was. “And what would it be⁠—a⁠—definitely that you understand by that?”

She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. “Why, exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will.”

“Oh⁠—of course never?”

It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as “real”⁠—just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter’s marriage. The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great “finds”⁠—continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter’s betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached, and as to which he had made out, contentedly, that further news was to be obtained from a certain Mr. Gutermann-Seuss of Brighton. 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. Adam Verver had in other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own little book, without having, for a day, raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those fortunate bachelors, or other gentlemen of pleasure, who so manage