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By Root 6977 0

him that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte’s simply saying to him that she didn’t like him enough. This he wouldn’t have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough – nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that – as a man, so to speak – he properly pleased her. He said nothing – the words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her chair at his approach, murmured them out. ‘We start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and sympathy.’ There they were, the words, and what did she want more? She didn’t however as she gave him back the little unfolded leaf say they were enough – though he saw the next moment that her silence was probably not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this change of colour; and she had again with it her apparent way of subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in her. As soon as he saw how emotion kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly she liked him enough – liked him enough to make him, old as he was ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. ‘Do you begin a little to be satisfied?’

Still, oh still a little, she had to think. ‘We’ve hurried them you see. Why so breathless a start?’

‘Because they want to congratulate us. They want,’ said Adam Verver, ‘to see our happiness.’

She wondered again – and this time also, for him, as publicly as possible. ‘So much as that?’

‘Do you think it’s too much?’

She continued to think plainly. ‘They weren’t to have started for another week.’

‘Well, what then? Isn’t our situation worth the little sacrifice? We’ll go back to Rome as soon as you like with them.’

This seemed to hold her – as he had previously seen her held, just a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions to what they would do together on a certain contingency. ‘Worth it, the little sacrifice, for whom? For us, naturally – yes,’ she said. ‘We want to see them – for our reasons. That is,’ she rather dimly smiled, ‘you do.’

‘And you do, my dear, too!’ he bravely declared.

‘Yes then – I do too,’ she after an instant ungrudgingly enough acknowledged. ‘For us, however, something depends on it.’

‘Rather! But does nothing depend on it for them?’

‘What can – from the moment that, as appears, they don’t want to nip us in the bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent us. But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little – such intense eagerness, I confess,’ she went on, ‘more than a little puzzles me. You may think me,’ she also added, ‘ungracious and suspicious, but the Prince can’t at all want to come back so soon. He wanted quite too intensely to get away.’

Mr Verver considered. ‘Well, hasn’t he been away?’

‘Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it. Besides,’ said Charlotte, ‘he mayn’t be able to join in the rosy view of our case that you impute to Maggie. It can’t in the least have appeared to him hitherto a matter of course that you should give his wife a bouncing stepmother.’

Adam Verver at this looked grave. ‘I’m afraid then he’ll just have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts; and accept it – if he can imagine no better reason – just because she does. That,’ he declared, ‘will have to do for him.’

His tone made her for a moment meet his face;