The Golden Bowl - Henry James [113]
2
It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs Assingham was incorruptible. ‘They send for Charlotte through you?’
‘No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.’
‘Ah but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter of an hour, have been for them as one. He’s your ambassador.’ It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. ‘They’ve connected her with you – she’s treated as your appendage.’
‘Oh my “appendage”,’ the Prince amusedly exclaimed – ‘cara mia, what a name! She’s treated rather say as my ornament and my glory. And it’s so remarkable a case for a mother-in-law that you surely can’t find fault with it.’
‘You’ve ornaments enough, it seems to me – as you’ve certainly glories enough – without her. And she’s not the least little bit,’ Mrs Assingham observed, ‘your mother-in-law. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then – then –!’ She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision.
‘Then, then what?’ he asked with perfect good nature.
‘She had better in such a case not be known at all.’
‘But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,’ said the young man, still amused, ‘if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself – that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have “success”? Besides,’ he added while she watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if but wanting to see how he would say it, ‘besides, there is always the fact that we’re of the same connexion, of – what is your word? – the same “concern”. We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat’ – and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.
Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner; it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad she wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte, just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. ‘It only appears to me of great importance that – now that you all seem more settled here – Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as in particular her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the “same” boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr Verver’s boat.’
‘And pray am I not in Mr Verver’s boat too? Why but for Mr Verver’s boat I should have been by this time’ – and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths – ‘away down, down, down.’ She knew of course what he meant – how it had taken his father-in-law’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with this reminder other things came to her – how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger perhaps that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure she could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, couldn’t