on the impulse. This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy. If her friend had blurted or bungled he would have said, in his simplicity, ‘Did we do “everything to avoid” it when we faced your remarkable marriage?’ – quite handsomely of course using the plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after Mr Verver had dispatched to Rome the news of their engagement. That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them – an acceptance quite other than perfunctory – she had never destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place – from which, very privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over. ‘A la guerre comme à la guerre then’1 – it had been couched in the French tongue. ‘We must lead our lives as we seethem; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own.’ The message had remained ambiguous; she had read it in more lights than one; it might mean that even without her his career was up-hill work for him, a daily fighting-matter on behalf of a good appearance, and that thus if they were to become neighbours again the event would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean on the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself hadn’t asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an enquiry, everything implied, was beneath him – just as it was beneath herself to mention to him uninvited that she had instantly and in perfect honesty offered to show the telegram to Mr Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would in all probability at once have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact for the moment hung by the single hair of Mr Verver’s delicacy (as she supposed they must call it); and that her position in the matter of responsibility was therefore inattackably straight.
For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured allowance, had originally much helped him – helped him in the sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of which it was just this accessory element that seemed at present, with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else, separations, delays and intervals; but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had on the whole expected; less, strangely, for the state of being married even as he was married. And there was a logic in the matter, he knew; a logic that but gave this truth a sort of solidity of evidence. Mr Verver, decidedly, helped him with it – with his wedded condition; helped him really so much that it made all the difference. In the degree in which he rendered it the service on Mr Verver’s part was remarkable – as indeed what service, from the first of their meeting, hadn’t been? He was living, he had been living these four or five years, on Mr Verver’s services: a truth scarcely less plain if he dealt with them, for appreciation, one by one than if he poured them all together into the general pot of his gratitude and let the thing simmer to a nourishing broth. To the latter way with them he was undoubtedly most disposed; yet he would even thus now and again pick out a piece to taste on its own merits. Wondrous at such hours could seem the savour of the particular ‘treat’, at his father-in-law’s expense, that he more and more struck himself as enjoying. He had needed months and months to arrive at a full appreciation – he couldn’t originally have given off-hand a name to