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By Root 7065 0

note of strangeness remained with him either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself – though not unmindful that there might still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the finer issue – which was it? – of the vernacular. Miss Verver had told him he spoke English too well – it was his only fault, and he hadn’t been able to speak worse even to oblige her. ‘When I speak worse, you see, I speak French,’ he had said; intimating thus that there were discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him know, as a reflexion on her own French, which she had always so dreamed of making good, of making better; to say nothing of his evident feeling that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not a person to rise to. The Prince’s answer to such remarks – genial, charming, like every answer the parties to his new arrangement had yet had from him – was that he was practising his American in order to converse properly, on equal terms as it were, with Mr Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of it, he said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides which he – well, besides which he had made to the girl the observation that positively, of all his observations yet, had most finely touched her.

‘You know I think he’s a real galantuomo3 – “and no mistake”. There are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘Well, my dear, why shouldn’t he be?’ the girl had gaily enquired.

It was this precisely that had set the Prince to think. The things, or many of them, that had made Mr Verver what he was seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. ‘Why his “form”,’4 he had returned, ‘might have made one doubt.’

‘Father’s form?’ She hadn’t seen it. ‘It strikes me he hasn’t got any.’

‘He hasn’t got mine – he hasn’t even got yours.’

‘Thank you for “even”!’ the girl had laughed at him.

‘Oh yours, my dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I’ve made that out. So don’t doubt it. It’s where it has brought him out – that’s the point.’

‘It’s his goodness that has brought him out,’ our young woman had, at this, objected.

‘Ah darling, goodness, I think, never brought any one out. Goodness, when it’s real, precisely, rather keeps people in.’ He had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. ‘No, it’s his way. It belongs to him.’

But she had wondered still. ‘It’s the American way. That’s all.’

‘Exactly – it’s all. It’s all I say! It fits him – so it must be good for something.’

‘Do you think it would be good for you?’ Maggie Verver had smilingly asked.

To which his reply had been just of the happiest. ‘I don’t feel, my dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now either hurt me or help me. Such as I am – but you’ll see for yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomo – which I devoutly hope: I’m like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a crème de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your father’s the natural fowl running about the basse-cour.5 His feathers, his movements, his sounds – those are the parts that, with me, are left out.’

‘Ah as a matter of course – since you can’t eat a chicken alive!’

The Prince hadn’t been annoyed at this, but had been positive. ‘Well, I’m eating your father alive – which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it’s when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn’t make one like him so much in any other language.’

It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur – it was the mere play of her joy. ‘I think he could make you like him in Chinese.’

‘It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that