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By Root 7251 0

the two, with so much, so strangely much else, quite uncalculated. Verily it towered before her, this history of their confidence. They had built strong and piled high – based as it was on such appearances – their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid, a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found him as unprepared as if he had been, like his wife, an abjectly simple person. And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning for herself that, whatever he might have to take from her – she being, on her side, beautifully free – he absolutely wouldn’t be able for any qualifying purpose to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law’s wife Mrs Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was at the least to bring her into the question – which would be by the same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie wouldn’t open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he weren’t fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it wasn’t till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he couldn’t.

‘You’re apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small matters. Won’t you perhaps feel in fairness that you’re striking out, triumphing, or whatever I may call it, rather too easily – feel it when I perfectly admit that your smashed cup there does come back to me? I frankly confess now to the occasion and to having wished not to speak of it to you at the time. We took two or three hours together by arrangement; it was on the eve of my marriage – at the moment you say. But that put it on the eve of yours too, my dear – which was directly the point. It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some small wedding-present – a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could be of use. You were naturally not to be told – precisely because it was all for you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup – which I’m bound to say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from whatever good motive, should have treated so ill.’ He had kept his hands in his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the achieved quietness of his explanation a long deep breath of comparative relief. Behind everything, beneath everything it was somehow a comfort to him at last to be talking with her – and he seemed to be proving to himself that he could talk. ‘It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury – I think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn’t believe in it and we didn’t take it.’

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of candour. ‘Oh you left it for me. But what did you take?’

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he might have been trying to forget. ‘Nothing, I think – at that place.’

‘What did you take then at any other? What did you get me – since that was your aim and end – for a wedding-gift?’

‘Didn’t we get you anything?’ The Prince had his shade of surprise – he continued very nobly to bethink himself.

Maggie waited a little; she had for some time now kept her eyes on him steadily, but they wandered at this to the fragments on her chimney. ‘Yes; it comes round after all to your having got me the bowl. I myself was to come upon it, the other day, by so wonderful a chance; was to find it in the same place and to have it pressed upon me by the same little man, who does,