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By Root 7234 0

that he wasn’t so sure he would do it. He knew himself, however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie’s marriage and Maggie’s finer happiness – happy as he had supposed her before – that had made the difference; he hadn’t in the other time, it now seemed to him, had to think of such things. They hadn’t come up for him, and it was positively as if she had herself kept them down. She had only been his child – which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had done for him more than he knew – much, and blissfully, as he always had known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation still, all the same, kept pace with her activity – his situation being simply that there was more than ever to be done.

There hadn’t yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense, now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life, of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces. It was as if his son-in-law’s presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law, had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future – very richly and handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now practically taken, was still pretty much the same ‘big fact’, the sky had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded, quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. At first, certainly, their decent little old-time union, Maggie’s and his own, had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say – something with a grand architectural front – had suddenly been dropped; so that the rest of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east end, the margin of street and passage, the quantity of overarching heaven, had been temporarily compromised. Not even then, of a truth, in a manner disconcerting – given, that is, for the critical, or at least the intelligent eye, the great style of the façade and its high place in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally to have been pronounced calculable or not, hadn’t, naturally, been the miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily, that from this vantage of wide wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and acres of garden and its majesty of artificial lake – though that, for a person so familiar with the ‘great’ ones, might be rather ridiculous – no visibility of transition showed, no violence of accommodation, in retrospect, emerged. The Palladian church was always there, but the piazza5 took care of itself. The sun stared down in his fulness, the air circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were also side doors of entrance between the two – large, monumental, ornamental, in their style – as for all proper great churches. By some such process in fine had the Prince, for his father-in-law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be at all ominously a block.

Mr Verver, it may further be mentioned, had taken at no moment sufficient alarm to have kept in detail the record of his reassurance; but he would none the less not have been unable, not really have been indisposed, to impart in confidence to the right person his notion of the history of the matter. The right person – it is equally distinct – had not, for this illumination, been wanting, but had been encountered in the form of Fanny Assingham, not for the first time indeed