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By Root 7112 0

admitted to his counsels, and who would have doubtless at present, in any case, from plenitude of interest and with equal guarantees, repeated his secret. It all came then, the great clearance, from the one prime fact that the Prince, by good fortune, hadn’t proved angular. He clung to that description of his daughter’s husband as he often did to terms and phrases, in the human, the social connexion, that he had found for himself: it was his way to have times of using these constantly, as if they just then lighted the world, or his own path in it, for him – even when for some of his interlocutors they covered less ground. It was true that with Mrs Assingham he never felt quite sure of the ground anything covered; she disputed with him so little, agreed with him so much, surrounded him with such systematic consideration, such predetermined tenderness, that it was almost – which he had once told her in irritation – as if she were nursing a sick baby. He had accused her of not taking him seriously, and she had replied – as from her it couldn’t frighten him – that she took him religiously, adoringly. She had laughed again, as she had laughed before, on his producing for her that good right word about the happy issue of his connexion with the Prince – with an effect the more odd perhaps as she hadn’t contested its value. She couldn’t of course however be at the best as much in love with his discovery as he himself. He was so much so that he fairly worked it – to his own comfort; came in fact sometimes near publicly pointing the moral of what might have occurred if friction, so to speak, had occurred. He pointed it frankly one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince the particular justice he did him, was even explicit as to the danger that in their remarkable relation they had thus escaped. Oh if he had been angular! – who could say what might then have happened? He spoke – and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs Assingham too – as if he grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.

It figured for him clearly as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church. Just so he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces. ‘You’re round, my boy,’ he had said – ‘you’re all, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,’ he had added, ‘that you’re not square in the general mass – whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round – that’s what I mean – in the detail. It’s the sort of thing in you that one feels – or at least I do – with one’s hand. Say you had been formed all over in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice – so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can see them all from here – each of them sticking out by itself – all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides. One would have been scratched by diamonds – doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all – but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal. I give you my idea – I think you ought to have it – just as it has come to me.’ The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was well accustomed by this time to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled – though indeed as if assenting,