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By Root 7100 0

home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero,3 as he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills, which she had at the time of their engagement seen and yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as the ‘perched’ place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use – all without counting the cloud of mortgages that had from far back buried them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius,4 and actually making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow excavation. Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices – sacrifices resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr Verver – involved in winning them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife meanwhile – one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay about – was that she never admired him so much, or so found him heart-breakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute her substance. There was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the licence and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established for each; she going so far as to put it that, even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it, charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart, at these light moments, that his course wouldn’t then be difficult, inasmuch as, so simply constituted as he was on all the precious question – and why should he be ashamed of it? – he knew but one way with the fair. They had to be fair – and he was fastidious and particular, his standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation with them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary, properly human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His interest, she always answered, happened not to be ‘plain’, and plainness, all round, had little to do with the matter, which was marked on the contrary by the richest variety of colour; but the working basis at all events had been settled – the Miss Maddocks of life been assured of their importance for him. How conveniently assured Maggie – to take him too into the joke – had more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since it fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This was one of her rules – full as she was of little rules, considerations, provisions. There were things she of course couldn’t tell him, in so many words, about Amerigo and herself, and about their happiness and their union and their deepest depths – and there were other things she needn’t; but there were also those that were both true and amusing, both communicable and real, and of these, with her so conscious, so delicately-cultivated scheme of conduct as a daughter, she could make her profit at will.

A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on most of the elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it involved, this serenity, innumerable