The Golden Bowl - Henry James [81]
Mr Verver – as if from due regard for these persons – considered a little. ‘What life would they like us to lead?’
‘Oh it’s not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together. She thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater.’
‘Greater –?’ He echoed it vaguely. ‘And Amerigo too, you say?’
‘Ah yes’ – her reply was prompt – ‘but Amerigo doesn’t mind. He doesn’t care, I mean, what we do. It’s for us, he considers, to see things exactly as we wish. Fanny herself,’ Maggie pursued, ‘thinks he’s magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for accepting the “social limitations” of our life, for not missing what we don’t give him.’
Mr Verver attended. ‘Then if he doesn’t miss it his magnificence is easy.’
‘It is easy – that’s exactly what I think. If there were things he did miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He could be a hero – he will be one if it’s ever necessary. But it will be about something better than our dreariness. I know,’ the Princess declared, ‘where he’s magnificent.’ And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as she had begun. ‘We’re not, all the same, committed to anything stupid. If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we can be grander. There’s nothing to prevent.’
‘Is it a strict moral obligation?’ Adam Verver enquired.
‘No – it’s for the amusement.’
‘For whose? For Fanny’s own?’
‘For everyone’s – though I dare say Fanny’s would be a large part.’ She paused; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring out, which she finally produced. ‘For yours in particular, say – if you go into the question.’ She even bravely followed it up. ‘I haven’t really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done for you than is done.’
Mr Verver uttered an odd vague sound. ‘Don’t you think a good deal’s done when you come out and talk to me this way?’
‘Ah,’ said his daughter, smiling at him, ‘we make too much of that!’ And then to explain: ‘That’s good, and it’s natural – but it isn’t great. We forget that we’re as free as air.’
‘Well, that’s great,’ Mr Verver pleaded.
‘Great if we act on it. Not if we don’t.’
She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that belied a light tone. ‘What do you want,’ he demanded, ‘to do to me?’ And he added, as she didn’t say, ‘You’ve got something in your mind.’ It had come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to be vague in him. There had been from the first something in her anxious eyes, in the way she occasionally lost herself, that it would pefectly explain. He was therefore now quite sure. ‘You’ve got something up your sleeve.’
She had a silence that made him right. ‘Well, when I tell you you’ll understand. It’s only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes – it has been in my mind. I’ve been asking myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you if you could stand just now another woman.’
It relieved him a little, yet the beautiful consideration of her manner made it in a degree portentous. ‘ “Stand” one –?’
‘Well, mind her coming.’
He stared – then he laughed. ‘It depends on who she is.’
‘There – you see! I’ve at all events been thinking whether you’d take this particular person but as a worry the more. Whether, that is, you’d go so far with her in your notion of having to be kind.’
He