have hoped. That’s what I was to have said. I didn’t want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you”—she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice, but without the least failure of sense or sequence—“I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is, to hear. I don’t care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask nothing of you I don’t—I mayn’t—ask even so much as that. What you may think of me—that doesn’t in the least matter. What I want is that it shall always be with you—so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid of it—that I DID. I won’t say that you did—you may make as little of that as you like. But that I was here with you where we are and as we are—I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away—and perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That’s all.”
She paused as if her demonstration was complete—yet, for the moment, without moving; as if in fact to give it a few minutes to sink in; into the listening air, into the watching space, into the conscious hospitality of nature, so far as nature was, all Londonised, all vulgarised, with them there; or even, for that matter, into her own open ears, rather than into the attention of her passive and prudent friend. His attention had done all that attention could do; his handsome, slightly anxious, yet still more definitely “amused” face sufficiently played its part. He clutched, however, at what he could best clutch at—the fact that she let him off, definitely let him off. She let him off, it seemed, even from so much as answering; so that while he smiled back at her in return for her information he felt his lips remain closed to the successive vaguenesses of rejoinder, of objection, that rose for him from within. Charlotte herself spoke again at last—“You may want to know what I get by it. But that’s my own affair.” He really didn’t want to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn’t; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, with more impersonal talk, were naturally a relief; so that he was not again, during their excursion, at a loss for the right word. The air had been, as it were, cleared; they had their errand itself to discuss, and the opportunities of London, the sense of the wonderful place, the pleasures of prowling there, the question of shops, of possibilities, of particular objects, noticed by each in previous prowls. Each professed surprise at the extent of the other’s knowledge; the Prince in especial wondered at his friend’s possession of her London. He had rather prized his own possession, the guidance he could really often give a cabman; it was a whim of his own, a part of his Anglomania, and congruous with that feature, which had, after all, so much more surface than depth. When his companion, with the memory of other visits and other rambles, spoke of places he hadn’t seen and things he didn’t know, he actually felt again—as half the effect—just a shade humiliated. He might even have felt a trifle annoyed—if it hadn’t been, on this spot, for his being, even more, interested. It was a fresh light on Charlotte and on her curious world-quality, of which, in Rome, he had had his due sense, but which clearly would show larger on the big London stage. Rome was, in comparison, a village, a family-party, a little old-world spinnet for the fingers of one hand. By the time they reached the Marble Arch it was almost as if she were showing him a new side, and that, in fact, gave amusement a new and a firmer basis. The right tone would be easy for putting himself in her hands. Should they disagree a little—frankly and fairly—about directions and chances, values and authenticities, the situation would be quite gloriously saved. They were none the less, as happened, much of one mind on the article of their keeping clear of resorts with which Maggie would be acquainted. Charlotte recalled it as a matter of course, named it in time as a condition—they would keep away from any place to which he had already been with Maggie.
This made indeed a scant difference, for though he had during the last month done few things so much as attend his future wife on her making of purchases, the antiquarii, as he called them with Charlotte, had not been the great affair. Except in Bond Street, really, Maggie had had no use for them: her situation indeed, in connection with that order of traffic, was full of consequences produced by her father’s. Mr. Verver, one of the great collectors of the world, hadn’t left his daughter to prowl for herself; he had little to do with shops, and was mostly, as a purchaser, approached privately and from afar. Great people, all over Europe, sought introductions to him; high personages, incredibly high, and more of them than would ever be known, solemnly sworn as everyone was, in such cases, to discretion, high personages made up to him as the one man on the short authentic list likely to give the price. It had therefore been easy to settle, as they walked, that the tracks of the Ververs, daughter’s as well as father’s, were to be avoided; the importance only was that their talk about it led for a moment to the first words they had as yet exchanged on the subject of Maggie. Charlotte, still in the Park, proceeded to them—for it was she who began—with a serenity of appreciation that was odd, certainly, as a sequel to her words of ten minutes before. This was another note on her—what he would have called another light—for her companion, who, though without giving a sign, admired, for what it was, the simplicity of her transition, a transition that took no trouble either to trace or to explain itself. She paused again an instant, on the grass, to make it; she stopped before him with a sudden “Anything of course, dear as she is, will do for her. I mean if I were to give her a pin-cushion from the Baker-Street Bazaar.”
“That’s exactly what I meant”—the Prince laughed out this allusion to their snatch of talk in Portland Place. “It’s just what I suggested.”
She took, however, no notice of the reminder; she went on in her own way. “But it isn’t a reason. In that case one would never do anything for her. I mean,” Charlotte explained, “if one took advantage of her character.”
“Of her character?”
“We mustn’t take advantage of her character,” the girl, again unheeding, pursued. “One mustn’t, if not for HER, at least for one’s self. She saves one such trouble.”
She had spoken thoughtfully, with her eyes on her friend’s; she might have been talking, preoccupied and practical, of someone with whom he was comparatively unconnected. “She certainly GIVES one no trouble,” said the Prince. And then as if this were perhaps ambiguous or inadequate: “She’s not selfish—God forgive her!—enough.”
“That’s what I mean,” Charlotte instantly said. “She’s not selfish enough. There’s nothing, absolutely, that one NEED do for her. She’s so modest,” she developed—“she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love her—or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.”
The Prince frowned a little—as a tribute, after all, to seriousness. “She lets what—?”
“Anything—anything that you might do and that you don’t. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself that she asks efforts—so far as she ever HAS to ask them. She hasn’t, much. She does everything herself. And that’s terrible.”
The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn’t commit himself. “Terrible?”
“Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody,” Charlotte continued in the same manner, “is decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion, or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is without taking great care. Certainly,” she said, “such people as you and I are not.”
The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. “Not good enough to stand it?”
“Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.”
