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secured or refused or lost! There were places he took me toā ā€”you wouldnā€™t believe!ā ā€”for often he could only have left me with servants. If he should carry me off with him tonight, for old sakeā€™s sake, to the Earlā€™s Court Exhibition, it will be a littleā ā€”just a very, very littleā ā€”like our young adventures.ā€ After which while Amerigo watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration, to which she presently yielded. If he was wondering what she would say next she had found exactly the thing. ā€œIn that case he will leave you Charlotte to take care of in our absence. Youā€™ll have to carry her off somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with her here. I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything, quite beautifully. Youā€™ll be able to do as you like.ā€

She couldnā€™t have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion. Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She troubled himā ā€”which hadnā€™t been at all her purpose; she mystified himā ā€”which she couldnā€™t help and, comparatively, didnā€™t mind; then it came over her that he had, after all, a simplicity, very considerable, on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discoveryā ā€”not like the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which he thought her capable. They were all, apparently, queer for him, but she had at least, with the lapse of the months, created the perception that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there, beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with. There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging it at him, on the question of her fatherā€™s view of him, her determined ā€œFind out for yourself!ā€ She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation. What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer to him, her fatherā€™s and her own, of an opportunity to separate from Mrs. Verver with the due amount of formā ā€”and all the more that he was, in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on the score of taste. Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea; for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine of them, wouldnā€™t be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile, at all events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. ā€œTheyā€™re doing the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to goā ā€”!ā€ And he looked down at her over his cigar.

If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her fatherā€™s age, Charlotteā€™s need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to ā€œlive intoā€ their queer futureā ā€”it was high time that they should take up their courage. This was eminent sense, but it didnā€™t arrest the Princess, who, the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. ā€œBut shanā€™t you then so much as miss her a little? Sheā€™s wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,ā€ Maggie went onā ā€”ā€œsheā€™s so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for usā ā€”for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.ā€

The Prince smoked hard a minute. ā€œAs you say, sheā€™s splendid, but there isā ā€”there always will beā ā€”much of her left. Only, as you also say, for others.ā€

ā€œAnd yet I think,ā€ the Princess returned, ā€œthat it isnā€™t as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? Itā€™s as if her unhappiness had been necessary to usā ā€”as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us.ā€

He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry. ā€œWhy do you speak of the unhappiness of your fatherā€™s wife?ā€

They exchanged a long lookā ā€”the time that it took her to find her reply. ā€œBecause not toā ā€”!ā€

ā€œWell,

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