第87章 Chapter 2(2)

"Is n't it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?" And the effect for his good friend was still further to be deepened. "I somehow feel half the time as if he were HER father-in-law too. It's as if he had saved us both--which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don't you remember"--he kept it up--"how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability for her of some good marriage?" And then as his friend's face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: "Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is We were wholly right--and so was she. That it WAS exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, was n't (270) it? Only--what she has got--something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better--once you allow her the way it's to be taken. Of course if you don't allow her THAT the case is different.

Her offset is a certain decent freedom--which I judge she'll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The 'boat,' you see"-- the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly--"is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you'll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing the same. It is n't even a question, sometimes, of one's getting to the dock--one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion's track--for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination--call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges, off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, AS inevitable--and above all as not endangering life or limb? We shan't drown, we shan't sink--at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too moreover--do her the justice--visibly knows how to swim."

He could easily go on, for she did n't interrupt him; (271) Fanny felt now that she would n't have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there was n't a drop of it that she did n't in a manner catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flash of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnameable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that GAVE THEM AWAY, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Was n't it, however gross such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their REALLY treating their subject--of course on some better occasion--and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting?