The Golden Bowl, Henry James [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

originally, left to herself, and left even more to the Principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand.

She had in a word not only mounted, cheerfully, the London treadmill⁠—she had handsomely professed herself, for the further comfort of the three others, sustained in the effort by a “frivolous side,” if that were not too harsh a name for a pleasant constitutional curiosity. There were possibilities of dullness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters-of-an-hour that turned up like false pieces in a debased currency, of which she made, on principle, very nearly as light as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The Prince had, on this score, paid her his compliment soon after her return from her wedding-tour in America, where, by all accounts, she had wondrously borne the brunt; facing brightly, at her husband’s side, everything that came up⁠—and what had come, often, was beyond words: just as, precisely, with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her husband’s son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus it had been, in short, that Charlotte could, for her friend’s appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions from which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of his own. “What could be more simple than one’s going through with everything,” she had asked, “when it’s so plain a part of one’s contract? I’ve got so much, by my marriage”⁠—for she had never for a moment concealed from him how “much” she had felt it and was finding it “that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I’m not a brute,” she had wound up, “you shall see me as I am!” Which was therefore as he had seen her⁠—dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all the while, contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her husband’s daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something more than this⁠—it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in⁠—on the crudest expression of it⁠—to do the “worldly” for them, and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it, moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt, quite equally provide for⁠—that would be, to balance, just in a manner Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognise it.

Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually recognising it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the Prince’s breast these others, these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently⁠—considering, in especial, his fuller resources in that line⁠—while he worked out⁠—to the last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to seek Fanny out in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and ultimate; and it consorted with common prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case, moreover, was that the “world,” by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be added, did, on occasion, wake up to opportunity and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations⁠—one of which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect of disturbing a little our young man’s measure of his margin. Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte’s own judgment was, always, that they were ideally free⁠—the proof