"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily enquired.
(7) It was this precisely that had set the Prince to think. The things, or many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. "Why his ' form,"' he had returned, "might have made one doubt."
"Father's form?" She had n't seen it. "It strikes me he has n't got any."
"He has n't got mine--he has n't even got yours."
"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh yours, my dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I've made that out. So don't doubt it. It's where it has brought him out--that's the point."
"It's his goodness that has brought him out," our young woman had, at this, objected. "Ah darling, goodness, I think, never brought any one out.
Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people in." He had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. "No, it's his way.
It belongs to him."
But she had wondered still. "It's the American way. That's all."
"Exactly--it's all. It's all I say! It fits him--so it must be good for something."
"Do you think it would be good for you?" Maggie Verver had smilingly asked.
To which his reply had been just of the happiest. "I don't feel, my dear, if you really want to know, that anything; much can now either hurt me or help (8) me. Such as I am--but you'll see for yourself. Say, however, I AM a galantuomo--which I devoutly hope: I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His feathers, his movements, his sounds--those are the parts that, with me, are left out."
"Ah as a matter of course--since you can't eat a chicken alive!"
The Prince had n't been annoyed at this, but had been positive. "Well, I'm eating your father alive--which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it's when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He could n't make one like him so much in any other language."
It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur--it was the mere play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in Chinese."
"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the tone--which has made him possible."
"Oh you'll hear enough of it," she laughed, "before you've done with us."
Only this in truth had made him frown a little. "What do you mean, please, by my having 'done' with you?"
"Why found out about us all there is to find."
He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. "Ah love, I BEGAN with that. I know enough, I feel, (9) never to be surprised. It's you yourselves meanwhile," he continued, "who really know nothing. There are two parts of me"--yes, he had been moved to go on. "One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the boundless betises of other people--especially of their infamous waste of money that might have come to me. Those things are written--literally in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they're abominable. Everybody can get at them, and you've both of you wonderfully looked them in the face. But there's another part, very much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown, unimportant--unimportant save to you--personal quantity. About this you've found out nothing."
"Luckily, my dear," the girl had bravely said; "for what then would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?"
The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEAR--he could n't call it anything else--she had looked, in her prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. "The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history."
"Oh I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that. "Call it the bad part, if you like--yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me originally think of you? It was n't--as I should suppose you must have seen--what you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and (10) the waste--the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about. If I've read but two or three yet, I shall give myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest. Where, therefore"--she had put it to him again--"without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?"
He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. "I might have been in a somewhat better pecuniary situation." But his actual situation under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that, having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had kept no impression of the girl's rejoinder. It had but sweetened the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one's bath aromatic. No one before him, never--not even the infamous Pope--had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed for that matter how little one of his race could escape after all from history. What was it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops.
