第55章 Chapter 3(2)

He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side. He did n't know--he was learning, and it was funny for him--to how many things he HAD been brought up. If the Prince could only strike something to which he had n't! This would n't, it seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet MIGHT a little add to the interest.

What was now clear at all events for the father and the daughter was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together--at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause them to wander, (159) unseen, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the "old" garden, as it was called, old with an antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it, I7I3, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before them a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the greenness, through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest trees spaciously clustered and where they would find one of the quietest places. A bench had been placed long ago beneath a great oak that helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude and figure a bosky horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and the low sun made a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade; Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as over her charming bare head she now handled it, gave, with the big straw hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was "sequestered"--they had praised it for that together before and liked the word; and after they had begun to linger there they could have smiled (if they had n't been really too serious and if the question had n't so soon ceased to matter) over the probable wonder of the others as to what would have become of them.

The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgement of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way that, as a rule, they (160) almost equally had others on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the superstition of not "hurting," but might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment, whether that was to be after all the last word of their conscientious development. Certain it was at all events that in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs. Rance the attendance at tea just in the right place on the west terrace might perfectly comprise the four or five persons--among them the very pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted announced and now brought--from the couple of other houses near enough, one of these the minor residence of their proprietor, established thriftily, while he hired out his ancestral home, within sight and sense of his profit. It was n't less certain either that for once in a way the group in question must all take the case as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr. Verver and his daughter, to see their reputation for a decent friendliness, through any momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo's possible funny Italian anxiety; Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware, conveniently amenable to his friend's explanations, beguilements, reassurances, and perhaps in fact rather more than less dependent on them as his new life--since that was his own name for it--opened out. It was no secret to Maggie--it was indeed positively a public joke for her--that she could n't explain as Mrs. Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking explanations, liking them almost (161) as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition of this luxury had to be met. He did n't seem to want them as yet for use--rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed beautiful general, his slightly indolent lack of more dissipated or even just of more sophisticated tastes.