"All, as a matter of coursesince you can't eat a chicken alive!"
The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive. "Well, I'm eating your father alivewhich 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 couldn't make one like him so much in any other language."
It mattered little that the girl had continued to demurit 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 tonewhich 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, 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 writtenliterally 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, unimportantunimportant save to YOUpersonal 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 CLEARhe couldn't call it anything elseshe 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 likeyours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me originally think of you? It wasn'tas I should suppose you must have seenwhat you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the wastethe 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 moreas soon as I have timeto 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, nevernot even the infamous Popehad 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. They were of the colourof what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people's, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts while he loiteredwhat he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. "You Americans are almost incredibly romantic."
"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us."
"Everything?" He had wondered.
"Well, everything that's nice at all. The world, the beautiful, worldor everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."
He had looked at her a momentand he well knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: "You see too muchthat's what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don't, at least," he had amended with a further thought, "see too little." But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless.
He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirsnothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as badthat is as goodas herself.
"Oh, he's better," the girl had freely declared "that is he's worse. His relation to the things he cares forand I think it beautifulis absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over hereit's the most romantic thing I know."
"You mean his idea for his native place?"
"Yesthe collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. It's the work of his life and the motive of everything he does."
The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. "Has it been his motive in letting me have you?"
"Yes, my dear, positivelyor in a manner," she had said.
"American City isn't, by the way, his native town, for, though he's not old, it's a young thing compared with hima younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. You're at any rate a part of his collection," she had explained"one of the things that can only be got over here. You're a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but you're so curious and eminent that there are very few others like youyou belong to a class about which everything is known. You're what they call a morceau de musee."
"I see. I have the great sign of it," he had risked"that I cost a lot of money."
"I haven't the least idea," she had gravely answered, "what you cost"and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying it. He had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the best of that. "Wouldn't you find out if it were a question of parting with me? My value would in that case be estimated."
She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well before her. "Yes, if you mean that I'd pay rather than lose you."
And then there came again what this had made him say. "Don't talk about MEit's you who are not of this age. You're a creature of a braver and finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, wouldn't have been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I didn't know some of the pieces your father has acquired, I should rather fear, for American City, the criticism of experts. Would it at all events be your idea," he had then just ruefully asked, "to send me there for safety?"