Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his walk. It would have been ridiculoussuch a moral from such a sourceif it hadnt all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity the oppression of which I began by recording. Another feature was the immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home. He was to meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister and her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the most disponible of ex-deputies and of relativesa scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggies plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the altar. It was no great array, yet it was apparently to be a more numerous muster than any possible to the bride herself, having no wealth of kinship to choose from and making it up, on the other hand, by loose invitations. He had been interested in the girls attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it, giving him, as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of ruminations she would in general be governed bywhich were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadnt natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they wouldnt try to supply the place by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways and hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enoughbut a marriage was an intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and kinyou asked them over and above. But you didnt ask them alone, to cover your nudity and look like what they werent. She knew what she meant and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her, finding a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her, desired her, to have character; his wife SHOULD have it, and he wasnt afraid of her having much. He had had, in his earlier time, to deal with plenty of people who had had it; notably with the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle, the Cardinal, above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset him. He was thus fairly on the look-out for the characteristic in this most intimate, as she was to come, of his associates. He encouraged it when it appeared.
He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining to-night in Portland Place, where Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have said, was his sense of the immediate two or three hours. He paused on corners, at crossings; there kept rising for him, in waves, that consciousness, sharp as to its source while vague as to its end, which I began by speaking ofthe consciousness of an appeal to do something or other, before it was too late, for himself. By any friend to whom he might have mentioned it the appeal could have been turned to frank derision. For what, for whom indeed but himself and the high advantages attached, was he about to marry an extraordinarily charming girl, whose prospects, of the solid sort, were as guaranteed as her amiability? He wasnt to do it, assuredly, all for her. The Prince, as happened, however, was so free to feel and yet not to formulate that there rose before him after a little, definitely, the image of a friend whom he had often found ironic. He withheld the tribute of attention from passing faces only to let his impulse accumulate. Youth and beauty made him scarcely turn, but the image of Mrs. Assingham made him presently stop a hansom. HER youth, her beauty were things more or less of the past, but to find her at home, as he possibly might, would be doing what he still had time for, would put something of a reason into his restlessness and thereby probably soothe it. To recognise the propriety of this particular pilgrimageshe lived far enough off, in long Cadogan Placewas already in fact to work it off a little. A perception of the propriety of formally thanking her, and of timing the act just as he happened to be doingthis, he made out as he went, was obviously all that had been the matter with him. It was true that he had mistaken the mood of the moment, misread it rather, superficially, as an impulse to look the other waythe other way from where his pledges had accumulated. Mrs. Assingham, precisely, represented, embodied his pledgeswas, in her pleasant person, the force that had set them successively in motion. She had MADE his marriage, quite as truly as his papal ancestor had made his familythough he could scarce see what she had made it for unless because she too was perversely romantic. He had neither bribed nor persuaded her, had given her nothingscarce even till now articulate thanks; so that her profit-to think of it vulgarlymust have all had to come from the Ververs.
Yet he was far, he could still remind himself, from supposing that she had been grossly remunerated. He was wholly sure she hadnt; for if there were people who took presents and people who didnt she would be quite on the right side and of the proud class. Only then, on the other hand, her disinterestedness was rather awfulit implied, that is, such abysses of confidence. She was admirably attached to Maggiewhose possession of such a friend might moreover quite rank as one of her assets; but the great proof of her affection had been in bringing them, with her design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome, meeting him afterwards in Paris, and liking him, as she had in time frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her young friends own and had then, unmistakably, presented him in a light. But the interest in Maggiethat was the pointwould have achieved but little without her interest in HIM. On what did that sentiment, unsolicited and unrecompensed, rest? what good, againfor it was much like his question about Mr. Ververshould he ever have done her? The Princes notion of a recompense to womensimilar in this to his notion of an appealwas more or less to make love to them. Now he hadnt, as he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assinghamnor did he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to mark them off, the women to whom he hadnt made love: it represented and that was what pleased him in ita different stage of existence from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either aggressive or resentful. On what occasion, ever, had she appeared to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were obscurea little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wifes countryman-which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Poleor was it the South?than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blacknessbut as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks.