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By Root 17291 0

’s own was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing. A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess herself – well, Amerigo’s very discretions were his way of taking account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir were in fine not more angular than any others to be observed in him; and Mr Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours. It was as if the grandpapa’s special show of the character were but another side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception – that of the Prince’s inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to conclude. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated – on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was after all the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how, when you came to that, could you know that a horse wouldn’t shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it didn’t shy at a traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little thus from month to month the Prince was learning what his wife’s father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off – he had been brought up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side. He didn’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 hadn’t! This wouldn’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, 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, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering,1 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 hadn’t been really too serious and if the question hadn’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 almost equally had others on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the superstition of not