The Golden Bowl - Henry James [85]
‘Ah she didn’t know it?’ Mr Verver had asked with interest.
‘Well, I think she didn’t’ – Mrs Assingham had to admit that she hadn’t pressingly sounded her. ‘I don’t pretend to be sure in every connexion of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t certainly like to make people suffer – not, in general, as is the case with so many of us, even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with her. She likes, that is – as all pleasant people do – to be liked.’
‘Ah she likes to be liked?’ her companion had gone on.
‘She did at the same time, no doubt, want to help us – to put us at our ease. That is she wanted to put you – and to put Maggie about you. So far as that went she had a plan. But it was only after – it was not before, I really believe – that she saw how effectively she could work.’
Again, as Mr Verver felt, he must have taken it up. ‘Ah she wanted to help us? – wanted to help me?’
‘Why,’ Mrs Assingham asked after an instant, ‘should it surprise you?’
He just thought. ‘Oh it doesn’t!’
‘She saw of course as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we all were. She didn’t need each of us to go by appointment to her room at night, or to take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No doubt even she was rather impatient.’
‘Of the poor things?’ Mr Verver had here enquired while he waited.
‘Well, of your not yourselves being so – and of your not in particular. I haven’t the least doubt in the world par exemple,2 that she thinks you too meek.’
‘Oh she thinks me too meek?’
‘And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in. All she had to do after all was to be nice to you.’
‘To – a – me?’ said Adam Verver.
He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone. ‘To you and to every one. She had only to be what she is – and to be it all round. If she’s charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she “acted” – as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them – the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it’s she who’s the real thing.’
‘Ah it’s she who’s the real thing?’ As he hadn’t hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs Rance, so doubtless he had now a little appeared to offer submission in his appeal. ‘I see, I see’ – he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without wanting at the same time to be sure of what the real thing was. ‘And what would it be – a – definitely that you understand by that?’
She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. ‘Why exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will.’
‘Oh – of course never!’
It not only remained with them and hung about them, it positively developed and deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as ‘real’ – just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter’s marriage. The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great ‘finds’; it continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling on his own side that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernardino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter