The Golden Bowl, vol 1 | Page 7

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, positively--or 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 him--a 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 you--you 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 ME--it'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?"
"Well, we may have to come to it."
"I'll go anywhere you want."
"We must see first--it will be only if we have to come to it. There are
things," she had gone on, "that father puts away--the bigger and more
cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here
and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes,
wonderful secret places. We've been like a pair of pirates--positively
stage pirates, the sort who wink at each other and say 'Ha-ha!' when
they come to where their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well
everywhere-- except what we like to see, what we travel with and have
about us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and
arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses we hire
a little less ugly. Of course it's a danger, and we have to keep watch.
But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says, the good of it, and it's
for the company of some of his things that he's willing to run his risks.
And we've had extraordinary luck"--Maggie had made that point;
"we've never lost anything yet. And the finest objects are often the
smallest. Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do
with size. But there's nothing, however tiny," she had wound up, "that
we've missed."
"I like the class," he had laughed for this, "in which you place me! I
shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at the

worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with the
family photographs and the new magazines. But it's something not to
be so big that I have to be buried."
"Oh," she had returned, "you shall not be buried, my dear, till you're
dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City."
"Before I pronounce I should like to see my tomb." So he had had, after
his fashion, the last word in their interchange, save for the result of an
observation that had risen to his lips at the beginning, which he had
then checked, and which now came back to him. "Good, bad or
indifferent, I hope there's one thing you believe about me."
He had sounded solemn, even to himself, but she had taken it gaily.
"Ah, don't fix me down to 'one'! I