The Golden Bowl, vol 1 | Page 9

it, in that absurd view, he would have been good
enough. Such was the laxity, in the Ververs, of the romantic spirit.
They didn't, indeed, poor dears, know what, in that line--the line of
futility--the real thing meant. HE did-- having seen it, having tried it,
having taken its measure. This was a memory in fact simply to screen
out--much as, just in front of him while he walked, the iron shutter of a
shop, closing early to the stale summer day, rattled down at the turn of
some crank. There was machinery again, just as the plate glass, all
about him, was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples. Well,
he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he was on their side--if it
wasn't rather the pleasanter way of putting it that they were on his.
Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his
walk. It would have been ridiculous--such a moral from such a
source--if it hadn't 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 relatives--a
scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie's 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 girl's 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 by--which were
quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadn't natural relations,
she and her father, she had explained; so they wouldn't try to supply the
place by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways
and hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enough--but a marriage

was an intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you HAD your
kith and kin--you asked them over and above. But you didn't ask them
alone, to cover your nudity and look like what they weren't. 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 wasn't 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 of--the
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 wasn't to do it,
assuredly, all for her. The Prince, as happened, however,