The Golden Bowl | Page 6

crimes, the follies, the
boundless betises of other people-- especially of their infamous waste
of money that might have come to me. Those things are
written--literally in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as
they're abominable. Everybody can get at them, and you've, both of you,
wonderfully, looked them in the face. But there's another part, very
much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self,
the unknown, unimportant, unimportant--unimportant save to
YOU--personal quantity. About this you've found out nothing."
"Luckily, my dear," the girl had bravely said; "for what then would
become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?"

The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily
CLEAR--he couldn't call it anything else--she had looked, in her
prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had been
moved to reply. "The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the
reigns without any history."
"Oh, I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that. "Call it the
bad part, if you like--yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it
else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me originally think of
you? It wasn't--as I should suppose you must have seen--what you call
your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations
behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste--the
wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in
your family library are all about. If I've read but two or three yet, I shall
give myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest. Where,
therefore"--she had put it to him again--"without your archives, annals,
infamies, would you have been?"
He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. "I might have been
in a somewhat better pecuniary situation." But his actual situation
under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that,
having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had
kept no impression of the girl's rejoinder. It had but sweetened the
waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some
essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one's bath
aromatic. No one before him, never--not even the infamous Pope--had
so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how
little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was it
but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of the
enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have
dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which
Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They
were of the colour--of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary
American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and
yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his
and these people's, was all suffused. What he had further said on the
occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from

his own thoughts while he loitered--what he had further said came back
to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound
that was always with him. "You Americans are almost incredibly
romantic."
"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us."
"Everything?" He had wondered.
"Well, everything that's nice at all. The world, the beautiful, world--or
everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."
He had looked at her a moment--and he well knew how she had struck
him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most
beautiful things. But what he had answered was: "You see too
much--that's what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you
don't, at least," he had amended with a further thought, "see too little."
But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning
perhaps was needless.
He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed
somehow no follies in theirs--nothing, one was obliged to recognise,
but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment
was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the
funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though
older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad--that is as
good--as herself.
"Oh, he's better," the girl had freely declared "that is he's worse. His
relation to the things he cares for--and I think it beautiful--is absolutely
romantic. So is his whole life over here--it's the most romantic thing I
know."
"You mean his idea for his native place?"
"Yes--the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to