The Golden Bowl | Page 5

own French, which she had always so dreamed of making good, of making better; to say nothing of his evident feeling that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not a person to rise to. The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial, charming, like every answer the parties to his new arrangement had yet had from him--was that he was practising his American in order to converse properly, on equal terms as it were, with Mr. Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of it, he said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the observation that positively, of all his observations yet, had most finely touched her.
"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I've ever seen in my life."
"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily inquired.
It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The things, or many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. "Why, his 'form,'" he had returned, "might have made one doubt."
"Father's form?" She hadn't seen it. It strikes me he hasn't got any."
"He hasn't got mine--he hasn't even got yours."
"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh, yours, my dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I've made that out. So don't doubt it. It's where it has brought him out-- that's the point."
"It's his goodness that has brought him out," our young woman had, at this, objected.
"Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out. Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people in." He had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. "No, it's his WAY. It belongs to him."
But she had wondered still. "It's the American way. That's all."
"Exactly--it's all. It's all, I say! It fits him--so it must be good for something."
"Do you think it would be good for you?" Maggie Verver had smilingly asked.
To which his reply had been just of the happiest. "I don't feel, my dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now either hurt me or help me. Such as I am--but you'll see for yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomo--which I devoutly hope: I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His feathers, movements, his sounds--those are the parts that, with me, are left out."
"All, as a matter of course--since you can't eat a chicken alive!"
The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive. "Well, I'm eating your father alive--which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it's when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn't make one like him so much in any other language."
It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur--it was the mere play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in Chinese."
"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the tone--which has made him possible."
"Oh, you'll hear enough of it," she laughed, "before you've done with us."
Only this, in truth, had made him frown a little.
"What do you mean, please, by my having 'done' with you?"
"Why, found out about us all there is to find."
He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. "Ah, love, I began with that. I know enough, I feel, never to be surprised. It's you yourselves meanwhile," he continued, "who really know nothing. There are two parts of me"--yes, he had been moved to go on. "One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the 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