Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/180

THE GOLDEN BOWL himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife's death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover—the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He was a plain American citizen staying at an hotel where sometimes for days together there were twenty others like him; but no pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art. He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn't afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were "placed" by their treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen—in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend's head, moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there. His freedom to see—of which the comparisons were part—what could it do but steadily grow and grow?

It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for all freedom—since for example it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs. Rance's conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have 150