Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/188

THE GOLDEN BOWL personage knew, to his own previous perception—that of the Prince's inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to conclude. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated—on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was after all the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how, when you came to that, could you know that a horse wouldn't shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it didn't shy at a traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little thus from month to month the Prince was learning what his wife's father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off—he had been brought up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr. Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side. He didn't know—he was learning, and it was funny for him—to how many things he had been brought up. If the Prince could only strike something to which he hadn't! This wouldn't, it seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet might a little add to the interest.

What was now clear at all events for the father and the daughter was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together—at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause them to wander, 158