Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/201

THE PRINCE before them or behind them. If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend's dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black "cutaway" coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white—the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a white-dotted blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waist coat. "Should you really," he now asked, "like me to marry?" He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it might be an idea; which for that matter he would be ready to carry right straight out should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth in the connexion to utter. "What I feel is that there's somehow something that used to be right and that I've made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn't married and that you didn't seem to want to. It used also"—she continued to make out—"to seem easy for the question not to come up. That's what I've made different. It does come up. It will come up."

"You don't think I can keep it down?" Mr. Verver's tone was cheerfully pensive.

"Well, I've given you by my move all the trouble of having to."

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, 171