Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/263

THE PRINCE chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some "dental," medical, surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. He went as far as the porte-cochere, took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even somehow just here by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte. "It's incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?—in the absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing."

The manner of it operated—she acknowledged with no great delay this natural possibility. "No—nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in love."

"Well, isn't Amerigo immensely in love?"

She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the degree—but she after all adopted Mr. Verver's. "Immensely."

"Then there you are!"

She had another smile, however—she wasn't there quite yet. "That isn't all that's wanted."

"But what more?"

"Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that she really believes." With which Char lotte became still more lucidly logical. "The reality of 233