Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/268

THE GOLDEN BOWL "Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you a message, he'll be it all." And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. "Don't you think he's charming?"

"Oh charming," said Charlotte Stant. "If he weren't I shouldn't mind."

"No more should I!" her friend harmoniously returned.

"Ah but you don't mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I mean, as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one's absolutely forced. If I were you," she went on—"if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don't know," she said, "what in the world—that didn't touch my luck—I should trouble my head about."

"I quite understand you—yet doesn't it just depend," Mr. Verver asked, "on what you call one's luck? It's exactly my luck that I'm talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you've made me all right. It's only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn't they," he explained, "that make one so: it's the something else I want that makes them right. If you'll give me what I ask you'll see."

She had taken her boa and thrown it over her 238