Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/323

THE PRINCE the former sprang as directly from his good understanding with his daughter. This understanding had, wonderfully—that was in high evidence—the same deep intimacy as the commercial, the financial association founded, far down, on a community of interest. And the correspondence, for the Prince, carried itself, out in identities of character the vision of which fortunately rather tended to amuse than to—as might have happened—irritate him. Those people—and his free synthesis lumped together capitalists and bankers, retired men of business, illustrious collectors, American fathers-in-law, American fathers, little American daughters, little American wives—those people were of the same large lucky group, as one might say; they were all at least of the same general species and had the same general instincts; they hung together, they passed each other the word, they spoke each other's language, they did each other "turns." In this last connexion it of course came up for our young man at a given moment that Maggie's relation with him was also on the perceived basis taken care of. Which was in fact the real upshot of the matter. It was a "funny" situation—that is it was funny just as it stood. Their married life was in question, but the solution wasn't less strikingly before them. It was all right for himself because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie's comfort, and it was all right for Maggie because he worked it so for her husband's.

The fact that time however wasn't, as we have said, wholly on the Prince's side might have shown for particularly true one dark day on which, by an odd but not unprecedented chance, the reflexions 293