whereas when one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase.  He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of the subject of Mr. Verver’s approbation.  The promptitude of his answer, we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest turn.  “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws—­in which case they’re to be had very cheap!” He had stopped short of the emphasis it would have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having him cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically reigning between them that Mr. Verver had not, on his side either, taken up the opportunity.  It is the latter’s relation to such aspects, however, that now most concerns us, and the bearing of his pleased view of this absence of friction upon Amerigo’s character as a representative precious object.  Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent “pieces” in gold, in silver, in enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.

Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Maggie herself, the aspirant to his daughter’s hand showed somehow the great marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to look for in pieces of the first order.  Adam Verver knew, by this time, knew thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately believed, was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes.  He had never spoken of himself as infallible—­it was not his way; but, apart from the natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur.  He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience.  It consorted so with Mr. Verver’s consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment, he had stared at his Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory.  His “peak in Darien” was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion, that a world