He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a grandfather.  In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre.  He could take the small clutching child from his nurse’s arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets.  Something clearly beatific in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—­reduce it, he said, to that—­in his easy weeks at Fawns.  The element of attitude was all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even more than he had hoped:  enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny Assingham had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of his full consciousness, overflowing the cup like a wine too generously poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now was, exactly, consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference, in fine, definitely made.  He could call back his prior, his own wedded consciousness—­it was not yet out of range of vague reflection.  He had supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple now before him carried the matter.  In especial since the birth of their boy, in New York—­the grand climax of their recent American period, brought to so right an issue—­the happy pair struck him as having carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern his imagination, at any rate, to follow them.  Extraordinary, beyond question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment—­it characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty:  the strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether Maggie’s mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum.  The maximum of tenderness he meant—­as the terms existed for him; the maximum of immersion in the fact of being married.  Maggie herself was capable; Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum:  such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe —­such was the impression he daily received from her.  She was her mother, oh yes—­but her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him, and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should prove at this time of day possible.