in, at the best, but as involved in the little boy’s future, his past, or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead their own merits or to complain of being neglected.  Nothing perhaps, in truth, had done more than this united participation to confirm in the elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver’s behalf, we have made some mention.  It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa.  The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process, might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with the place of immediate male parent swept bare and open to the next nearest sympathy.

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what the Prince might be or might do for his son—­the sum of service, in his absence, so completely filled itself out.  It was not in the least, moreover, that there was doubt of him, for he was conspicuously addicted to the manipulation of the child, in the frank Italian way, at such moments as he judged discreet in respect to other claims:  conspicuously, indeed, that is, for Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to speak to her husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak to her father of the extravagance of her husband.  Adam Verver had, all round, in this connection, his own serenity.  He was sure of his son-in-law’s auxiliary admiration—­admiration, he meant, of his grand-son; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the instinct—­or it might fairly have been the tradition—­of the latter’s making the child so solidly beautiful as to have to be admired?  What contributed most to harmony in this play of relations, however, was the way the young man seemed to leave it to be gathered that, tradition for tradition, the grandpapa’s own was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing.  A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess herself—­well, Amerigo’s very discretions were his way of taking account of it.  His discriminations in respect to his heir were, in fine, not more angular than any others to be observed in him; and Mr. Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours.  It was as if the grandpapa’s special show of the character were but another side for the observer to study, another item for him to note.  It came back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception—­that of the Prince’s inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to conclude.  The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated—­on