even that avidity for an issue which was making so little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened.  He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a concentrated evening.  “But it isn’t—­is it?” he asked—­“as if they were leaving each other?”

“Oh no; it isn’t as if they were leaving each other.  They’re only bringing to a close—­without knowing when it may open again—­a time that has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them.”  Yes, she could talk so of their “time”—­she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground.  “They have their reasons—­many things to think of; how can one tell?  But there’s always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our last hours together; I mean that he and I shall.  He may wish to take me off to dine with him somewhere alone—­and to do it in memory of old days.  I mean,” the Princess went on, “the real old days; before my grand husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was:  the wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done, his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains.  The way we’ve sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we’ve stayed on and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for, the things he had secured or refused or lost!  There were places he took me to—­you wouldn’t believe!—­for often he could only have left me with servants.  If he should carry me off with him to-night, for old sake’s sake, to the Earl’s Court Exhibition, it will be a little—­just a very, very little—­like our young adventures.”  After which while Amerigo watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration, to which she presently yielded.  If he was wondering what she would say next she had found exactly the thing.  “In that case he will leave you Charlotte to take care of in our absence.  You’ll have to carry her off somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with her here.  I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything, quite beautifully.  You’ll be able to do as you like.”

She couldn’t have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion.  Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it.  She troubled him—­which hadn’t been at all her purpose; she mystified him—­which she couldn’t help and, comparatively, didn’t