“To—­a—­me?” said Adam Verver.

He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his tone.  “To you and to every one.  She had only to be what she is—­and to be it all round.  If she’s charming, how can she help it?  So it was, and so only, that she ’acted’-as the Borgia wine used to act.  One saw it come over them—­the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming.  One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move.  For what they had to take home was that it’s she who’s the real thing.”

“Ah, it’s she who’s the real thing?” As he had not hitherto taken it home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so, doubtless, he had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal.  “I see, I see”—­he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was.  “And what would it be—­a—­definitely that you understand by that?”

She had only for an instant not found it easy to say.  “Why, exactly what those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will.”

“Oh—­of course never?”

It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as “real”—­just as he had been able to think of it as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter’s marriage.  The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great “finds”—­continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified.  Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed.  He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.  As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak, both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino Luini he had happened to come to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of his daughter’s betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind,