to contradict that had come out for him; so that he
was restless for her as well as for himself. She
looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his
telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim,
shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of
conviction that—as a man, so to speak—he
properly pleased her. He said nothing—the
words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again
better still as Charlotte, who had left her chair
at his approach, murmured them out. “We
start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and
sympathy.” There they were, the words,
and what did she want more? She didn’t,
however, as she gave him back the little unfolded
leaf, say they were enough —though he saw,
the next moment, that her silence was probably not
disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale.
Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present
theory that he had always thought them, shone at him
the more darkly out of this change of colour; and
she had again, with it, her apparent way of subjecting
herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness
to face him, to any view he might take, all at his
ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced
in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion
kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched,
since it proved that, little as she professed, she
had been beautifully hoping. They stood there
a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes
then, certainly she liked him enough—liked
him enough to make him, old as he was ready to brand
himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure
of it accordingly made him speak first. “Do
you begin, a little, to be satisfied?”
Still, however, she had to think. “We’ve
hurried them, you see. Why so breathless a start?”
“Because they want to congratulate us.
They want,” said Adam Verver, “to see
our happiness.”
She wondered again—and this time also,
for him, as publicly as possible. “So much
as that?”
“Do you think it’s too much?”
She continued to think plainly. “They weren’t
to have started for another week.”
“Well, what then? Isn’t our situation
worth the little sacrifice? We’ll go back
to Rome as soon as you like with them.”
This seemed to hold her—as he had previously
seen her held, just a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions
to what they would do together on a certain contingency.
“Worth it, the little sacrifice, for whom?
For us, naturally—yes,” she said.
“We want to see them—for our reasons.
That is,” she rather dimly smiled, “You
do.”
“And you do, my dear, too!” he bravely
declared. “Yes then—I do too,”
she after an instant ungrudging enough acknowledged.
“For us, however, something depends on it.”
“Rather! But does nothing depend on it
for them?”
“What can—from the moment that,
as appears, they don’t want to nip us in the
bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent
us. But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so
very little—such intense eagerness, I confess,”
she went on, “more than a little puzzles me.
You may think me,” she also added, “ungracious
and suspicious, but the Prince can’t at all
want to come back so soon. He wanted quite too
intensely to get away.”