Mr. Verver considered.  “Well, hasn’t he been away?”

“Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it.  Besides,” said Charlotte, “he may not be able to join in the rosy view of our case that you impute to her.  It can’t in the least have appeared to him hitherto a matter of course that you should give his wife a bouncing stepmother.”

Adam Verver, at this, looked grave.  “I’m afraid then he’ll just have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts; and accept it—­ if he can imagine no better reason—­just because she does.  That,” he declared, “will have to do for him.”

His tone made her for a moment meet his face; after which, “Let me,” she abruptly said, “see it again”—­taking from him the folded leaf that she had given back and he had kept in his hand.  “Isn’t the whole thing,” she asked when she had read it over, “perhaps but a way like another for their gaining time?”

He again stood staring; but the next minute, with that upward spring of his shoulders and that downward pressure of his pockets which she had already, more than once, at disconcerted moments, determined in him, he turned sharply away and wandered from her in silence.  He looked about in his small despair; he crossed the hotel court, which, overarched and glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs, exotic ladies in chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some “dental,” medical, surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism.  He went as far as the porte-cochere, took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even, somehow, just here, by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte.  “It is incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?—­in the absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing.”  The manner of it operated—­she acknowledged with no great delay this natural possibility.  “No—­nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in love.”

“Well, isn’t Amerigo immensely in love?”

She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the degree—­but she after all adopted Mr. Verver’s.  “Immensely.”

“Then there you are!”

She had another smile, however—­she wasn’t there quite yet.  “That isn’t all that’s wanted.”

“But what more?”

“Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that she really believes.”  With which Charlotte became still more lucidly logical.  “The reality of his belief will depend in such a case on the reality of hers.  The Prince may for instance now,” she went on, “have made out to his satisfaction that Maggie may mainly desire to abound in your sense, whatever it is you do.  He may remember that he has never seen her do anything else.”