think, quite as quietly as it might be given.  The ‘boat,’ you see”—­the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly—­“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream.  I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same.  It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock—­one has to take a header and splash about in the water.  Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track—­for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination—­call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us.  Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable—­and, above all, as not endangering life or limb?  We shan’t drown, we shan’t sink—­at least I can answer for myself.  Mrs. Verver too, moreover—­do her the justice—­visibly knows how to swim.”

He could easily go on, for she didn’t interrupt him; Fanny felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted him for the world.  She found his eloquence precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn’t, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation.  The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it.  There were moments, positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that gave them away, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension.  What, inconceivably, was it like?  Wasn’t it, however gross, such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their really treating their subject—­of course on some better occasion—­and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting?  If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand.  Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound.  This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought—­on the manner of which he couldn’t have improved—­to complete his successful simile by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting.  “For Mrs. Verver to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband’s wife, something is wanted that,