It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness.  He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church.  Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces.  “You’re round, my boy,” he had said—­“you’re all, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square.  I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that you’re not square in the general mass—­whether abominably or not.  The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round—­that’s what I mean—­in the detail.  It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels—­or at least I do—­with one’s hand.  Say you had been formed, all over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice—­so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation.  I can see them all from here—­each of them sticking out by itself—­all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides.  One would have been scratched by diamonds—­doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all—­but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash.  As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal.  I give you my idea—­I think you ought to have it—­just as it has come to me.”  The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it.  They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone.  The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled—­though indeed as if assenting, from principle and habit, to more than he understood.  He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less why they were.

In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been living, the reasons they so frequently gave—­so much oftener than he had ever heard reasons given before—­remained on the whole the element by which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been living.  He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he hadn’t meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things he had.  He had fallen back on his general explanation—­“We haven’t the same values;” by which he understood the same measure of importance.  His “curves” apparently were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived;