have been, that such a look could convey.  He had been sufficiently off his guard to show some little wonder as to their having plotted so very hard against their destiny, and she knew well enough, of course, what, in this connection, was at the bottom of his thought, and what would have sounded out more or less if he had not happily saved himself from words.  All men were brutes enough to catch when they might at such chances for dissent—­for all the good it really did them; but the Prince’s distinction was in being one of the few who could check himself before acting on the impulse.  This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy.  If her friend had blurted or bungled he would have said, in his simplicity, “Did we do ‘everything to avoid’ it when we faced your remarkable marriage?”—­quite handsomely of course using the plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after Mr. Verver had despatched to Rome the news of their engagement.  That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them—­ an acceptance quite other than perfunctory—­she had never destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still carefully reserved.  She kept it in a safe place—­from which, very privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over.  “A la guerre comme a la guerre then”—­it had been couched in the French tongue.  “We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own.”  The message had remained ambiguous; she had read it in more lights than one; it might mean that even without her his career was up-hill work for him, a daily fighting-matter on behalf of a good appearance, and that thus, if they were to become neighbours again, the event would compel him to live still more under arms.  It might mean on the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure.  On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself had not asked if the document were still in her possession.  Such an inquiry, everything implied, was beneath him—­just as it was beneath herself to mention to him, uninvited, that she had instantly offered, and in perfect honesty, to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put it before him.  She had thereby forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would, in all probability, straightway have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact, for the moment, hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver’s delicacy (as she supposed they must call it); and that her position, in the matter of responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight.