Yet he was far, he could still remind himself, from supposing that she had been grossly remunerated. He was wholly sure she had n't; for if there were people who took presents and people who did n't she would be quite on the right side and of the proud class. Only then, on the other hand, her disinterestedness was rather awful--it implied, that is, such abysses of confidence. She was admirably attached to Maggie--whose possession of such a friend might moreover quite rank as one of her "assets"; but the great proof of her affection had been in bringing them, with her design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome, meeting him afterwards in Paris, and "liking" him, as she had in time frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her young friend's own and had then, unmistakeably, presented him in a light. But the interest in Maggie--that was the point--would have achieved but little without her interest in HIM. On what did that sentiment, unsolicited and unrecompensed rest? what good, again--for it was much like his question about Mr. Verver--should he ever have done her?
The Prince's notion of a (22) recompense to women--similar in this to his notion of an appeal--was more or less to make love to them. Now he had n't, as he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assingham--nor did he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days to mark them off, the women to whom he had n't made love: it represented--and that was what pleased him in it--a different stage of existence from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either aggressive or resentful.
On what occasion, ever, had she appeared to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were obscure--a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered to have read as a boy a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman--which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole--or was it the South?--than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs.
Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness--but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and (23) ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks.
Shocks, however, from these quite different depths, were not what he saw reason to apprehend; what he rather seemed to himself not yet to have measured was something that, seeking a name for it, he would have called the quantity of confidence reposed in him. He had stood still, at many a moment of the previous month, with the thought, freshly determined or renewed, of the general expectation--to define it roughly--of which he was the subject. What was singular was that it seemed not so much an expectation of anything in particular as a large bland blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, mediaeval, wonderful, of which the "worth" in mere modern change, sovereigns and half-crowns, would be great enough, but as to which, since there were finer ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous.
That was the image for the security in which it was open to him to rest; he was to constitute a possession, yet was to escape being reduced to his component parts. What would this mean but that practically he was never to be tried or tested? What would it mean but that if they did n't "change" him they really would n't know--he would n't know himself--how many pounds, shillings and pence he had to give? These at any rate for the present were unanswerable questions; all that WAS before him was that he was invested with attributes. He was taken seriously. Lost there in the white mist was (24) the seriousness in THEM that made them so take him. It was even in Mrs. Assingham, in spite of her having, as she had frequently shown, a more mocking spirit. All he could say as yet was that he had done nothing so far to break any charm. What should he do if he were to ask her frankly this afternoon what was, morally speaking, behind their veil. It would come to asking what they expected him to do. She would answer him probably:
"Oh, you know, it's what we expect you to BE!" on which he would have no resource but to deny his knowledge. Would that dissipate the spell, his saying he had no idea? What idea in fact could he have? He also took himself seriously--made a point of it; but it was n't simply a question of fancy and pretension. His own estimate he saw ways, at one time and another, of dealing with; but theirs, sooner or later, say what they might, would put him to the practical proof. As the practical proof, accordingly, would naturally be proportionate to the cluster of his attributes, one arrived at a scale that he was not, honestly, the man to calculate. Who but a billionaire could say what was fair exchange for a billion? That measure was the shrouded object, but he felt really, as his cab stopped in Cadogan Place, a little nearer the shroud. He promised himself virtually to give the latter a twitch.