istory, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the
boundless betises of other people--especially of their infamous waste
of money that might have come to me. Those things are written--literally
in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they're abominable.
Everybody can get at them, and you've, both of you, wonderfully, looked
them in the face. But there's another part, very much smaller
doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown,
unimportant, unimportant--unimportant save to YOU--personal quantity.
About this you've found out nothing."

"Luckily, my dear," the girl had bravely said; "for what then would
become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?"

The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEAR--he couldn't
call it anything else--she had looked, in her prettiness, as she had
said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. "The
happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any
history."

"Oh, I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that. "Call it the
bad part, if you like--yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it
else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me originally think of
you? It wasn't--as I should suppose you must have seen--what you call
your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations
behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste--the
wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in
your family library are all about. If I've read but two or three yet, I
shall give myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest.
Where, therefore"--she had put it to him again--"without your archives,
annals, infamies, would you have been?"

He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. "I might have been
in a somewhat better pecuniary situation." But his actual situation
under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that,
having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had
kept no impression of the girl's rejoinder. It had but sweetened the
waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of
some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one's bath
aromatic. No one before him, never--not even the infamous Pope--had
so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how
little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was
it but his