be called
watching--offer this refreshment; she noted the consummate way--for
"consummate" was the term she privately applied--in which Charlotte
cleared her acceptance, cleared her impersonal smile, of any betrayal,
any slightest value, of consciousness; and then felt the slow surge of a
vision that, at the end of another minute or two, had floated her
across the room to where her father stood looking at a picture, an early
Florentine sacred subject, that he had given her on her marriage. He
might have been, in silence, taking his last leave of it; it was a
work for which he entertained, she knew, an unqualified esteem. The
tenderness represented for her by his sacrifice of such a treasure had
become, to her sense, a part of the whole infusion, of the immortal
expression; the beauty of his sentiment looked out at her, always, from
the beauty of the rest, as if the frame made positively a window for his
spiritual face: she might have said to herself, at this moment, that in
leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing
the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self.
She put her hand over his shoulder, and their eyes were held again,
together, by the abiding felicity; they smiled in emulation, vaguely,
as if speech failed them through their having passed too far; she would
have begun to wonder the next minute if it were reserved to them, for
the last stage, to find their contact, like that of old friends reunited
too much on the theory of the unchanged, subject to shy lapses.

"It's all right, eh?"

"Oh, my dear--rather!"

He had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she
had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an
instant afterwards symbolised another truth, so that they looked about
at everything else to give them this extension. She had passed her arm
into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the
sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the "important" pieces,
supreme in their way, stood out, round them, consciously, for
recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece,
taking in the whole nobleness--quite as if for him to measure the wisdom
of old ideas. The two noble persons seated, in conversation, at tea,
fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs. Verver
and the Prince fairly "placed" themselves, however unwittingly, as high
expressions of the kind