ccasion, that he wasn't so sure he WOULD do it. He knew himself,
however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where
he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie's marriage and
Maggie's finer happiness--happy as he had supposed her before--that had
made the difference; he hadn't in the other time, it now seemed to him,
had to think of such things. They hadn't come up for him, and it was as
if she, positively, had herself kept them down. She had only been his
child--which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on
which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had
done for him more than he knew--much, and blissfully, as he always HAD
known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she
called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation
still, all the same, kept pace with her activity--his situation being
simply that there was more than ever to be done.

There had not yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their
return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement
again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense,
now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and
lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life,
of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces. It was as if his
son-in-law's presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law,
had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future--very richly and
handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not
to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now
practically taken, was still pretty much the same "big fact," the sky
had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded,
quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. At
first, certainly, their decent little old-time union, Maggie's and his
own, had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart
of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say--something with
a grand architectural front--had suddenly been dropped; so that the rest
of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east
end, the margin of street and passage, the quantity of over-arching
heaven, had been temporarily compromised. Not even then, of a truth, in
a manner disconcerting--given, that is, for the critical, or at least
the intelligent, eye, the gre