at style of the facade and its high place
in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally
to have been pronounced calculable or not, had not, naturally, been the
miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily,
that from this vantage of wide, wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as
they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and acres of garden
and its majesty of artificial lake--though that, for a person
so familiar with the "great" ones, might be rather ridiculous--no
visibility of transition showed, no violence of adjustment, in
retrospect, emerged. The Palladian church was always there, but the
piazza took care of itself. The sun stared down in his fulness, the air
circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round
was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west,
and there were also side doors for entrance, between the two--large,
monumental, ornamental, in their style--as for all proper great
churches. By some such process, in fine, had the Prince, for his
father-in-law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at all
ominously, a block.

Mr. Verver, it may further be mentioned, had taken at no moment
sufficient alarm to have kept in detail the record of his reassurance;
but he would none the less not have been unable, not really have been
indisposed, to impart in confidence to the right person his notion of
the history of the matter. The right person--it is equally distinct--had
not, for this illumination, been wanting, but had been encountered in
the form of Fanny Assingham, not for the first time indeed admitted to
his counsels, and who would have doubtless at present, in any case, from
plenitude of interest and with equal guarantees, repeated his secret.
It all came then, the great clearance, from the one prime fact that
the Prince, by good fortune, hadn't proved angular. He clung to that
description of his daughter's husband as he often did to terms and
phrases, in the human, the social connection, that he had found for
himself: it was his way to have times of using these constantly, as if
they just then lighted the world, or his own path in it, for him--even
when for some of his interlocutors they covered less ground. It was true
that with Mrs. Assingham he never felt quite sure of the ground anything
covered; she disputed with him so little, agreed with him so much,
surrounded him with such systematic considera