tion, such predetermined
tenderness, that it was almost--which he had once told her in irritation
as if she were nursing a sick baby. He had accused her of not taking
him seriously, and she had replied--as from her it couldn't frighten
him--that she took him religiously, adoringly. She had laughed again,
as she had laughed before, on his producing for her that good right word
about the happy issue of his connection with the Prince--with an effect
the more odd perhaps as she had not contested its value. She couldn't of
course, however, be, at the best, as much in love with his discovery as
he was himself. He was so much so that he fairly worked it--to his own
comfort; came in fact sometimes near publicly pointing the moral of what
might have occurred if friction, so to speak, had occurred. He pointed
it frankly one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince
the particular justice he did him, was even explicit as to the danger
that, in their remarkable relation, they had thus escaped. Oh, if he
HAD been angular!--who could say what might THEN have happened? He
spoke--and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs. Assingham too--as if he
grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.

It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last
vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and
hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his
spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of
the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a
contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces.
"You're round, my boy," he had said--"you're ALL, you're variously
and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been
abominably square. I'm not sure, for that matter," he had added, "that
you're not square in the general mass--whether abominably or not. The
abomination isn't a question, for you're inveterately round--that's
what I mean--in the detail. It's the sort of thing, in you, that one
feels--or at least I do--with one's hand. Say you had been formed, all
over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of
the Ducal Palace in Venice--so lovely in a building, but so damnable,
for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can
see them all from here--each of them sticking out by itself--all the
architectural cut diamonds that would have s