cratched one's softer sides.
One would have been scratched by diamonds--doubtless the neatest way
if one was to be scratched at all--but one would have been more or less
reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you're a pure and perfect
crystal. I give you my idea--I think you ought to have it--just as it
has come to me." The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was
well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could
more have confirmed Mr. Verver's account of his surface than the manner
in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in
no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness
betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young
man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled--though indeed as if assenting,
from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs
that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.

In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been
living, the reasons they so frequently gave--so much oftener than he had
ever heard reasons given before--remained on the whole the element by
which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife
were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been
living. He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other
point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he
hadn't meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things
he had. He had fallen back on his general explanation--"We haven't the
same values;" by which he understood the same measure of importance. His
"curves" apparently were important because they had been unexpected,
or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his
relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too,
for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of
intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had
a staircase. He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of
the subject of Mr. Verver's approbation. The promptitude of his answer,
we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular
kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest
turn. "Oh, if I'm a crystal I'm delighted that I'm a perfect one, for I
believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws--in which case they're
to be had very cheap!" He had stoppe