led of faith as of the right application
of it; since she had exercised it eagerly and restlessly, made it a
pretext for innocent perversities in respect to which philosophic time
was at, last to reduce all groans to gentleness. And they had loved each
other so that his own intelligence, on the higher line, had temporarily
paid for it. The futilities, the enormities, the depravities, of
decoration and ingenuity, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had
made him think lovely! Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and
addicted to silent pleasures--as he was accessible to silent pains--he
even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in
the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play,
if his wife's influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of
things, so promptly removed. Would she have led him altogether, attached
as he was to her, into the wilderness of mere mistakes? Would she have
prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous Peak?--or would she,
otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence, where
he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to HIS companions, the
revelation vouchsafed? No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real
lady: Mr. Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.

VIII

What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much
less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of
things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible
the years of light. A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard
at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of
another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the
good faith of it had been less. His comparative blindness had made
the good faith, which in its turn had made the soil propitious for the
flower of the supreme idea. He had had to LIKE forging and sweating, he
had had to like polishing and piling up his arms. They were things at
least he had had to believe he liked, just as he had believed he liked
transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling all for themselves,
the creation of "interests" that were the extinction of other interests,
the livid vulgarity, even, of getting in, or getting out, first. That
had of course been so far from really the case--with the supreme idea,
all the while, growing and striking deep, under