ood while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still
had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his
affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as
he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the
Sabine hills, which she had, at the time of their engagement, seen and
yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as
the "perched" place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the
pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as
the head and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods
over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed
all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and
charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use--all
without counting the cloud of mortgages that had, from far back, buried
them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the
layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius, and actually
making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow
excavation. Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail
for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an
idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices--sacrifices
resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr. Verver--necessary for winning
them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife
meanwhile--one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay
about--was that she never admired him so much, or so found him
heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in
which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw
other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once
for all, to constitute HER substance. There was really nothing they had
talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of
the license and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established
for each: she going so far as to put it that, even should he some day
get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would,
after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it,
charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply
moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open
to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart,
at these l