was not in a condition to travel; his sister and
her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the
most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the
most disponible of ex-deputies and of relatives--a scant handful of the
consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie's plea for hymeneal reserve,
were to accompany him to the altar. It was no great array, yet it was
apparently to be a more numerous muster than any possible to the bride
herself, having no wealth of kinship to choose from and making it up,
on the other hand, by loose invitations. He had been interested in the
girl's attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it, giving him,
as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of ruminations
she would in general be governed by--which were quite such as fell in
with his own taste. They hadn't natural relations, she and her
father, she had explained; so they wouldn't try to supply the place
by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways and
hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enough--but a marriage was an
intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and
kin--you asked them over and above. But you didn't ask them alone, to
cover your nudity and look like what they weren't. She knew what she
meant and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her, finding
a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her, desired her, to have
character; his wife SHOULD have it, and he wasn't afraid of her having
much. He had had, in his earlier time, to deal with plenty of people who
had had it; notably with the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle,
the Cardinal, above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his
education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset him. He
was thus fairly on the look-out for the characteristic in this most
intimate, as she was to come, of his associates. He encouraged it when
it appeared.

He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as
if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before
and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It would open again,
doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even
perhaps open with his dining to-night in Portland Place, where Mr.
Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with
the spoils of Darius. But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have
said, was his sense of the