ere were people who took presents and people who didn't she would be
quite on the right side and of the proud class. Only then, on the other
hand, her disinterestedness was rather awful--it implied, that is,
such abysses of confidence. She was admirably attached to Maggie--whose
possession of such a friend might moreover quite rank as one of her
"assets"; but the great proof of her affection had been in bringing
them, with her design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome,
meeting him afterwards in Paris, and "liking" him, as she had in time
frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her young
friend's own and had then, unmistakably, presented him in a light. But
the interest in Maggie--that was the point--would have achieved
but little without her interest in HIM. On what did that sentiment,
unsolicited and unrecompensed, rest? what good, again--for it was much
like his question about Mr. Verver--should he ever have done her? The
Prince's notion of a recompense to women--similar in this to his notion
of an appeal--was more or less to make love to them. Now he hadn't, as
he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assingham--nor did
he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to
mark them off, the women to whom he hadn't made love: it represented--
and that was what pleased him in it--a different stage of existence
from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he
had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either
aggressive or resentful. On what occasion, ever, had she appeared
to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were
obscure--a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of
the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good
fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan
Poe, his prospective wife's countryman-which was a thing to show, by the
way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked
Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North
Pole--or was it the South?--than anyone had ever done, found at a given
moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling
curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of
milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon
some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs.
Assingham herself, had r