d--that Amerigo had, a little,
"coached" or incited their young friend, or perhaps rather that she had
simply, as one of the signs of the general perfection Fanny Assingham
commended in her, profited by observing, during her short opportunity
before the start of the travellers, the pleasant application by the
Prince of his personal system. He might wonder what exactly it was that
they so resembled each other in treating him like--from what noble and
propagated convention, in cases in which the exquisite "importance" was
to be neither too grossly attributed nor too grossly denied, they had
taken their specific lesson; but the difficulty was here of course that
one could really never know--couldn't know without having been one's
self a personage; whether a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a
General, or just a beautiful Author.

Before such a question, as before several others when they recurred, he
would come to a pause, leaning his arms on the old parapet and losing
himself in a far excursion. He had as to so many of the matters in hand
a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out, in his
unrest, for some idea, lurking in the vast freshness of the night,
at the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion, and so,
spreading beneath him, make him feel that he floated. What he kept
finding himself return to, disturbingly enough, was the reflection,
deeper than anything else, that in forming a new and intimate tie
he should in a manner abandon, or at the best signally relegate, his
daughter. He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost
her--as was indeed inevitable--by her own marriage; he should reduce to
definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the
best an inconvenience, that required some makeweight and deserved some
amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that
he should appear to adopt, in doing it, the sentiment, in fact the very
conviction, entertained, and quite sufficiently expressed, by
Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had
suffered--putting it with extravagance--at her hands. If she put it with
extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came--which she
put with extravagance too--from her persistence, always, in thinking,
feeling, talking about him, as young. He had had glimpses of moments
when to hear her thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would
have supposed the special edge o