o you about it."

"About its making me his stepmother-in-law--or whatever I SHOULD
become?" Over which, for a little, she not undivertedly mused. "Yes,
there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about
that."

"Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or
as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you
a message, he'll be it ALL." And then as the girl, with one of her so
deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical looks at him, failed to take
up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a
question. "Don't you think he's charming?"

"Oh, charming," said Charlotte Stant. "If he weren't I shouldn't mind."

"No more should I!" her friend harmoniously returned.

"Ah, but you DON'T mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I mean,
as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the
least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I were you," she
went on--"if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even
a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me
waste my worry. I don't know," she said, "what in the world--that didn't
touch my luck--I should trouble my head about."

"I quite understand you--yet doesn't it just depend," Mr. Verver asked,
"on what you call one's luck? It's exactly my luck that I'm talking
about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you've made me all right.
It's only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of.
It isn't they," he explained, "that make one so: it's the something else
I want that makes THEM right. If you'll give me what I ask, you'll see."

She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes,
while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by another
interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of dispersal for
luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it, for free talk, should
they have been moved to loudness, quite to themselves. She was ready
for their adjournment, but she was also aware of a pedestrian youth,
in uniform, a visible emissary of the Postes et Telegraphes, who had
approached, from the street, the small stronghold of the concierge and
who presented there a missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung
over his shoulder. The portress, meeting him on the threshold, met
equally, across the court, Charlotte's marked attention to his visit,
so that, within the