nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea,
carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very
nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father--
this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving
as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the
happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other
matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so
keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground
of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant,
but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous
intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next
word, lightly as he produced it.

"Isn't it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing
us together, a benefactor in common?" And the effect, for his
interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. "I somehow feel, half
the time, as if he were her father-in-law too. It's as if he had saved
us both--which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to
make of itself a link. Don't you remember"--he kept it up--"how, the day
she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly
and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of
some good marriage?" And then as his friend's face, in her extremity,
quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of
general repudiation: "Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the
work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right--and so was she.
That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended
a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our
word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn't
it? Only--what she has got--something thoroughly good. It would be
difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better--once you
allow her the way it's to be taken. Of course if you don't allow her
that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom--
which, I judge, she'll be quite contented with. You may say that will be
very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it.
She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of
retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it
might be given. The 'boat,' you see"--the Prince explained it no les