s
considerately and lucidly--"is a good deal tied up at the dock, or
anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time
to time to stretch my legs, and you'll probably perceive, if you give it
your attention, that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing
the same. It isn't even a question, sometimes, of one's getting to the
dock--one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our
having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my
having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my
companion's track--for I grant you this as a practical result of our
combination--call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off
the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur,
as inevitable--and, above all, as not endangering life or limb? We
shan't drown, we shan't sink--at least I can answer for myself. Mrs.
Verver too, moreover--do her the justice--visibly knows how to swim."

He could easily go on, for she didn't interrupt him; Fanny felt now that
she wouldn't have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence
precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn't, in a manner,
catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The
crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot,
and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of
her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There
were moments, positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of
their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look,
when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words,
something that GAVE THEM AWAY, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost
an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably,
was it like? Wasn't it, however gross, such a rendering of anything so
occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility
of their REALLY treating their subject--of course on some better
occasion--and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If
this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the
head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel,
was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it
twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting
her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real
treatment of their subject