orked upon her, but of course she
had always liked him. "I should be interested," she presently remarked,
"to see some sense you don't possess."

Well, he produced one on the spot. "The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I
mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of course something that
in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's
no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase--half-ruined into
the bargain!--in some castle of our quattrocento is like the `lightning
elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral
sense works by steam--it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and
steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that--well, that
it's as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again."

"Trusting," Mrs. Assingham smiled, "to get up some other way?"

"Yes--or not to have to get up at all. However," he added, "I told you
that at the beginning."

"Machiavelli!" she simply exclaimed.

"You do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius. However, if
you really believe I have his perversity you wouldn't say it. But it's
all right," he gaily enough concluded; "I shall always have you to come
to."

On this, for a little, they sat face to face; after which, without
comment, she asked him if he would have more tea. All she would give
him, he promptly signified; and he developed, making her laugh, his idea
that the tea of the English race was somehow their morality, "made,"
with boiling water, in a little pot, so that the more of it one drank
the more moral one would become. His drollery served as a transition,
and she put to him several questions about his sister and the others,
questions as to what Bob, in particular, Colonel Assingham, her husband,
could do for the arriving gentlemen, whom, by the Prince's leave, he
would immediately go to see. He was funny, while they talked, about
his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits,
imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more
rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known. This, Mrs.
Assingham professed, was exactly what would endear them to her, and
that, in turn, drew from her visitor a fresh declaration of all the
comfort of his being able so to depend on her. He had been with her, at
this point, some twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits,
and he stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciat