se
fellows, from whom he was so to differ, in English; he used, mentally,
the English term to describe his difference, for, familiar with the
tongue from his earliest years, so that no note of strangeness remained
with him either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for
the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly, even
for his relation with himself--though not unmindful that there might
still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of
that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the
finer issue--which was it?--of the vernacular. Miss Verver had told him
he spoke English too well--it was his only fault, and he had not been
able to speak worse even to oblige her. "When I speak worse, you see,
I speak French," he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him know,
as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so dreamed of
making good, of making better; to say nothing of his evident feeling
that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not a person to rise to.
The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial, charming, like every answer
the parties to his new arrangement had yet had from him--was that he was
practising his American in order to converse properly, on equal terms as
it were, with Mr. Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of
it, he said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the observation that
positively, of all his observations yet, had most finely touched her.

"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There are
plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I've ever
seen in my life."

"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily inquired.

It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The things, or
many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was seemed practically
to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other
people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. "Why, his
'form,'" he had returned, "might have made one doubt."

"Father's form?" She hadn't seen it. "It strikes me he hasn't got any."

"He hasn't got mine--he hasn't even got yours."

"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh, yours, my
dear,