ms--terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square--under
which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that
resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves
with calling his irritation--deep in the bosom of this falsity of
position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher
and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous, but
that one couldn't yet help, as for instance when one's wife chose, in
the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here, however, was the
difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely
unusual--yet to which, none the less, it would be too absurd that he
should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another
woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to
like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one
as idiotic or incapable--this WAS a predicament of which the dignity
depended all on one's own handling. What was supremely grotesque, in
fact, was the essential opposition of theories--as if a galantuomo, as
HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything
BUT blush to "go about" at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver
in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents
before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was
perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it--also as a man
of the world--all merciful justice; but, assuredly, none the less, there
was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for
himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it
could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich
and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable.
Wasn't this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It
was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were
given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an
exquisite sense of complicity.

XXI

He found himself therefore saying, with gaiety, even to Fanny Assingham,
for their common, concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was
so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place:
"What WOULD our cari sposi have made of it here? what would they, you
know, really?"--which overflow would have been reckless if, already,