preciation was
his extraordinarily unchallenged, his absolutely appointed and enhanced
possession of it. Poor Fanny Assingham's challenge amounted to nothing:
one of the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble
balustrade--so like others that he knew in still more nobly-terraced
Italy--was that she was squared, all-conveniently even to herself, and
that, rumbling toward London with this contentment, she had become an
image irrelevant to the scene. It further passed across him, as
his imagination was, for reasons, during the time, unprecedentedly
active,--that he had, after all, gained more from women than he had ever
lost by them; there appeared so, more and more, on those mystic books
that are kept, in connection with such commerce, even by men of the
loosest business habits, a balance in his favour that he could pretty
well, as a rule, take for granted. What were they doing at this
very moment, wonderful creatures, but combine and conspire for his
advantage?--from Maggie herself, most wonderful, in her way, of all, to
his hostess of the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably
come to keep Charlotte on, for reasons of her own, and who had asked,
in this benevolent spirit, why in the world, if not obliged, without
plausibility, to hurry, her husband's son-in-law should not wait over
in her company. He would at least see, Lady Castledean had said, that
nothing dreadful should happen to her, either while still there or
during the exposure of the run to town; and, for that matter, if they
exceeded a little their license it would positively help them to have
done so together. Each of them would, in this way, at home, have the
other comfortably to blame. All of which, besides, in Lady Castledean as
in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in Charlotte herself, was working;
for him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some
vague sense on their part--definite and conscious at the most only in
Charlotte--that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman,
in fine, below his remarkable fortune.

But there were more things before him than even these; things that
melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty.
If the outlook was in every way spacious--and the towers of three
cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to
him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of
tone--didn't he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely,