Still she debated. 'Do you mean write it to her?'
'Quite so. Immediately. To-morrow.'
'Oh, I don't think I can write it,' said Charlotte Stant. 'When I write to her'—and she looked amused for so different a shade—'it's about the Principino's appetite and Dr. Brady's visits.'
'Very good then—put it to her face to face. We'll go straight to Paris to meet them.'
Charlotte, at this, rose with a movement that was like a small cry; but her unspoken sense lost itself while she stood with her eyes on him—he keeping his seat as for the help it gave him, a little, to make his appeal go up. Presently, however, a new sense had come to her, and she covered him, kindly, with the expression of it. 'I do think, you know, you must rather 'like' me.'
'Thank you,' said Adam Verver. 'You WILL put it to her yourself then?'
She had another hesitation. 'We go over, you say, to meet them?'
'As soon as we can get back to Fawns. And wait there for them, if necessary, till they come.'
'Wait—a—at Fawns?'
'Wait in Paris. That will be charming in itself.'
'You take me to pleasant places.' She turned it over. 'You propose to me beautiful things.'
'It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You've made Brighton—!'
'Ah!'—she almost tenderly protested. 'With what I'm doing now?'
'You're promising me now what I want. Aren't you promising me,' he pressed, getting up, 'aren't you promising me to abide by what Maggie says?'
Oh, she wanted to be sure she was. 'Do you mean she'll ASK it of me?'
It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but certain? 'She'll speak to you. She'll speak to you FOR me.'
This at last then seemed to satisfy her. 'Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?' He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. 'Of course I give you time. Especially,' he smiled, 'as it's time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see, I mean, how I need you.'
'I already see,' said Charlotte, 'how you've persuaded yourself you do.' But she had to repeat it. 'That isn't, unfortunately, all.'
'Well then, how you'll make Maggie right.'
''Right'?' She echoed it as if the word went far. And 'O—oh!' she still critically murmured as they moved together away.
XIII
He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie's reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns—a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform—had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to 'speak' to her so far even as to tell her of the communication despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them—it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn't be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.
It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris—which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch—made, between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders—things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common conventions—that was what was odd—had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed—or would have figured it with less of unrest—that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all 'far' there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself, on the receipt of Maggie's missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him—his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn't much matter which—and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. There was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie, certainly, would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.
These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte's simply saying to him that she didn't like him enough. This he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough—nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that—as a man, so to speak—he properly
