Chapter 7
Adam Verver, at Fawns1, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedom — might have been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The justification2 of the push he had applied3, however, and of the push, equally sharp, that, to shut himself in, he again applied — the ground of this energy was precisely4 that he might here, however briefly5, find himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked opportunity to give an eye. The vast, square, clean apartment was empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered village and strong cloudshadow, which were, together, a thing to create the sense, with everyone else at church, of one’s having the world to one’s self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr. Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said, for solitude6, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through tortuous7 corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our attention — tender indeed almost to compassion8 — qualify his achieved isolation9. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable11 man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always figured other persons — such was the law of his nature — as a numerous array, and that, though conscious of but a single near tie, one affection, one duty deepest-rooted in his life, it had never, for many minutes together, been his portion not to feel himself surrounded and committed, never quite been his refreshment12 to make out where the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint13, diminishing concentric zones of intensity14, of importunity15, really faded to the blessed impersonal16 whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached. It shaded off, the appeal — he would have admitted that; but he had as yet noted17 no point at which it positively18 stopped.
Thus had grown in him a little habit — his innermost secret, not confided19 even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everything — thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign22 for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness23, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved in the preservation24 by an adult of one of childhood’s toys. When he took a rare moment “off,” he did so with the touching25, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic26 of infancy27 — sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of a wooden gun. It was essentially28, in him, the IMITATION of depravity — which, for amusement, as might have been, he practised “keeping up.” In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so artlessly-artful interludes were condemned29, by the nature of the case, to brevity. He had fatally stamped himself — it was his own fault — a man who could be interrupted with impunity31. The greatest of wonders, moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to where he was. It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine32 twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made of the chamber33 of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous34, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented35, a miraculous37 white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions.
The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral38 temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily39 contained — these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they were one with perfection of machinery40, they had constituted the kind of acquisitive power engendered41 and applied, the necessary triumph of all operations. A dim explanation of phenomena42 once vivid must at all events for the moment suffice us; it being obviously no account of the matter to throw on our friend’s amiability43 alone the weight of the demonstration44 of his economic history. Amiability, of a truth, is an aid to success; it has even been known to be the principle of large accumulations; but the link, for the mind, is none the less fatally missing between proof, on such a scale, of continuity, if of nothing more insolent45, in one field, and accessibility to distraction46 in every other. Variety of imagination — what is that but fatal, in the world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished47 from monotony? Mr. Verver then, for a fresh, full period, a period betraying, extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous48 behind an iridescent49 cloud. The cloud was his native envelope — the soft looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive50 enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude51 of folds, but of a quality unmistakable for sensitive feelers. He was still reduced, in fine, to getting his rare moments with himself by feigning52 a cynicism. His real inability to maintain the pretence53, however, had perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable54 today — his acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter-of-an hour, of that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must reckon. A quarter-of-an-hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, usually got. Mrs. Rance opened the door — more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more briskly on seeing him than he had been moved to do on seeing nobody. Then, with force, it came home to him that he had, definitely, a week before, established a precedent36. He did her at least that justice — it was a kind of justice he was always doing someone. He had on the previous Sunday liked to stop at home, and he had exposed himself thereby55 to be caught in the act. To make this possible, that is, Mrs. Rance had only had to like to do the same — the trick was so easily played. It had not occurred to him to plan in any way for her absence — which would have destroyed, somehow, in principle, the propriety56 of his own presence. If persons under his roof hadn’t a right not to go to church, what became, for a fair mind, of his own right? His subtlest manoeuvre57 had been simply to change from the library to the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his daughter’s, or the guest of the Miss Lutches — he scarce knew in which light to regard her — had then, and not unnaturally58, of course, joined him. It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence59 would already have got itself enacted60. She had spent the whole morning with him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back — thanks to her having been tepid61 about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a turn outside. It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of subterfuge62 — almost as a form of disloyalty. Yet what was it she had in mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made, a patient, punctilious63 host, mindful that she had originally arrived much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately64 or yearningly65 invited?— so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the MORE on one’s conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the middle West, were there as friends of Maggie’s, friends of the earlier time; but Mrs. Rance was there — or at least had primarily appeared — only as a friend of the Miss Lutches.
This lady herself was not of the middle West — she rather insisted on it — but of New Jersey66, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and most intimate States: he couldn’t remember which, though she insisted too on that. It was not in him — we may say it for him — to go so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of her own; and this partly because she had struck him, verily, rather as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such connection as he enjoyed with the ironic67 question in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments68; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed69, was in finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force. It pressed upon him hard, and all round, assuredly, this attribution of power. Everyone had need of one’s power, whereas one’s own need, at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it. The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive71 would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently72 discredit73 the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating74 to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage75 was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded76 the imputation77 of greed. The other, the constant imputation, that of being able to “do,” would have no ground if he hadn’t been, to start with — this was the point — provably luxurious78. His lips, somehow, were closed — and by a spring connected moreover with the action of his eyes themselves. The latter showed him what he had done, showed him where he had come out; quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent79 at the age of twenty, and the apex80 of which was a platform looking down, if one would, on the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half-a-dozen others.
His eyes, in any case, now saw Mrs. Rance approach with an instant failure to attach to the fact any grossness of avidity of Mrs. Rance’s own — or at least to descry81 any triumphant82 use even for the luridest impression of her intensity. What was virtually supreme83 would be her vision of his having attempted, by his desertion of the library, to mislead her — which in point of fact barely escaped being what he had designed. It was not easy for him, in spite of accumulations fondly and funnily regarded as of systematic84 practice, not now to be ashamed; the one thing comparatively easy would be to gloss85 over his course. The billiard-room was NOT, at the particular crisis, either a natural or a graceful86 place for the nominally87 main occupant of so large a house to retire to — and this without prejudice, either, to the fact that his visitor wouldn’t, as he apprehended88, explicitly90 make him a scene. Should she frankly91 denounce him for a sneak92 he would simply go to pieces; but he was, after an instant, not afraid of that. Wouldn’t she rather, as emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly, treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?— show at least that they needn’t mind even though the vast table, draped in brown holland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp93, to be pursued, to be genially94 hunted. This last was a turn he was well aware the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed95 before him — for the mere70 moment — the prospect96 of her fairly proposing that they should knock about the balls. That danger certainly, it struck him, he should manage in some way to deal with. Why too, for that matter, had he need of defences, material or other?— how was it a question of dangers really to be called such? The deep danger, the only one that made him, as an idea, positively turn cold, would have been the possibility of her seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible issue. Here, fortunately, she was powerless, it being apparently97 so provable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.
She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere — somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage99, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh — as they had appeared eager to mention; though when they were separately questioned their descriptions failed to tally30. He would be at the worst, should it come to the worst, Mrs. Rance’s difficulty, and he served therefore quite enough as the stout100 bulwark101 of anyone else. This was in truth logic102 without a flaw, yet it gave Mr. Verver less comfort than it ought. He feared not only danger — he feared the idea of danger, or in other words feared, hauntedly, himself. It was above all as a symbol that Mrs. Rance actually rose before him — a symbol of the supreme effort that he should have sooner or later, as he felt, to make. This effort would be to say No — he lived in terror of having to. He should be proposed to at a given moment — it was only a question of time — and then he should have to do a thing that would be extremely disagreeable. He almost wished, on occasion, that he wasn’t so sure he WOULD do it. He knew himself, however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly103, where he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie’s marriage and Maggie’s finer happiness — happy as he had supposed her before — that had made the difference; he hadn’t in the other time, it now seemed to him, had to think of such things. They hadn’t come up for him, and it was as if she, positively, had herself kept them down. She had only been his child — which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had done for him more than he knew — much, and blissfully, as he always HAD known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation still, all the same, kept pace with her activity — his situation being simply that there was more than ever to be done.
There had not yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense, now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life, of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces. It was as if his son-inlaw’s presence, even from before his becoming his son-inlaw, had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future — very richly and handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently104 or in ways not to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now practically taken, was still pretty much the same “big fact,” the sky had lifted, the horizon receded105, the very foreground itself expanded, quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. At first, certainly, their decent little old-time union, Maggie’s and his own, had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say — something with a grand architectural front — had suddenly been dropped; so that the rest of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east end, the margin106 of street and passage, the quantity of over-arching heaven, had been temporarily compromised. Not even then, of a truth, in a manner disconcerting — given, that is, for the critical, or at least the intelligent, eye, the great style of the facade107 and its high place in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally to have been pronounced calculable or not, had not, naturally, been the miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily, that from this vantage of wide, wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and acres of garden and its majesty108 of artificial lake — though that, for a person so familiar with the “great” ones, might be rather ridiculous — no visibility of transition showed, no violence of adjustment, in retrospect109, emerged. The Palladian church was always there, but the piazza110 took care of itself. The sun stared down in his fulness, the air circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were also side doors for entrance, between the two — large, monumental, ornamental111, in their style — as for all proper great churches. By some such process, in fine, had the Prince, for his father-inlaw, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at all ominously112, a block.
Mr. Verver, it may further be mentioned, had taken at no moment sufficient alarm to have kept in detail the record of his reassurance113; but he would none the less not have been unable, not really have been indisposed, to impart in confidence to the right person his notion of the history of the matter. The right person — it is equally distinct — had not, for this illumination, been wanting, but had been encountered in the form of Fanny Assingham, not for the first time indeed admitted to his counsels, and who would have doubtless at present, in any case, from plenitude of interest and with equal guarantees, repeated his secret. It all came then, the great clearance114, from the one prime fact that the Prince, by good fortune, hadn’t proved angular. He clung to that description of his daughter’s husband as he often did to terms and phrases, in the human, the social connection, that he had found for himself: it was his way to have times of using these constantly, as if they just then lighted the world, or his own path in it, for him — even when for some of his interlocutors they covered less ground. It was true that with Mrs. Assingham he never felt quite sure of the ground anything covered; she disputed with him so little, agreed with him so much, surrounded him with such systematic consideration, such predetermined tenderness, that it was almost — which he had once told her in irritation116 as if she were nursing a sick baby. He had accused her of not taking him seriously, and she had replied — as from her it couldn’t frighten him — that she took him religiously, adoringly. She had laughed again, as she had laughed before, on his producing for her that good right word about the happy issue of his connection with the Prince — with an effect the more odd perhaps as she had not contested its value. She couldn’t of course, however, be, at the best, as much in love with his discovery as he was himself. He was so much so that he fairly worked it — to his own comfort; came in fact sometimes near publicly pointing the moral of what might have occurred if friction117, so to speak, had occurred. He pointed118 it frankly one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince the particular justice he did him, was even explicit89 as to the danger that, in their remarkable119 relation, they had thus escaped. Oh, if he HAD been angular!— who could say what might THEN have happened? He spoke121 — and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs. Assingham too — as if he grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.
It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony122 pointedness123, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly124, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces. “You’re round, my boy,” he had said —“you’re ALL, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably125 square. I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that you’re not square in the general mass — whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately126 round — that’s what I mean — in the detail. It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels — or at least I do — with one’s hand. Say you had been formed, all over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice — so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can see them all from here — each of them sticking out by itself — all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides. One would have been scratched by diamonds — doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all — but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal. I give you my idea — I think you ought to have it — just as it has come to me.” The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled — though indeed as if assenting128, from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.
In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been living, the reasons they so frequently gave — so much oftener than he had ever heard reasons given before — remained on the whole the element by which he most differed from them; and his father-inlaw and his wife were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been living. He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably129, so often, things he hadn’t meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things he had. He had fallen back on his general explanation —“We haven’t the same values;” by which he understood the same measure of importance. His “curves” apparently were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his relegated130 old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse131 than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase. He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of the subject of Mr. Verver’s approbation132. The promptitude of his answer, we may in fact well surmise133, had sprung not a little from a particular kindled134 remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest turn. “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws — in which case they’re to be had very cheap!” He had stopped short of the emphasis it would have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having HIM cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically reigning135 between them that Mr. Verver had not, on his side either, taken up the opportunity. It is the latter’s relation to such aspects, however, that now most concerns us, and the bearing of his pleased view of this absence of friction upon Amerigo’s character as a representative precious object. Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent136 “pieces” in gold, in silver, in enamel137, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation138, so engaged all the faculties139 of his mind, that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.
Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Maggie herself, the aspirant140 to his daughter’s hand showed somehow the great marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to look for in pieces of the first order. Adam Verver knew, by this time, knew thoroughly141; no man in Europe or in America, he privately142 believed, was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes. He had never spoken of himself as infallible — it was not his way; but, apart from the natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur143. He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet144 about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly145 fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted146 so with Mr. Verver’s consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment, he had stared at HIS Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal148 lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His “peak in Darien” was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp149 akin20 to the low moan of apprehensive150 passion, that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It had been a turning of the page of the book of life — as if a leaf long inert151 had moved at a touch and, eagerly reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles152. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of it — what was most wondrous153 of all — still more even in the thought than in the act. The thought was that of the affinity154 of Genius, or at least of Taste, with something in himself — with the dormant155 intelligence of which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected156 him as changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual plane. He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty — and he didn’t after all perhaps dangle157 so far below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success; now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the immense meaning it had waited for.
It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife, when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had so broken — and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier occasion, the journey of his honeymoon158 year, it had still been closely covered. He had “bought” then, so far as he had been able, but he had bought almost wholly for the frail159, fluttered creature at his side, who had had her fancies, decidedly, but all for the art, then wonderful to both of them, of the Rue98 de la Paix, the costly160 authenticities of dressmakers and jewellers. Her flutter — pale disconcerted ghost as she actually was, a broken white flower tied round, almost grotesquely161 for his present sense, with a huge satin “bow” of the Boulevard — her flutter had been mainly that of ribbons, frills and fine fabrics162; all funny, pathetic evidence, for memory, of the bewilderments overtaking them as a bridal pair confronted with opportunity. He could wince163, fairly, still, as he remembered the sense in which the poor girl’s pressure had, under his fond encouragement indeed, been exerted in favour of purchase and curiosity. These were wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that threw her back, for his pity, into a past more remote than he liked their common past, their young affection, to appear. It would have had to be admitted, to an insistent164 criticism, that Maggie’s mother, all too strangely, had not so much failed of faith as of the right application of it; since she had exercised it eagerly and restlessly, made it a pretext165 for innocent perversities in respect to which philosophic166 time was at, last to reduce all groans167 to gentleness. And they had loved each other so that his own intelligence, on the higher line, had temporarily paid for it. The futilities, the enormities, the depravities, of decoration and ingenuity168, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had made him think lovely! Musing169, reconsidering little man that he was, and addicted170 to silent pleasures — as he was accessible to silent pains — he even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play, if his wife’s influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of things, so promptly171 removed. Would she have led him altogether, attached as he was to her, into the wilderness172 of mere mistakes? Would she have prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous173 Peak?— or would she, otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence174, where he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to HIS companions, the revelation vouchsafed175? No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real lady: Mr. Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.
Chapter 8
What was at all events not permanently176 hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light. A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the good faith of it had been less. His comparative blindness had made the good faith, which in its turn had made the soil propitious177 for the flower of the supreme idea. He had had to LIKE forging and sweating, he had had to like polishing and piling up his arms. They were things at least he had had to believe he liked, just as he had believed he liked transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling178 all for themselves, the creation of “interests” that were the extinction179 of other interests, the livid vulgarity, even, of getting in, or getting out, first. That had of course been so far from really the case — with the supreme idea, all the while, growing and striking deep, under everything, in the warm, rich earth. He had stood unknowing, he had walked and worked where it was buried, and the fact itself, the fact of his fortune, would have been a barren fact enough if the first sharp tender shoot had never struggled into day. There on one side was the ugliness his middle time had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents180, was the beauty with which his age might still be crowned. He was happier, doubtless, than he deserved; but THAT, when one was happy at all, it was easy to be. He had wrought181 by devious182 ways, but he had reached the place, and what would ever have been straighter, in any man’s life, than his way, now, of occupying it? It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate183, set down by his hands as a house on a rock — a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift, primarily, to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure — in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted184 to positive sanctity, his spirit today almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico185 in anticipation186 of the final rites187.
These would be the “opening exercises,” the august dedication188 of the place. His imagination, he was well aware, got over the ground faster than his judgment189; there was much still to do for the production of his first effect. Foundations were laid and walls were rising, the structure of the shell all determined115; but raw haste was forbidden him in a connection so intimate with the highest effects of patience and piety190; he should belie21 himself by completing without a touch at least of the majesty of delay a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price. He was far from knowing as yet where he would end, but he was admirably definite as to where he wouldn’t begin. He wouldn’t begin with a small show — he would begin with a great, and he could scarce have indicated, even had he wished to try, the line of division he had drawn191. He had taken no trouble to indicate it to his fellow-citizens, purveyors and consumers, in his own and the circumjacent commonwealths192, of comic matter in large lettering, diurnally193 “set up,” printed, published, folded and delivered, at the expense of his presumptuous194 emulation195 of the snail196. The snail had become for him, under this ironic suggestion, the loveliest beast in nature, and his return to England, of which we are present witnesses, had not been unconnected with the appreciation so determined. It marked what he liked to mark, that he needed, on the matter in question, instruction from no one on earth. A couple of years of Europe again, of renewed nearness to changes and chances, refreshed sensibility to the currents of the market, would fall in with the consistency197 of wisdom, the particular shade of enlightened conviction, that he wished to observe. It didn’t look like much for a whole family to hang about waiting-they being now, since the birth of his grandson, a whole family; and there was henceforth only one ground in all the world, he felt, on which the question of appearance would ever really again count for him. He cared that a work of art of price should “look like” the master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks.
He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a correspondingly rare morsel198 of an earlier pate199 tendre. He could take the small clutching child from his nurse’s arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific200 in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction201, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately202 straight as the mere element of attitude — reduce it, he said, to that — in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even more than he had hoped: enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny Assingham had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of his full consciousness, overflowing203 the cup like a wine too generously poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now was, exactly, consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference, in fine, definitely made. He could call back his prior, his own wedded204 consciousness — it was not yet out of range of vague reflection. He had supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their boy, in New York — the grand climax205 of their recent American period, brought to so right an issue — the happy pair struck him as having carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern his imagination, at any rate, to follow them. Extraordinary, beyond question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment — it characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty206: the strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether Maggie’s mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum. The maximum of tenderness he meant — as the terms existed for him; the maximum of immersion207 in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable; Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely208, divinely, the maximum: such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe209 — such was the impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes — but her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him, and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should prove at this time of day possible.
He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process of his introduction to his present interests — an introduction that had depended all on himself, like the “cheek” of the young man who approaches a boss without credentials210 or picks up an acquaintance, makes even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. HIS real friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the door of that essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground for elation120 was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty — thanks to his modesty — had been to believe in his facility. THIS was the problem he had worked out to its solution — the solution that was now doing more than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he wished to feel “good,” as they said at American City, he had but to retrace211 his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back to — that the development had not been somebody’s else passing falsely, accepted too ignobly212, for his. To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press — the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife’s death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his divination213 of his faculty214 most went to his head. He was a plain American citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art. He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn’t afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal147 of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were “placed” by their treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen — in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend’s head, moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there. His freedom to see — of which the comparisons were part — what could it do but steadily215 grow and grow?
It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for ALL freedom — since, for example, it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs. Rance’s conspiring216 against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other license217 of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for a little, that, though if proposed to — and not only by this aspirant but by any other — he wouldn’t prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate218, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval219, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated220. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal221, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression — this was the point — took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies222 with which Mrs. Rance struck him as potentially bristling223, were not of a sort, really, to be met by one’s self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, “I’m restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because I’m proud and refined; but if it WASN’T for Mr. Rance and for my refinement224 and my pride!”— the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous225 rustle226, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented227, many-paged letters, of voices as to which, distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered little in what part of the resounding228 country they had learned to make themselves prevail. The Assinghams and the Miss Lutches had taken the walk, through the park, to the little old church, “on the property,” that our friend had often found himself wishing he were able to transport, as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to one of his exhibitory halls; while Maggie had induced her husband, not inveterate127 in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith — her own as it had been her mother’s, and as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be taken for his — without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage might not have been acted out.
What at last appeared to have happened, however, was that the divided parties, coming back at the same moment, had met outside and then drifted together, from empty room to room, yet not in mere aimless quest of the pair of companions they had left at home. The quest had carried them to the door of the billiard-room, and their appearance, as it opened to admit them, determined for Adam Verver, in the oddest way in the world, a new and sharp perception. It was really remarkable: this perception expanded, on the spot, as a flower, one of the strangest, might, at a breath, have suddenly opened. The breath, for that matter, was more than anything else, the look in his daughter’s eyes — the look with which he SAW her take in exactly what had occurred in her absence: Mrs. Rance’s pursuit of him to this remote locality, the spirit and the very form, perfectly229 characteristic, of his acceptance of the complication — the seal set, in short, unmistakably, on one of Maggie’s anxieties. The anxiety, it was true, would have been, even though not imparted, separately shared; for Fanny Assingham’s face was, by the same stroke, not at all thickly veiled for him, and a queer light, of a colour quite to match, fairly glittered in the four fine eyes of the Miss Lutches. Each of these persons — counting out, that is, the Prince and the Colonel, who didn’t care, and who didn’t even see that the others did — knew something, or had at any rate had her idea; the idea, precisely, that this was what Mrs. Rance, artfully biding230 her time, WOULD do. The special shade of apprehension231 on the part of the Miss Lutches might indeed have suggested the vision of an energy supremely232 asserted. It was droll233, in truth, if one came to that, the position of the Miss Lutches: they had themselves brought, they had guilelessly introduced Mrs. Rance, strong in the fact of Mr. Rance’s having been literally234 beheld235 of them; and it was now for them, positively, as if their handful of flowers — since Mrs. Rance was a handful!— had been but the vehicle of a dangerous snake. Mr. Verver fairly felt in the air the Miss Lutches’ imputation — in the intensity of which, really, his own propriety might have been involved.
That, none the less, was but a flicker236; what made the real difference, as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie. His daughter’s anxiety alone had depths, and it opened out for him the wider that it was altogether new. When, in their common past, when till this moment, had she shown a fear, however dumbly, for his individual life? They had had fears together, just as they had had joys, but all of hers, at least, had been for what equally concerned them. Here of a sudden was a question that concerned him alone, and the soundless explosion of it somehow marked a date. He was on her mind, he was even in a manner on her hands — as a distinct thing, that is, from being, where he had always been, merely deep in her heart and in her life; too deep down, as it were, to be disengaged, contrasted or opposed, in short objectively presented. But time finally had done it; their relation was altered: he SAW, again, the difference lighted for her. This marked it to himself — and it wasn’t a question simply of a Mrs. Rance the more or the less. For Maggie too, at a stroke, almost beneficently, their visitor had, from being an inconvenience, become a sign. They had made vacant, by their marriage, his immediate10 foreground, his personal precinct — they being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for others — so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see, he had the sense of what she saw HIM. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception had there not, the next instant, been more for him in Fanny Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing.
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fawns
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| n.（未满一岁的）幼鹿( fawn的名词复数 )；浅黄褐色；乞怜者；奉承者v.（尤指狗等）跳过来往人身上蹭以示亲热( fawn的第三人称单数 )；巴结；讨好 | |
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justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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tortuous
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| adj.弯弯曲曲的，蜿蜒的 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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importunity
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| n.硬要，强求 | |
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impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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confided
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| v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的过去式和过去分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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akin
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| adj.同族的，类似的 | |
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belie
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| v.掩饰，证明为假 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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quaintness
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| n.离奇有趣，古怪的事物 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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tally
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| n.计数器，记分，一致，测量；vt.计算，记录，使一致；vi.计算，记分，一致 | |
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impunity
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| n.(惩罚、损失、伤害等的)免除 | |
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shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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anonymous
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| adj.无名的；匿名的；无特色的 | |
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unprecedented
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| adj.无前例的，新奇的 | |
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precedent
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| n.先例，前例；惯例；adj.在前的，在先的 | |
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miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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cerebral
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| adj.脑的，大脑的；有智力的，理智型的 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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engendered
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| v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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amiability
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| n.和蔼可亲的，亲切的，友善的 | |
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demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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distraction
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| n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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monotonous
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| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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iridescent
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| adj.彩虹色的，闪色的 | |
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expressive
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| adj.表现的，表达…的，富于表情的 | |
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amplitude
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| n.广大；充足；振幅 | |
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feigning
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| 假装，伪装( feign的现在分词 )； 捏造（借口、理由等） | |
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pretence
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| n.假装，作假；借口，口实；虚伪；虚饰 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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manoeuvre
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| n.策略，调动；v.用策略，调动 | |
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unnaturally
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| adv.违反习俗地；不自然地；勉强地；不近人情地 | |
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recurrence
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| n.复发，反复，重现 | |
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enacted
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| 制定（法律），通过（法案）( enact的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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tepid
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| adj.微温的，温热的，不太热心的 | |
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subterfuge
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| n.诡计；藉口 | |
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punctilious
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| adj.谨慎的，谨小慎微的 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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yearningly
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| 怀念地，思慕地，同情地； 渴 | |
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jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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67
ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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68
resentments
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| （因受虐待而）愤恨，不满，怨恨( resentment的名词复数 ) | |
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69
analyzed
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| v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析 | |
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70
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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71
defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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72
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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73
discredit
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| vt.使不可置信；n.丧失信义；不信，怀疑 | |
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74
complicating
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| 使复杂化( complicate的现在分词 ) | |
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75
outrage
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| n.暴行，侮辱，愤怒；vt.凌辱，激怒 | |
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76
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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77
imputation
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| n.归罪，责难 | |
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78
luxurious
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| adj.精美而昂贵的；豪华的 | |
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79
ascent
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| n.(声望或地位)提高；上升，升高；登高 | |
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80
apex
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| n.顶点，最高点 | |
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81
descry
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| v.远远看到；发现；责备 | |
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82
triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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83
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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84
systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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85
gloss
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| n.光泽，光滑；虚饰；注释；vt.加光泽于；掩饰 | |
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86
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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87
nominally
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| 在名义上，表面地； 应名儿 | |
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88
apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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89
explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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90
explicitly
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| ad.明确地，显然地 | |
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91
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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92
sneak
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|
| vt.潜行(隐藏,填石缝)；偷偷摸摸做；n.潜行；adj.暗中进行 | |
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93
romp
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| n.欢闹；v.嬉闹玩笑 | |
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94
genially
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| adv.亲切地，和蔼地；快活地 | |
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95
loomed
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| v.隐约出现，阴森地逼近( loom的过去式和过去分词 )；隐约出现，阴森地逼近 | |
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96
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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97
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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98
rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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99
bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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101
bulwark
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| n.堡垒，保障，防御 | |
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102
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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103
bleakly
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| 无望地，阴郁地，苍凉地 | |
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104
inconveniently
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| ad.不方便地 | |
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105
receded
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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106
margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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107
facade
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| n.(建筑物的)正面，临街正面；外表 | |
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108
majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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109
retrospect
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| n.回顾，追溯；v.回顾，回想，追溯 | |
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110
piazza
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| n.广场；走廊 | |
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111
ornamental
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| adj.装饰的；作装饰用的；n.装饰品；观赏植物 | |
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112
ominously
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| adv.恶兆地，不吉利地；预示地 | |
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113
reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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114
clearance
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| n.净空；许可(证)；清算；清除，清理 | |
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115
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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116
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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117
friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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118
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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119
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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120
elation
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| n.兴高采烈，洋洋得意 | |
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121
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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122
stony
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|
| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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123
pointedness
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| n.尖角，尖锐；棱角 | |
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124
beguilingly
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125
abominably
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|
| adv. 可恶地，可恨地，恶劣地 | |
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126
inveterately
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| adv.根深蒂固地，积习地 | |
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127
inveterate
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| adj.积习已深的，根深蒂固的 | |
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128
assenting
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| 同意，赞成( assent的现在分词 ) | |
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129
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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130
relegated
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| v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类 | |
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131
intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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132
approbation
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| n.称赞；认可 | |
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133
surmise
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| v./n.猜想，推测 | |
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134
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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135
reigning
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| adj.统治的，起支配作用的 | |
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136
eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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137
enamel
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| n.珐琅，搪瓷，瓷釉；(牙齿的)珐琅质 | |
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138
appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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139
faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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140
aspirant
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| n.热望者；adj.渴望的 | |
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141
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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142
privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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143
connoisseur
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| n.鉴赏家，行家，内行 | |
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144
sonnet
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| n.十四行诗 | |
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145
devoutly
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| adv.虔诚地，虔敬地，衷心地 | |
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146
consorted
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| v.结伴( consort的过去式和过去分词 )；交往；相称；调和 | |
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147
perusal
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| n.细读，熟读；目测 | |
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148
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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149
gasp
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| n.喘息，气喘；v.喘息；气吁吁他说 | |
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150
apprehensive
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| adj.担心的，恐惧的，善于领会的 | |
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151
inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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152
isles
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| 岛( isle的名词复数 ) | |
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153
wondrous
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|
| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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154
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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155
dormant
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| adj.暂停活动的；休眠的；潜伏的 | |
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156
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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157
dangle
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| v.(使)悬荡，(使)悬垂 | |
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158
honeymoon
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| n.蜜月（假期）；vi.度蜜月 | |
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159
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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160
costly
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| adj.昂贵的，价值高的，豪华的 | |
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161
grotesquely
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| adv. 奇异地,荒诞地 | |
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162
fabrics
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| 织物( fabric的名词复数 )； 布； 构造； （建筑物的）结构（如墙、地面、屋顶）：质地 | |
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163
wince
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| n.畏缩，退避，（因痛苦，苦恼等)面部肌肉抽动；v.畏缩，退缩，退避 | |
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164
insistent
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| adj.迫切的，坚持的 | |
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165
pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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166
philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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167
groans
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| n.呻吟，叹息( groan的名词复数 )；呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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168
ingenuity
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| n.别出心裁；善于发明创造 | |
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169
musing
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| n. 沉思，冥想 adj. 沉思的, 冥想的 动词muse的现在分词形式 | |
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170
addicted
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| adj.沉溺于....的，对...上瘾的 | |
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171
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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172
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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173
vertiginous
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| adj.回旋的；引起头晕的 | |
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174
eminence
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| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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175
vouchsafed
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| v.给予，赐予( vouchsafe的过去式和过去分词 )；允诺 | |
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176
permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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177
propitious
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| adj.吉利的；顺利的 | |
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178
gambling
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| n.赌博；投机 | |
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179
extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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180
portents
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| n.预兆( portent的名词复数 )；征兆；怪事；奇物 | |
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181
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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182
devious
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| adj.不坦率的，狡猾的；迂回的，曲折的 | |
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183
consummate
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| adj.完美的；v.成婚；使完美 [反]baffle | |
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184
sifted
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| v.筛( sift的过去式和过去分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审 | |
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185
portico
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| n.柱廊，门廊 | |
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186
anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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187
rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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188
dedication
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| n.奉献，献身，致力，题献，献辞 | |
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189
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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190
piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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191
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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192
commonwealths
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| n.共和国( commonwealth的名词复数 )；联邦；团体；协会 | |
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193
diurnally
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| adv.白天活动地 | |
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194
presumptuous
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| adj.胆大妄为的，放肆的，冒昧的，冒失的 | |
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195
emulation
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| n.竞争；仿效 | |
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196
snail
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| n.蜗牛 | |
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197
consistency
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|
| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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198
morsel
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| n.一口，一点点 | |
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pate
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| n.头顶；光顶 | |
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beatific
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| adj.快乐的，有福的 | |
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detraction
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| n.减损；诽谤 | |
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202
legitimately
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| ad.合法地；正当地，合理地 | |
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overflowing
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| n. 溢出物,溢流 adj. 充沛的，充满的 动词overflow的现在分词形式 | |
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wedded
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| adj.正式结婚的；渴望…的，执著于…的v.嫁，娶，（与…）结婚( wed的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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205
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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modesty
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| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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immersion
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| n.沉浸；专心 | |
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exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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credentials
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| n.证明，资格，证明书，证件 | |
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retrace
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| v.折回；追溯，探源 | |
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ignobly
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| 卑贱地，下流地 | |
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divination
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| n.占卜，预测 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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conspiring
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| 密谋( conspire的现在分词 )； 搞阴谋； （事件等）巧合； 共同导致 | |
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license
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| n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许 | |
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orientate
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| v.给…定位；使适应 | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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stimulated
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| a.刺激的 | |
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ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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contingencies
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| n.偶然发生的事故，意外事故( contingency的名词复数 )；以备万一 | |
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bristling
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| a.竖立的 | |
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refinement
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| n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼 | |
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murmurous
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| adj.低声的 | |
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rustle
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| v.沙沙作响；偷盗(牛、马等)；n.沙沙声声 | |
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scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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resounding
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| adj. 响亮的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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biding
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| v.等待，停留( bide的现在分词 )；居住；（过去式用bided）等待；面临 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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droll
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| adj.古怪的，好笑的 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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flicker
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| vi./n.闪烁，摇曳，闪现 | |
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