The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval1, a certain persistent2 aftertaste. This was the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham’s hand after dinner, while the clustered quartette kept their ranged companions, in the music-room, moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham contrived3, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved — by the genius of Brahms — beyond what she could bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated away, at the young man’s side, to such a distance as permitted them to converse4 without the effect of disdain5. It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms — it was their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered6 sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie7 his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere8 matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring — in a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness — these independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly9 but distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly10 that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness11 itself had appeared to explain — which had introduced, in turn, a slight awkwardness. “Do you know that they’re not, after all, going to Matcham; so that, if they don’t — if, at least, Maggie doesn’t — you won’t, I suppose, go by yourself?” It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined12. He had paid, first and last, many an English country visit; he had learned, even from of old, to do the English things, and to do them, all sufficiently13, in the English way; if he didn’t always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to an appearance, as the good people who had, in the night of time, unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised them; yet, with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns14 the trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical, life; the determined need, which apparently15 all participant, of returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front — in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing, of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly climax16 over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling17 tray; it met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression. Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own people — or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else — that he moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous whole.
“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed18 of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental19 as to make his identity not complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket. The Prince’s shining star may, no doubt, having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety20; but whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of sight — amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery21 of thought. Something had rather momentously22 occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old friend: his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on — and he could scarce have said why — a sharpness of importance: she had never lied to him before — if only because it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly23, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the question of what he would do — by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do — in that event of Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying24 had become marked in her. Betrayed by the solicitude25 of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a view, she had been obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly, a reason for her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he had on the spot, in his friendliness26, invented one for her use, presenting it to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up, to hand back to her, a dropped flower. “You ask if I’m likely also to back out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel decide?”— he had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting27 her to assent28, though not having had his impression, from any indication offered him by Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question for the large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe29 themselves on the golden roll; an exertion30 of a sort that, to do her justice, he had never before observed Fanny to make. This last passage of the chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she would.
Once launched, himself, at any rate, as he had been directed by all the terms of the intercourse31 between Portland Place and Eaton Square, once steeped, at Matcham, in the enjoyment32 of a splendid hospitality, he found everything, for his interpretation33, for his convenience, fall easily enough into place; and all the more that Mrs. Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with. The great house was full of people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible propinquity, and no appearance, of course, was less to be cultivated than that of his having sought an opportunity to foregather with his friend at a safe distance from their respective sposi. There was a happy boldness, at the best, in their mingling34 thus, each unaccompanied, in the same sustained sociability35 — just exactly a touch of that eccentricity36 of associated freedom which sat so lightly on the imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as much as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should, at such a rate, go about together — though, on the other hand, this consideration drew relief from the fact that, in their high conditions and with the easy tradition, the almost inspiring allowances, of the house in question, no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced anything more than funny. Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider — looking as it did well over the heads of all lower growths; and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated37 party to the general alliance. What anyone “thought” of anyone else — above all of anyone else with anyone else — was a matter incurring38 in these lulls39 so little awkward formulation that hovering40 judgment41, the spirit with the scales, might perfectly42 have been imaged there as some rather snubbed and subdued43, but quite trained and tactful poor relation, of equal, of the properest, lineage, only of aspect a little dingy44, doubtless from too limited a change of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious45 presence, never betrayed by a rattle46 of her rusty47 machine, a room in the attic48 and a plate at the side-table were decently usual. It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again, to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied49, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality50 and humility51 among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn’t bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually52 kept by him, the irritation53 and depression to which promiscuous54 visiting, even at pompous55 houses, had been found to expose him. That was all right, the noted56 working harmony of the clever son-inlaw and the charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess.
What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty57, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience58, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence59 of fortune and appetite so diffused60 among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity61 and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque62 in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities63 and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance64 of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate65, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant66, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand — to that the thing came back — was above all for courage and good-humour; and the value of this as a general assurance — that is for seeing one through at the worst — had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent67 horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous68 unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet69 in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns — which was much to the point — in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive70 ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid71 result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom72 of his wife, at so contented73 a view of his conduct and course — a state of mind that was positively74 like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity75 of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony76 became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself. It wasn’t that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything monstrous77, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they said, to “happen”; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity78 of “What indeed would THEY have made of it?” “They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping — so far as they ever consented to mope in monotonous79 Eaton Square, but placid80 too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of — whether beautifully or cynically81; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible82 to it. They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio.
The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled83 by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms — terms of conformity84 with the principles of Eaton Square — under which one had been so absurdly dedicated85. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation — deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety86. There were situations that were ridiculous, but that one couldn’t yet help, as for instance when one’s wife chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely87 here, however, was the difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual — yet to which, none the less, it would be too absurd that he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically88, with another woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic89 or incapable90 — this WAS a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one’s own handling. What was supremely91 grotesque, in fact, was the essential opposition92 of theories — as if a galantuomo, as HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything BUT blush to “go about” at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence93, the state of our primitive94 parents before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it — also as a man of the world — all merciful justice; but, assuredly, none the less, there was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration95 in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Wasn’t this consensus96 literally97 their only way not to be ungracious? It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them, during their auspicious98 visit, of an exquisite99 sense of complicity.
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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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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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contrived
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| adj.不自然的，做作的；虚构的 | |
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converse
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| vi.谈话，谈天，闲聊；adv.相反的，相反 | |
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disdain
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| n.鄙视，轻视；v.轻视，鄙视，不屑 | |
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sequestered
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| adj.扣押的；隐退的；幽静的；偏僻的v.使隔绝，使隔离( sequester的过去式和过去分词 )；扣押 | |
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underlie
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| v.位于...之下，成为...的基础 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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covertly
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| adv.偷偷摸摸地 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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abruptness
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| n. 突然，唐突 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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sojourns
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| n.逗留，旅居( sojourn的名词复数 ) | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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bristling
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| a.竖立的 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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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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subtlety
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| n.微妙，敏锐，精巧；微妙之处，细微的区别 | |
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embroidery
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| n.绣花，刺绣；绣制品 | |
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momentously
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intelligibly
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| adv.可理解地，明了地，清晰地 | |
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prying
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| adj.爱打听的v.打听，刺探（他人的私事）( pry的现在分词 )；撬开 | |
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solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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assent
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| v.批准，认可；n.批准，认可 | |
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inscribe
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| v.刻；雕；题写；牢记 | |
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exertion
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| n.尽力，努力 | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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mingling
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| adj.混合的 | |
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sociability
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| n.好交际，社交性，善于交际 | |
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eccentricity
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| n.古怪，反常，怪癖 | |
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domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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incurring
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| 遭受，招致，引起( incur的现在分词 ) | |
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lulls
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| n.间歇期（lull的复数形式）vt.使镇静，使安静（lull的第三人称单数形式） | |
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hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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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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subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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abstemious
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| adj.有节制的，节俭的 | |
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rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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rusty
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| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
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attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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geniality
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| n.和蔼，诚恳；愉快 | |
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humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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promiscuous
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| adj.杂乱的，随便的 | |
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pompous
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的；夸大的；豪华的 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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gusty
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| adj.起大风的 | |
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impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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maturity
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| n.成熟；完成；(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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ingenuities
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| 足智多谋，心灵手巧( ingenuity的名词复数 ) | |
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defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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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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gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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iridescent
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| adj.彩虹色的，闪色的 | |
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languorous
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| adj.怠惰的，没精打采的 | |
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trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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perceptive
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| adj.知觉的，有洞察力的，感知的 | |
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lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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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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perversity
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| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
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irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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hilarity
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| n.欢乐；热闹 | |
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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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placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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cynically
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| adv.爱嘲笑地，冷笑地 | |
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inaccessible
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| adj.达不到的，难接近的 | |
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ruffled
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| adj. 有褶饰边的, 起皱的 动词ruffle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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conformity
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| n.一致，遵从，顺从 | |
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dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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systematically
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| adv.有系统地 | |
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idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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commiseration
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| n.怜悯，同情 | |
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consensus
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| n.(意见等的)一致，一致同意，共识 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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auspicious
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| adj.吉利的；幸运的，吉兆的 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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