The Golden Bowl | Page 4

the ancient state than any they have
left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the
world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London much more
than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it
was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished,
as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was
on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park
Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of
his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are
concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough,
into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively
short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which
objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which
precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a
hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the
insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories. The
young man's movements, however, betrayed no consistency of
attention--not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had
proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the

pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under
the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias.
And the Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since,
though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the streets
begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were
still one of the notes of the scene. He was too restless--that was the
fact--for any concentration, and the last idea that would just now have
occurred to him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.
He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before, and
what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the sense of how
he had been justified. Capture had crowned the pursuit--or success, as
he would otherwise have put it, had rewarded virtue; whereby the
consciousness of these things made him, for the hour, rather serious
than gay. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his
handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time
oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue
eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be
observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a "refined"
Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o'clock,
his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended
to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a
crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was
nothing to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our
personage felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he
were married, so definitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled
the date to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He
was to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady on whose
behalf, and on whose father's, the London lawyers had reached an
inspired harmony with his own man of business, poor Calderoni, fresh
from Rome and now apparently in the wondrous situation of being
"shown London," before promptly leaving it again, by Mr. Verver
himself, Mr. Verver whose easy way with his millions had taxed to
such small purpose, in the arrangements, the principle of reciprocity.
The reciprocity with which the Prince was during these minutes most
struck was that of Calderoni's bestowal of his company for a view of

the lions. If there was one thing in the world the young man, at this
juncture, clearly intended, it was to be much more decent as a
son-in-law than lots of fellows he could think of had shown themselves
in that character. He thought of these fellows, from whom he was so to
differ, in English; he used, mentally, the English term to describe his
difference, for, familiar with the tongue from his earliest years, so that
no note of strangeness remained with him either for lip or for ear, he
found it convenient, in life, for the greatest number of relations. He
found it convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself--though
not unmindful that there might still, as time went on, be others,
including a more intimate degree of that one, that would