ouldn't care to attempt to tell her now."

The Colonel smoked on it. "She'd be so scandalised?"

"She'd be so frightened. She'd be, in her strange little way, so hurt.
She wasn't born to know evil. She must never know it." Bob Assingham had
a queer grim laugh; the sound of which, in fact, fixed his wife before
him. "We're taking grand ways to prevent it."

But she stood there to protest. "We're not taking any ways. The ways are
all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage
that day in Villa Borghese--the second or third of her days in Rome,
when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr. Verver, and the
Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea.
They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the
rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I
recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's
greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a streetcorner as we
passed, that one of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used
for him among his relations, was Amerigo: which (as you probably don't
know, however, even after a lifetime of ME), was the name, four hundred
years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea,
in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in
becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the
thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless
breasts."

The Colonel's grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his
wife's not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land
of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even
at the present moment not directly lighted by an inquiry that managed to
be curious without being apologetic. "But where does the connection come
in?"

His wife was prompt. "By the women--that is by some obliging woman,
of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe
discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to
as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great--great
enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator,
crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among
them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My
point is, at any rate, that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince
was, from the start, helped with the