even if he should have to say to me 'The
Golden Bowl is broken'?"

He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile. "Ah, if
anyone should WANT to smash it--!"

She laughed; she almost admired the little man's expression. "You mean
one could smash it with a hammer?"

"Yes; if nothing else would do. Or perhaps even by dashing it with
violence--say upon a marble floor."

"Oh, marble floors!" But she might have been thinking--for they were a
connection, marble floors; a connection with many things: with her old
Rome, and with his; with the palaces of his past, and, a little, of
hers; with the possibilities of his future, with the sumptuosities of
his marriage, with the wealth of the Ververs. All the same, however,
there were other things; and they all together held for a moment her
fancy. "Does crystal then break--when it IS crystal? I thought its
beauty was its hardness."

Her friend, in his way, discriminated. "Its beauty is its BEING crystal.
But its hardness is certainly, its safety. It doesn't break," he went
on, "like vile glass. It splits--if there is a split."

"Ah!"--Charlotte breathed with interest. "If there is a split." And
she looked down again at the bowl. "There IS a split, eh? Crystal does
split, eh?"

"On lines and by laws of its own."

"You mean if there's a weak place?"

For all answer, after an hesitation, he took the bowl up again, holding
it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the finest, sweetest
sound. "Where is the weak place?"

She then did the question justice. "Well, for ME, only the price. I'm
poor, you see--very poor. But I thank you and I'll think." The Prince,
on the other side of the shop-window, had finally faced about and, as
to see if she hadn't done, was trying to reach, with his eyes, the
comparatively dim interior. "I like it," she said--"I want it. But I
must decide what I can do."

The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself. "Well, I'll keep it for
you."

The small quarter-of-an-hour had had its marked oddity--this she felt
even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury aspects had again, in
their protest against the truth of her gathered impression, made her
more or less their own. Yet the oddity might have been registered as
small as compared to the other effect that, before they had gone much
further, she had, with her companion, to take account of. This latter
was simply the effect of their having, by some tacit logic, some queer
inevita