d 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
reigning 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 eminent "pieces" in gold, in silver, in
enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied
themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and
appreciation, so engaged all the faculties 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 aspirant 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 thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately 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 connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of
his reading, been struck with Keats's sonnet about stout Cortez in the
presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly
fitted the poet's grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted 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 immortal
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 gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive
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 inert had moved at a touch and, ea