se it didn't shy at a
traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines
without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little, thus,
from month to month, the Prince was learning what his wife's father
had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off--he had been
brought, up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought
it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr.
Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt
that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive
side. He didn't know--he was learning, and it was funny for him--to
how many things he HAD been brought up. If the Prince could only strike
something to which he hadn't! This wouldn't, it seemed to him, ruffle
the smoothness, and yet MIGHT, a little, add to the interest.

What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was
their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together--at any
cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them
out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends
were gathered, and cause them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along
a covered walk in the "old" garden, as it was called, old with an
antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of
brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out
of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it,
1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before them
a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the greenness,
through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest trees
spaciously clustered and where they would find one of the quietest
places. A bench had been placed, long ago, beneath a great oak that
helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to
rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude
and figure a bosky horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and
the low sun made a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade;
Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as, over
her charming bare head, she now handled it, gave, with the big straw
hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped
back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was
"sequestered"--they had praised it for that together, before, and liked
the w