he word itself being romantic,
pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays where
handsome and ardent young men, in uniforms, tights, cloaks, high-boots,
had it, in soliloquies, ever on their lips; and the sense on the first
day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second
was over conduced already to make him say to his companion that they
must spend more than their mere night or two. At his ease on the ground
of what was before him he at all events definitely desired to be, and it
was strongly his impression that he was proceeding step by step. He was
acting--it kept coming back to that--not in the dark, but in the high
golden morning; not in precipitation, flurry, fever, dangers these of
the path of passion properly so called, but with the deliberation of a
plan, a plan that might be a thing of less joy than a passion, but that
probably would, in compensation for that loss, be found to have the
essential property, to wear even the decent dignity, of reaching further
and of providing for more contingencies. The season was, in local
parlance, "on," the elements were assembled; the big windy hotel, the
draughty social hall, swarmed with "types," in Charlotte's constant
phrase, and resounded with a din in which the wild music of gilded and
befrogged bands, Croatian, Dalmatian, Carpathian, violently exotic and
nostalgic, was distinguished as struggling against the perpetual popping
of corks. Much of this would decidedly have disconcerted our friends if
it hadn't all happened, more preponderantly, to give them the brighter
surprise. The noble privacy of Fawns had left them--had left Mr. Verver
at least--with a little accumulated sum of tolerance to spend on the
high pitch and high colour of the public sphere. Fawns, as it had been
for him, and as Maggie and Fanny Assingham had both attested, was out
of the world, whereas the scene actually about him, with the very sea a
mere big booming medium for excursions and aquariums, affected him as so
plump in the conscious centre that nothing could have been more complete
for representing that pulse of life which they had come to unanimity
at home on the subject of their advisedly not hereafter forgetting.
The pulse of life was what Charlotte, in her way, at home, had lately
reproduced, and there were positively current hours when it might have
been open to her companion to feel himself again indebted to her for
introductions. He had "broug