red from her in silence. He looked about
in his small despair; he crossed the hotel court, which, overarched and
glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights,
heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs,
exotic ladies in chairs, the general exotic accent and presence
suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior,
the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some
critical apartment of large capacity, some "dental," medical, surgical
waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for
gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences
and redundancies of barbarism. He went as far as the porte-cochere,
took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even, somehow,
just here, by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to
Charlotte. "It is incredible to you that when a man is still as much in
love as Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife
feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?--in the
absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing." The manner
of it operated--she acknowledged with no great delay this natural
possibility. "No--nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in
love."

"Well, isn't Amerigo immensely in love?"

She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the
degree--but she after all adopted Mr. Verver's. "Immensely."

"Then there you are!"

She had another smile, however--she wasn't there quite yet. "That isn't
all that's wanted."

"But what more?"

"Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that SHE really
believes." With which Charlotte became still more lucidly logical. "The
reality of his belief will depend in such a case on the reality of hers.
The Prince may for instance now," she went on, "have made out to his
satisfaction that Maggie may mainly desire to abound in your sense,
whatever it is you do. He may remember that he has never seen her do
anything else."

"Well," said Adam Verver, "what kind of a warning will he have found in
that? To what catastrophe will he have observed such a disposition in
her to lead?"

"Just to THIS one!" With which she struck him as rising straighter and
clearer before him than she had done even yet.

"Our little question itself?" Her appearance had in fact, at the moment,
such an effect on him that he could answer but in marvelling