rd?--the same 'concern.' We're
certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal
acquaintances. We're in the same boat"--and the Prince smiled with a
candour that added an accent to his emphasis.

Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it
caused her to turn for a moment's refuge to a corner of her general
consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE
wasn't in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was
embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she
could say, what she felt and what she could show. "It only appears to
me of great importance that--now that you all seem more settled
here--Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further
circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband's wife;
known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don't know what
you mean by the 'same' boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver's
boat."

"And, pray, am _I_ not in Mr. Verver's boat too? Why, but for Mr.
Verver's boat, I should have been by this time"--and his quick Italian
gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed
to deepest depths--"away down, down, down." She knew of course what he
meant--how it had taken his father-in-law's great fortune, and taken no
small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally
weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with
this reminder other things came to her--how strange it was that, with
all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so
inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high,
and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which,
for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in
them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking,
feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure
SHE could take in this specimen of the class didn't suffer from his
consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those
pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN'T suffer, to
whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all
visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services
rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly--but it had been up to now her
conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the
beauty well