esty, to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if
this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put
it before him. She had thereby forborne to call his attention to
her consciousness that such an exposure would, in all probability,
straightway have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact,
for the moment, hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver's delicacy (as
she supposed they must call it); and that her position, in the matter of
responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight.

For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured allowance, had
originally much helped him--helped him in the sense of there not
being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of which it was just this
accessory element that seemed, at present, with wonders of patience,
to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else,
separations, delays and intervals; but it was troublesomely less of
an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the
question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of
being married than he had, on the whole, expected; less, strangely, for
the state of being married even as he was married. And there was a
logic in the matter, he knew; a logic that but gave this truth a sort
of solidity of evidence. Mr. Verver, decidedly, helped him with it--with
his wedded condition; helped him really so much that it made all the
difference. In the degree in which he rendered it the service on Mr.
Verver's part was remarkable--as indeed what service, from the first
of their meeting, had not been? He was living, he had been living these
four or five years, on Mr. Verver's services: a truth scarcely less
plain if he dealt with them, for appreciation, one by one, than if he
poured them all together into the general pot of his gratitude and let
the thing simmer to a nourishing broth. To the latter way with them he
was undoubtedly most disposed; yet he would even thus, on occasion, pick
out a piece to taste on its own merits. Wondrous at such hours could
seem the savour of the particular "treat," at his father-in-law's
expense, that he more and more struck himself as enjoying. He had
needed months and months to arrive at a full appreciation--he couldn't
originally have given offhand a name to his deepest obligation; but by
the time the name had flowered in his mind he was practically living at
the ease guaranteed him. Mr. Verver then, in a word, took c