acilities and amiabilities
amplified by the social legend, depended, for conveying the effect of
quantity, on no personal "equation," no mere measurable medium. Quantity
was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver's estimable quality
was almost wholly in that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and
clearbrowed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed
without defiance; his shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high,
his complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not covered;
in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of his table, so nearly
like a little boy shyly entertaining in virtue of some imposed rank,
that he COULD only be one of the powers, the representative of a
force--quite as an infant king is the representative of a dynasty. In
this generalised view of his father-in-law, intensified to-night but
always operative, Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. The
refuge, after the reunion of the two households in England, had more and
more offered itself as the substitute for communities, from man to man,
that, by his original calculation, might have become possible, but
that had not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family eyes
across the table, met them afterwards in the music-room, but only to
read in them still what he had learned to read during his first months,
the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of apprehension in which
the terms and conditions were finally fixed and absolute. This directed
regard rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated,
and was, to the Prince's fancy, much of the same order as any glance
directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a
cheque received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a
banker. It made sure of the amount--and just so, from time to time,
the amount of the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed
instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a
value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite
endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the
young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all,
had not fixed it--the "figure" was a conception all of Mr. Verver's own.
Certainly, however, everything must be kept up to it; never so much as
to-night had the Prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable, as
these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been