第52章 Chapter 2(3)

Far below the plain American citizen--in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend's head moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there. His freedom to see--of which the comparisons were part--what could it do but steadily grow and grow?

It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for ALL freedom--since for example it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs. Rance's conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have (151) perhaps drawn our circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other licence of the present and the near future: the licence to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the licence to stop remembering for a little that though if proposed to--and not only by this aspirant but by any other--he would n't prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less in such a fashion rather cruelly conditioned; the licence in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression--this was the point--took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred, The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs.

Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were really not of a sort to be met by one's self And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, "I'm restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because I'm proud and refined; but if it WAS N'T for Mr. Rance and for my refinement and my pride!"--the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented many-paged letters, (152) of voices as to which, distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered little in what part of the resounding country they had learned to make themselves prevail. The Assinghams and the Miss Lutches had taken the walk, through the park, to the little old church, "on the property," that our friend had often found himself wishing he were able to transport, as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to one of his exhibitory halls; while Maggie had induced her husband, not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith--her own as it had been her mother's, and as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing always to let it be taken for HIS--without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage might n't have been acted out.