"No, it's his WAY. It belongs to him."

But she had wondered stil . "It's the American way. That's al ."

"Exactly--it's al . It's al , I say! It fits him--so it must be good for something."

"Do you think it would be good for you?" Maggie Verver had smilingly asked. To which his reply had been just of the happiest. "I don't feel, my dear, if you real y want to know, that anything much can now either hurt me or help me. Such as I am--but you'l see for yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomo--which I devoutly hope: I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volail e, with half the parts left out. Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His feathers, movements, his sounds--those are the parts that, with me, are left out."

"Al , as a matter of course--since you can't eat a chicken alive!" The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive. "Wel , I'm eating your father alive--which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it's when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn't make one like him so much in any other language." It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur--it was the mere play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in Chinese."

"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the tone--which has made him possible."

"Oh, you'l hear enough of it," she laughed, "before you've done with us." Only this, in truth, had made him frown a little.

"What do you mean, please, by my having 'done' with you?"

"Why, found out about us al there is to find."

He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. "Ah, love, I began with that. I know enough, I feel, never to be surprised. It's you yourselves meanwhile," he continued, "who real y know nothing. There are two parts The Legal Smal Print

9

of me"--yes, he had been moved to go on. "One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the fol ies, the boundless betises of other people--especial y of their infamous waste of money that might have come to me. Those things are written-literal y in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they're abominable. Everybody can get at them, and you've, both of you, wonderful y, looked them in the face. But there's another part, very much smal er doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown, unimportant, unimportant--unimportant save to YOU--personal quantity. About this you've found out nothing."

"Luckily, my dear," the girl had bravely said; "for what then would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?"

The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEAR--he couldn't cal it anything else--she had looked, in her prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. "The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history."

"Oh, I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that. "Cal it the bad part, if you like-yours certainly sticks out of you.