What was it else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me original y think of you? It wasn't--as I should suppose you must have seen--what you cal your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the fol ies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste--the wicked Pope, the monster most of al , whom so many of the volumes in your family library are al about. If I've read but two or three yet, I shal give myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest. Where, therefore"--she had put it to him again--"without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?" He recal ed what, to this, he had gravely returned. "I might have been in a somewhat better pecuniary situation." But his actual situation under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that, having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had kept no impression of the girl's rejoinder. It had but sweetened the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one's bath aromatic. No one before him, never--not even the infamous Pope--had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how little one of his race could escape, after al , from history. What was it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colour--of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people's, was al suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts while he loitered--what he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. "You Americans are almost incredibly romantic."

"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us."

"Everything?" He had wondered.

"Wel , everything that's nice at al . The world, the beautiful, world--or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."

He had looked at her a moment--and he wel knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: "You see too much--that's what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don't, at least," he had amended with a further thought,

"see too little." But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless. He had seen the fol ies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no fol ies in theirs--nothing, The Legal Smal Print 10

one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectful y submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad--that is as good--as herself.

"Oh, he's better," the girl had freely declared "that is he's worse. His relation to the things he cares for--and I think it beautiful--is absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over here-it's the most romantic thing I know."

"You mean his idea for his native place?"

"Yes--the col ection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. It's the work of his life and the motive of everything he does." The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again-smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her.

"Has it been his motive in letting me have you?"

"Yes, my dear, positively--or in a manner," she had said.

"American City isn't, by the way, his native town, for, though he's not old, it's a young thing compared with him--a younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. You're at any rate a part of his col ection," she had explained--"one of the things that can only be got over here. You're a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price.