He was polyglot himself, for that matter--as was the case too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom more than for himself was it anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting on her lips that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers--a few, and mostly men--who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte's almost mystifying instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their acquaintance, she had made no display of it, quite as if English, between them, his English so matching with hers, were their inevitable medium. (55) He had perceived all by accident--by hearing her talk before him to somebody else--that they had an alternative as good; an alternative in fact as much better as the amusement for him was greater in watching her for the slips that never came. Her account of the mystery did n't suffice: her recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents, from the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt generation, demoralised falsified polyglot well before her, with the Tuscan balia who was her first remembrance; the servants of the villa, the dear contadini of the podere, the little girls and the other peasants of the next podere, all the rather shabby but still ever so pretty human furniture of her early time, including the good sisters of the poor convent of the Tuscan hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything else, but prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened and as a smaller girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five. Such reminiscences naturally gave a ground, but they had n't prevented him from insisting that some strictly civil ancestor--generations back, and from the Tuscan hills if she would--made himself felt ineffaceably in her blood and in her tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she had taken his theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little presents that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all melted together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned, not unnaturally, in the next thing, in the nature of a surmise, that his (56) discretion let him articulate. "You have n't, I rather gather, particularly liked your country?" They would stick for the time to their English.
"It does n't, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it does n't in the least matter over there whether one likes it or not--that is to any one but one's self. But I did n't like it," said Charlotte Stant.
"That's not encouraging then to me, is it?" the Prince went on.
"Do you mean because you're going?"
"Oh yes, of course we're going. I've wanted immensely to go."
She waited. "But now?--immediately?"
"In a month or two--it seems to be the new idea." On which there was something in her face--as he imagined--that made him say: "Didn't Maggie write to you?"
"Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you must stay"--Charlotte was easily clear--"as long as possible."
"Is that what you did?" he laughed. "You stayed as long as possible?"
"Well, it seemed to me so--but I had n't 'interests.' You'll have them--on a great scale. It's the country for interests," said Charlotte. "If I had only had a few I doubtless would n't have left it."
He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. "Yours then are rather here?"
"Oh mine!"--the girl smiled. "They take up little room, wherever they are."
It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow did for her--it determined in (57) him a speech that would have seemed a few minutes before precarious and in questionable taste. The lead she had given him made the difference, and he felt it as really a lift on finding an honest and natural word rise, by its licence, to his lips. Nothing surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high bravery. "I've been thinking it all the while so probable, you know, that you would have seen your way to marrying."
She looked at him an instant, and during these seconds he feared for what he might have spoiled. "To marrying whom?"
"Why some good kind clever rich American."
Again his security hung in the balance--then she was, as he felt, admirable.
"I tried every one I came across. I did my best. I showed I had come, quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At any rate it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have me." Then she seemed to betray regret for his having to hear of her anything so disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it; if he was disappointed she would cheer him up. "Existence, you know, all the same, does n't depend on that. I mean," she smiled, "on having caught a husband."
"Oh--existence!" the Prince vaguely commented.
"You think I ought to argue for more than mere existence?" she asked.
"I don't see why my existence--even reduced as much as you like to being merely mine--should be so impossible. There are things of sorts I should be able to have--things I should be able to be. The position of a single woman to-day is very favourable, you know."
(58) "Favourable to what?"