THE PRINCE
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 didn'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 hadn'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, of the nature of a surmise, that his
55
