She had a pause while he only smiled; then she said: “I don’t in the least want to lose sight of you. But even if I did I shouldn’t think it right.”
“Thank you for that—it’s what I needed of you. I’m sure, after all, that the more you’re with me the more I shall understand. It’s the only thing in the world I want. I’m excellent, I really think, all round—except that I’m stupid. I can do pretty well anything I SEE. But I’ve got to see it first.” And he pursued his demonstration. “I don’t in the least mind its having to be shown me—in fact I like that better. Therefore it is that I want, that I shall always want, your eyes. Through THEM I wish to look—even at any risk of their showing me what I mayn’t like. For then,” he wound up, “I shall know. And of that I shall never be afraid.”
She might quite have been waiting to see what he would come to, but she spoke with a certain impatience. “What on earth are you talking about?”
But he could perfectly say: “Of my real, honest fear of being ‘off’ some day, of being wrong, WITHOUT knowing it. That’s what I shall always trust you for—to tell me when I am. No—with you people it’s a sense. We haven’t got it—not as you have. Therefore—!” But he had said enough. “Ecco!” he simply smiled.
It was not to be concealed that he worked upon her, but of course she had always liked him. “I should be interested,” she presently remarked, “to see some sense you don’t possess.”
Well, he produced one on the spot. “The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I’ve of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the `lightning elevator’ in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it’s as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.”
“Trusting,” Mrs. Assingham smiled, “to get up some other way?”
“Yes—or not to have to get up at all. However,” he added, “I told you that at the beginning.”
“Machiavelli!” she simply exclaimed.
“You do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius. However, if you really believe I have his perversity you wouldn’t say it. But it’s all right,” he gaily enough concluded; “I shall always have you to come to.”