only for him--and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost
sublimely--that their being "nice," her mother and she between them,
had _not_ seemed to profit by their being so furiously handsome.

This had, ever so grossly and ever so tiresomely, satisfied every one
else; since every one had thrust upon them, had imposed upon them, as
by a great cruel conspiracy, their silliest possibilities; fencing
them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but
mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to
see they didn't escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through
the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and
apples--as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior
sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil
French to strike her as willing to let go, so to speak, a pound or two
of this fatal treasure if he might only have got in exchange for it
an ounce or so more of their so much less obvious and Jess published
personal history. Yes, it described him to say that, in addition to
all the rest of him, and of _his_ personal history, and of his family,
and of theirs, in addition to their social posture, as that of a
serried phalanx, and to their notoriously enormous wealth and crushing
respectability, she might have been ever so much less lovely for him
if she had been only--well, a little prepared to answer questions. And
it wasn't as if quiet, cultivated, earnest, public-spirited, brought
up in Germany, infinitely travelled, awfully like a high-caste
Englishman, and all the other pleasant things, it wasn't as if he
didn't love to be with her, to look at her, just as she was; for he
loved it exactly as much, so far as that footing simply went, as any
free and foolish youth who had ever made the last demonstration of
it. It was that marriage was, for him--and for them all, the serried
Frenches--a great matter, a goal to which a man of intelligence, a