vernacular. Miss Verver had told him he spoke English too well--
it was his only fault, and he had not been able to speak worse
even to oblige her. "When I speak worse, you see, I speak
French," he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him
know, as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so
dreamed of making good, of making better; to say nothing of his
evident feeling that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not
a person to rise to. The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial,
charming, like every answer the parties to his new arrangement
had yet had from him--was that he was practising his American in
order to converse properly, on equal terms as it were, with Mr.
Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of it, he
said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the
observation that positively, of all his observations yet, had
most finely touched her.

"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There
are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man
I've ever seen in my life."

"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily
inquired.

It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The
things, or many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was
seemed practically to bring a charge of waste against the other
things that, with the other people known to the young man, had