Little by little, thus, from month to month, the Prince was learning what his wife's father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off--he had been brought, up to the romantic view of principini.

Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop?
The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr.
Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness.

He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side.

He didn't know--he was learning, and it was funny for him--to how many things he HAD been brought up.

If the Prince could only strike something to which he hadn't! This wouldn't, it seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet MIGHT, a little, add to the interest.
What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together--at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the "old" garden, as it was called, old with an antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink.