Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness--quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas.

The two noble persons seated, in conversation, at tea, fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs.Verver and the Prince fairly "placed" themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, esthetically, by such a scene.

The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though, to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase.

There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped?
"Le compte y est.

You've got some good things." Maggie met it afresh--"Ah, don't they look well ?" Their companions, at the sound of this, gave them, in a spacious intermission of slow talk, an attention, all of gravity, that was like an ampler submission to the general duty of magnificence; sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud.