He was still reduced in fine to getting his rare moments with himself by feigning a cynicism. His real inability to maintain the pretence, however, had perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day--his acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter of an hour, of that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must reckon. A quarter of an hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, (129) usually got. Mrs.
Rance opened the door--more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more briskly on seeing him than he had been moved to do on seeing nobody. Then with force it came home to him that he HAD a week before definitely established a precedent. He did her at least that justice--it was a kind of justice he was always doing somebody. He had on the previous Sunday liked to stop at home and had exposed himself thereby to be caught in the act. To make this possible that is, Mrs. Rance had only had to like to do the same--the trick was so easily played. It had n't occurred to him to plan in any way for her absence--which would have destroyed somehow in principle the propriety of his own presence. If persons under his roof had n't a right not to go to church what became, for a fair mind, of his own right? His subtlest manoeuvre had been simply to change from the library to the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his daughter's, or the guest of the Miss Lutches--he scarce knew in which light to regard her--had then, and not unnaturally of course joined him. It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence would already have got itself enacted. She had spent the whole morning with him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back--thanks to her having been tepid about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a turn outside It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of subterfuge--almost as a form of disloyalty.
Yet what (130) was it she had in mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made, a patient punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly invited?--so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the MORE on one's conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the Middle West, were there as friends of Maggie's, friends of the earlier time; but Mrs. Rance was there--or at least had primarily appeared--only as a friend of the Miss Lutches.
This lady herself was not of the Middle West--she rather insisted on it--but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and most intimate States: he could n't remember which, though she insisted too on that. It was n't in him--we may say it for him--to go so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of her own; and this partly because she had struck him verily rather as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such connexion as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former.
His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted had he analysed, was in finding it so taken for granted (131) that as he had money he had force.
It pressed upon him hard and all round assuredly, this attribution of power.
Every one had need of one's power, whereas one's own need, at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it. The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the imputation of greed. The other, the constant imputation, that of being able to "do," would have no ground if he had n't been, to start with--this was the point--proveably luxurious. His lips somehow were closed--and by a spring connected moreover with the action of his eyes themselves. The latter showed him what he HAD done, showed him where he had come out; quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty, and the apex of which was a platform looking down, if one would, on the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half a dozen others.