To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him. "Yes, there'll be others. But you'll see me through."
She hesitated. "Do you mean if you give in?"
"Oh no. Through my holding out."
Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness.
"Why SHOULD you hold out for ever?
He gave, none the less, no start--and this as from the habit of taking anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious. But it was quite written upon him too, for that matter, that holding out would n't be so very completely his natural or at any rate his acquired form. His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long time--for a man so greatly beset. This appearance, that is, spoke but little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses--and all in spite of his being a small spare slightly stale person, deprived of the general prerogative of presence. It was n't by mass or weight or vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail. There was even something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the footlights.
He would have figured less than anything (170) the stage-manager or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be at the best the financial "backer," watching his interests from the wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry. Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed propriety of his greater stoutness. He had lost early in life much of his crisp closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a small neat beard, too compact to be called "full," though worn equally, as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and chin. His neat colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was CLEAR, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver's eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was "big " even when restricted to the stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor's vision out or most opened themselves to your own. Whatever you might feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents say; so that on one side or the other you were never out of their range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight of you scarce knew what, either (171) before them or behind them. If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend's dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black "cutaway" coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white--the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a white-dotted blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waistcoat. "Should you really," he now asked, "like me to marry?" He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it might be an idea; which for that matter he would be ready to carry right straight out should she definitely say so.
Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth in the connexion to utter. "What I feel is that there's somehow something that used to be right and that I've made wrong. It used to be right that you had n't married and that you did n't seem to want to. It used also"--she continued to make out--"to seem easy for the question not to come up. That's what I've made different. It does come up. It WILL come up."
"You don't think I can keep it down?" Mr. Verver's tone was cheerfully pensive.
"Well, I've given you by MY move all the trouble of having to."
He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, (172) as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. "I guess I don't feel as if you had 'moved' very far. You've only moved next door."
"Well," she continued, "I don't feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I've made the difference for you I must think of the difference."
"Then what, darling," he indulgently asked, "DO you think?"
"That's just what I don't yet know. But I must find out. We must think together--as we've always thought. What I mean," she went on after a moment, "is that it strikes me I ought to at least offer you some alternative.
I ought to have worked one out for you."
"An alternative to what?"
"Well, to your simply missing what you've lost--without anything being done about it."
"But what HAVE I lost?"
She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. "Well, whatever it was that BEFORE kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you could n't be in the market when you were married to ME. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I'm married to some one else you're, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don't see why you should n't be married to THEM."
"Is n't it enough of a reason," he mildly enquired, "that I don't want to be?"