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By Root 17454 0

– as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn’t always meet all contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt – the expression of the fine pang determined in her a few hours before – rise after a time to her lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion’s intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all. ‘What is it after all that they want to do to you?’ ‘They’ were for the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs Rance was the symbol, and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what she meant. What she meant – when once she had spoken – could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: ‘What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered.’ He accepted equally for the time this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it wouldn’t so much matter if he hadn’t been so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went on to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have had to wait long – if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was a way. ‘Since you are an irresistible youth we’ve got to face it. That’s somehow what that woman has made me feel. There’ll be others.’

4

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 wouldn’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 wasn’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 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