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Verver's reply; yet uttered in so explicitly jocose a relation to the possibilities of failure that even when, just afterwards, he wandered in his impatience to one of the long windows and passed out to the balcony, she asked herself but for a few seconds if reality, should she follow him, would overtake or meet her there.
And the beauty," she explained, "is that they're afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others." "For Mr. Verver and Maggie?" It did take some following. "Afraid of what?" "Afraid of themselves." The Colonel wondered. "Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver's and Maggie's selves?" Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. "Yes of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger."
Verver's boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver's boat, I should have been by this time" and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths "away down, down, down."
Verver's not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying had become marked in her.
"Oh, isn't what I may have meddled 'for' so far as it can be proved I did meddle open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver's and Maggie's? Mayn't they see my motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?" She positively liked to keep it up.
"She would have liked for instance I'm sure she would have liked extremely to marry; and nothing in general is more ridiculous, even when it has been pathetic, than a woman who has tried and has not been able." It had all Mr. Verver's attention. "She has 'tried' ?" "She has seen cases where she would have liked to." "But she has not been able?"
He was being thus, in renewed instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all, had not fixed it the "figure" was a conception all of Mr. Verver's own.
What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn't do he must MAKE something different. He perfectly recognised always in his humility that the material for the making had to be Mr. Verver's millions.
Verver's face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced them and as if also to bring out at last, under pressure, something she had all the while been keeping back she took a jump to pure plain reason. "You haven't noticed for yourself, but I can't quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume WE assume, if you like Maggie wires her joy only to you.
It is not even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince's spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver's too perfect competence.
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