"Yes--and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me. But you made much," he said, "of your difficulty." To which he added: "It's the only case I remember, Mag, of your ever making ANYTHING of a difficulty."
She kept her eyes on him a moment. "That I was so happy as I was?"
"That you were so happy as you were."
"Well, you admitted"--Maggie kept it up--"that that was a good difficulty.
You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful."
(261) He thought a moment. "Yes--I may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me." But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile. "What do you want to put on me now?"
"Only that we used to wonder--that we were wondering then--if our life was n't perhaps a little selfish."
This also for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed. "Because Fanny Assingham thought so?"
"Oh no; she never thought, she could n't think, if she would, anything of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools," Maggie developed;
"she does n't seem to think so much about their being wrong--wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked. She does n't," the Princess further adventured, "quite so much mind their being wicked."
"I see--I see." And yet it might have been for his daughter that he did n't so very vividly see. "Then she only thought US fools?"
"Oh no--I don't say that. I'm speaking of our being selfish."
"And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?"
"Oh I don't say she CONDONES--!" A scruple in Maggie raised its crest.
"Besides, I'm speaking of what was."
Her father showed however, after a little, that he had n't been reached by this discrimination; his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled. "Look here, Mag," he said reflectively--"I ain't selfish.
I'll be blowed if I'm selfish." (262) Well, Maggie, if he WOULD talk of that, could also pronounce. "Then, father, I am."
"Oh shucks!" said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back. "I'll believe it," he presently added, "when Amerigo complains of you."
"Ah it's just he who's my selfishness. I'm selfish, so to speak, FOR him. I mean," she continued, "that he's my motive--in everything."
Well, her father could from experience fancy what she meant. "But has n't a girl a right to be selfish about her husband?"
"What I DON'T mean," she observed without answering, "is that I'm jealous of him. But that's his merit--it's not mine."
Her father again seemed amused at her. "You COULD BE--otherwise?"
"Oh how can I talk," she asked, "of 'otherwise'? It IS N'T, luckily for me, otherwise. If everything were different"--she further presented her thought--"of course everything WOULD be." And then again as if that were but half: "My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous--or are only jealous also a little, so that it does n't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all--why then you're beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down."
Mr. Verver listened as if he had nothing on these high lines to oppose.
"And that's the way YOU love?"
(263) For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered: "It was n't to talk about that. I do FEEL however beyond everything--and as a consequence of that, I dare say," she added with a turn to gaiety, "seem often not to know quite WHERE I am."
The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly or sinking otherwise than in play was impossible--something of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half-shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he in his day had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving. He sat a while as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time; yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed. Besides, who but himself really knew what HE, after all, had n't, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condition was keeping him at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. That could n't be fixed upon him as missing; since if it was n't personally floating, if it was n't even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way--for tasting the balm. It could pass further for knowing--for knowing that without (264) him nothing might have been: which would have been missing least of all. "I guess I've never been jealous," he finally remarked. And it said more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was intending; for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she could n't speak.
But she at last tried for one of them. "Oh it's you, father, who are what I call beyond everything. Nothing can pull YOU down."
He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy communion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity. He might have been seeing things to say and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back. So he settled on the merely obvious.
"Well then we make a pair. We're all right."
