ng 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."

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
hasn'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 ISN'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
doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you
are, in the 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?"

For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered: "It wasn'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 awhile a