moment to say. "I'm not talking of you as a public
character--I'm talking of you on your personal side."

"Well, American City--if 'personalities' can do it--has given me a
pretty personal side. What do you make," he went on, "of what I've done
for my reputation?"

"Your reputation THERE? You've given it up to them, the awful people,
for less than nothing; you've given it up to them to tear to pieces, to
make their horrible vulgar jokes against you with."

"Ah, my dear, I don't care for their horrible vulgar jokes," Adam Verver
almost artlessly urged.

"Then there, exactly, you are!" she triumphed. "Everything that
touches you, everything that surrounds you, goes on--by your splendid
indifference and your incredible permission--at your expense."

Just as he had been sitting he looked at her an instant longer; then
he slowly rose, while his hands stole into his pockets, and stood there
before her. "Of course, my dear, YOU go on at my expense: it has never
been my idea," he smiled, "that you should work for your living. I
wouldn't have liked to see it." With which, for a little again, they
remained face to face. "Say therefore I HAVE had the feelings of a
father. How have they made me a victim?"

"Because I sacrifice you."

"But to what in the world?"

At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her
opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as in a vise, her
impression of his now, with his strained smile, which touched her to
deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest. This was the moment,
in the whole process of their mutual vigilance, in which it decidedly
most hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the
lightest wrong touch. It shook between them, this transparency, with
their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame,
and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too
hard. She held her breath, for she knew by his eyes, the light at the
heart of which he couldn't blind, that he was, by his intention, making
sure--sure whether or no her certainty was like his. The intensity of
his dependence on it at that moment--this itself was what absolutely
convinced her so that, as if perched up before him on her vertiginous
point and in the very glare of his observation, she balanced for thirty
seconds, she almost rocked: she might have been for the time, in all her
conscious person, the very form of the equilibrium they were, i