exactly what we wanted?" She just hesitated,
then felt herself steady--oh, beyond what she had dreamed. "Exactly what
_I_ wanted--yes."

His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he
might, with his intenser fixed smile, have been knowing she was, for
herself, rightly inspired. "What do you make then of what I wanted?"

"I don't make anything, any more than of what you've got. That's exactly
the point. I don't put myself out to do so--I never have; I take from
you all I can get, all you've provided for me, and I leave you to make
of your own side of the matter what you can. There you are--the rest is
your own affair. I don't even pretend to concern myself--!"

"To concern yourself--?" He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking
about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

"With what may have REALLY become of you. It's as if we had agreed
from the first not to go into that--such an arrangement being of course
charming for ME. You can't say, you know, that I haven't stuck to it."

He didn't say so then--even with the opportunity given him of her
stopping once more to catch her breath. He said instead: "Oh, my
dear--oh, oh!"

But it made no difference, know as she might what a past--still so
recent and yet so distant--it alluded to; she repeated her denial,
warning him off, on her side, from spoiling the truth of her contention.
"I never went into anything, and you see I don't; I've continued to
adore you--but what's that, from a decent daughter to such a father?
what but a question of convenient arrangement, our having two houses,
three houses, instead of one (you would have arranged for fifty if I
had wished!) and my making it easy for you to see the child? You don't
claim, I suppose, that my natural course, once you had set up for
yourself, would have been to ship you back to American City?"

These were direct inquiries, they quite rang out, in the soft, wooded
air; so that Adam Verver, for a minute, appeared to meet them with
reflection. She saw reflection, however, quickly enough show him what
to do with them. "Do you know, Mag, what you make me wish when you talk
that way?" And he waited again, while she further got from him the
sense of something that had been behind, deeply in the shade, coming
cautiously to the front and just feeling its way before presenting
itself. "You regularly make me wish that I had shipped back to American
City. When you go on as you do--" Bu