ess.
"Why SHOULD you hold out forever?"

He gave, none the less, no start--and this as from the habit of taking
anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious. But it was quite
written upon him too, for that matter, that holding out wouldn't be,
so very completely, his natural, or at any rate his acquired, form.
His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long
time--for a man so greatly beset. This appearance, that is, spoke but
little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses--and all in
spite of his being a small, spare, slightly stale person, deprived of
the general prerogative of presence. It was not by mass or weight or
vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than
he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail. There was even
something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his
relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the
stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the
footlights. He would have figured less than anything the stage-manager
or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be,
at the best, the financial "backer," watching his interests from the
wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry.
Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed
propriety of his greater stoutness. He had lost early in life much of
his crisp, closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a
small neat beard, too compact to be called "full," though worn equally,
as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and
chin. His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable
features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was CLEAR,
and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept
and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage,
as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and
uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver's eyes that both
admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the
modest area the outward extension of a view that was "big" even when
restricted to stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically
large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their
ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor's
vision out or most opened themselves to