derstand meanwhile," he soon went on, "that, ready as you
are to see me through my collapse, you're not ready, or not AS ready,
to see me through my resistance? I've got to be a regular martyr before
you'll be inspired?"

She demurred at his way of putting it. "Why, if you like it, you know,
it won't BE a collapse."

"Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if
I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don't WANT to like
it. That is," he amended, "unless I feel surer I do than appears very
probable. I don't want to have to THINK I like it in a case when I
really shan't. I've had to do that in some cases," he confessed--"when
it has been a question of other things. I don't want," he wound up, "to
be MADE to make a mistake."

"Ah, but it's too dreadful," she returned, "that you should even have to
FEAR--or just nervously to dream--that you may be. What does that show,
after all," she asked, "but that you do really, well within, feel a
want? What does it show but that you're truly susceptible?"

"Well, it may show that"--he defended himself against nothing. "But it
shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we're
leading now, numerous and formidable."

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which,
however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular. "Do you
feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?"

"Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to
the same thing. I think she'd do anything."

"Oh well, I'd help you," the Princess said with decision, "as against
HER--if that's all you require. It's too funny," she went on before he
again spoke, "that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk
of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I'm bound to say, too
funny. The thing is," Maggie developed under this impression, "that I
don't think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don't
at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so
it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I'm sure, to Fanny
Assingham."

Mr. Verver-as if from due regard for these persons--considered a little.
"What life would they like us to lead?"

"Oh, it's not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together.
SHE thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater."

"Greater--?" He echoed it vaguely. "And Amerigo too, you say?"

"Ah yes"-her reply was prompt "but Amerigo doesn't mind. He do