The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

“Oh, I’m not talking about my husband!”

“Then whom, are you talking about?”

Both the retort and the rejoinder had come quicker than anything previously exchanged, and they were followed, on Maggie’s part, by a momentary drop. But she was not to fall away, and while her companion kept his eyes on her, while she wondered if he weren’t expecting her to name his wife then, with high hypocrisy, as paying for his daughter’s bliss, she produced something that she felt to be much better. “I’m talking about you.”

“Do you mean I’ve been your victim?”

“Of course you’ve been my victim. What have you done, ever done, that hasn’t been for me?”

“Many things; more than I can tell you⁠—things you’ve only to think of for yourself. What do you make of all that I’ve done for myself?”

“ ‘Yourself’?⁠—” She brightened out with derision.

“What do you make of what I’ve done for American City?”

It took her but a 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, in their different ways, equally trying to save. And they were saving it⁠—yes, they were, or at least she was: that was still the workable issue, she could say, as she felt her dizziness drop. She held herself hard; the thing was to be done, once for all, by her acting, now, where she stood. So much was crowded into so short a space that she knew already she was keeping her head. She had kept it by the warning of his eyes; she shouldn’t lose it again; she knew how and why, and if she had turned cold this was precisely what helped her. He had said to himself “She’ll break down and name Amerigo; she’ll say it’s to him she’s sacrificing me; and its by what that will give me⁠—with so many other things too⁠—that my suspicion will be clinched.” He was watching her lips, spying for the symptoms of the sound; whereby these symptoms had only to fail and he would have got nothing that she didn’t measure out to him as she gave it. She had presently in fact so recovered herself that she seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than he have made her name her husband. It was there before her that if she should so much as force him just not consciously to avoid saying “Charlotte, Charlotte” he would have given himself away. But to be sure of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing instant what they were both doing. He was doing what he had steadily been coming to; he was practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice⁠—he had read his way so into her best possibility; and where had she already, for weeks and days past, planted her feet if not on her acceptance of the offer? Cold indeed, colder and colder she turned, as she felt herself suffer this close personal vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken. That was her very certitude, the intensity of his pressure; for if something dreadful hadn’t happened there wouldn’t, for either of them, be these dreadful things to do. She had meanwhile, as well, the immense advantage that she could have named Charlotte without exposing herself⁠—as, for that matter, she was the next minute showing him.

“Why, I sacrifice you, simply, to everything and to everyone. I take the consequences of your