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

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 your own. Whatever you might feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them. If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend’s dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black “cut away” coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white⁠—the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a sprigged blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waistcoat. “Should you really,” he now asked, “like me to marry?” He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it might be an idea; which, for that matter, he would be ready to carry out should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth, in the connection, to utter. “What I feel is that there is somehow something that used to be right and that I’ve made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn’t married, and that you didn’t seem to want to. It used also”⁠—she continued to make out “to seem easy for the question not to come up. That’s what I’ve made different. It does come up. It will come up.”

“You don’t think I can keep it down?” Mr. Verver’s tone was cheerfully pensive.

“Well, I’ve given you, by my move, all the trouble of having to.”

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. “I guess I don’t feel as if you had ‘moved’ very far. You’ve only moved next door.”

“Well,” she continued, “I don’t feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I’ve made the difference for you, I must think of the difference.”

“Then what, darling,” he indulgently asked, “do you think?”

“That’s just what I don’t yet know. But I must find out. We must think together⁠—as we’ve always thought. What I mean,” she went on after a moment, “is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you.”

“An alternative to what?”

“Well, to your simply missing what you’ve lost⁠—without anything being done about it.”

“But what have I lost?”

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. “Well, whatever it was that, before, kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I’m married to someone else you’re, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to them.”

“Isn’t it enough of a reason,” he mildly inquired, “that I don’t want to be?”

“It’s enough of a reason, yes. But to be enough of a reason it has to be too much of a trouble. I mean for you. It has to be too much of a fight. You ask me what you’ve lost,” Maggie continued to explain. “The not having to take the trouble and to make the fight⁠—that’s what you’ve lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were⁠—because I was just as I was⁠—that’s what you miss.”

“So that you think,” her father presently said, “that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?”

The detached tone of it⁠—detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate⁠—was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short, light laugh. “Well, what I don’t want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn’t understand. I should understand. That’s all,” said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. “You don’t go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don’t like?”

“Ah, father,” she sighed, “you know how far I go⁠—how far I could go. But I only wish that if you ever should like anybody, you may never doubt of my feeling how I’ve brought you to it. You’ll always know that I know that it’s my fault.”

“You mean,” he went on in his contemplative way, “that it will be you who’ll take the consequences?”

Maggie just considered. “I’ll leave you all the