Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/272

THE GOLDEN BOWL Well, Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce. "Then, father, I am."

"Oh shucks!" said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back. "I'll believe it," he presently added, "when Amerigo complains of you."

"Ah it's just he who's my selfishness. I'm selfish, so to speak, for him. I mean," she continued, "that he's my motive—in everything."

Well, her father could from experience fancy what she meant. "But hasn't a girl a right to be selfish about her husband?"

"What I don't mean," she observed without answering, "is that I'm jealous of him. But that's his merit—it's not mine."

Her father again seemed amused at her. "You could be—otherwise?"

"Oh how can I talk," she asked, "of 'otherwise'? It isn't, luckily for me, otherwise. If everything were different "—she further presented her thought—"of course everything would be." And then again as if that were but half: "My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous—or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all—why then you're beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down."

Mr. Verver listened as if he had nothing on these high lines to oppose. "And that's the way you love?" 262