Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/277

THE PRINCESS 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 267