"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"

"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
sooner."

"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."

"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."

She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"

He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"

"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not
accepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such
cases? Not taking up the bequest."

"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My
asking you to join with me in doing so."

Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her
less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"

"How? By a single word."

"And what word?"

"Your consent to my giving up."

"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."

"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.

She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I
_don't_ consent?"

"Yes. I do nothing."

"That, as I understand, is accepting."

Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."

"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."

"I won't touch the money."

It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
"Who then in such an event _will?_"

"Any one who wants or who can."

Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
you?"

"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
you."

"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."

"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.

"In what way?"

"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
you 'have' me."

"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
thoroughly up to it!"

"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that t