ent from me--you had the same one you always
had."

"And THEN I asked you," her father concurred, "why in that case you
hadn't the same."

"Then indeed you did." He had brought her face round to him before, and
this held it, covering him with its kindled brightness, the result of
the attested truth of their being able thus, in talk, to live again
together. "What I replied was that I had lost my position by my
marriage. THAT one--I know how I saw it--would never come back. I had
done something TO it--I didn't quite know what; given it away, somehow,
and yet not, as then appeared, really got my return. I had been
assured--always by dear Fanny--that I COULD get it, only I must wake up.
So I was trying, you see, to wake up--trying very hard."

"Yes--and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me. But
you made much," he said, "of your difficulty." To which he added:
"It's the only case I remember, Mag, of you ever making ANYTHING of a
difficulty."

She kept her eyes on him a moment. "That I was so happy as I was?"

"That you were so happy as you were."

"Well, you admitted"--Maggie kept it up--"that that was a good
difficulty. You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful."

He thought a moment. "Yes--I may very well have confessed it, for so it
did seem to me." But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile.
"What do you want to put on me now?"

"Only that we used to wonder--that we were wondering then--if our life
wasn't perhaps a little selfish." This also for a time, much at his
leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed. "Because Fanny Assingham
thought so?"

"Oh no; she never thought, she couldn't think, if she would, anything
of that sort. She only thinks people are sometimes fools," Maggie
developed; "she doesn't seem to think so much about their being
wrong--wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked. She doesn't," the
Princess further adventured, "quite so much mind their being wicked."

"I see--I see." And yet it might have been for his daughter that he
didn't so very vividly see. "Then she only thought US fools?"

"Oh no--I don't say that. I'm speaking of our being selfish."

"And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?"

"Oh, I don't say she CONDONES--!" A scruple in Maggie raised its crest.
"Besides, I'm speaking of what was."

Her father showed, however, after a little, that he had not been reached
by this discrimination; his thoughts were resti