had been gathering while she waited. "Well, I would marry, I
think, to have something from you in all freedom."

PART SECOND

VII

Adam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to
open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedom--might have
been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The
justification of the push he had applied, however, and of the push,
equally sharp, that, to shut himself in, he again applied--the ground
of this energy was precisely that he might here, however briefly, find
himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other
unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked
opportunity to give an eye. The vast, square, clean apartment was
empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace
and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of
richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered
village and strong cloudshadow, which were, together, a thing to create
the sense, with everyone else at church, of one's having the world to
one's self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with
Mr. Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said,
for solitude, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through
tortuous corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our
attention--tender indeed almost to compassion--qualify his achieved
isolation. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable man
bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it
might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had
successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always
figured other persons--such was the law of his nature--as a numerous
array, and that, though conscious of but a single near tie, one
affection, one duty deepest-rooted in his life, it had never, for many
minutes together, been his portion not to feel himself surrounded
and committed, never quite been his refreshment to make out where
the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint,
diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity, really faded
to the blessed impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes
ached. It shaded off, the appeal--he would have admitted that; but he
had as yet noted no point at which it positively stopped.

Thus had grown in him a little hab