lland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She
couldn't cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round
it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had
to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be
pursued, to be genially hunted. This last was a turn he was well aware
the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed before him--for
the mere moment--the prospect of her fairly proposing that they should
knock about the balls. That danger certainly, it struck him, he should
manage in some way to deal with. Why too, for that matter, had he need
of defences, material or other?--how was it a question of dangers really
to be called such? The deep danger, the only one that made him, as
an idea, positively turn cold, would have been the possibility of her
seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible
issue. Here, fortunately, she was powerless, it being apparently so
provable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.

She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska,
in Arizona or somewhere--somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the
county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed
somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great
alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man,
had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to
assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached:
the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh--as they had appeared
eager to mention; though when they were separately questioned their
descriptions failed to tally. He would be at the worst, should it come
to the worst, Mrs. Rance's difficulty, and he served therefore quite
enough as the stout bulwark of anyone else. This was in truth logic
without a flaw, yet it gave Mr. Verver less comfort than it ought. He
feared not only danger--he feared the idea of danger, or in other words
feared, hauntedly, himself. It was above all as a symbol that Mrs. Rance
actually rose before him--a symbol of the supreme effort that he should
have sooner or later, as he felt, to make. This effort would be to say
No--he lived in terror of having to. He should be proposed to at a given
moment--it was only a question of time--and then he should have to do
a thing that would be extremely disagreeable. He almost wished, on
o