your own. Whatever you might
feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents
say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their
range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight
of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them. If other
importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they
were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend's dress,
adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every
day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black "cut away"
coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking
trousers, chequered in black and white--the proper harmony with which,
he inveterately considered, was a sprigged blue satin necktie; and,
over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and
seasons, a white duck waistcoat. "Should you really," he now asked,
"like me to marry?" He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it
MIGHT be an idea; which, for that matter, he would be ready to carry out
should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it
seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a
truth, in the connection, to utter. "What I feel is that there is
somehow something that used to be right and that I've made wrong. It
used to be right that you hadn't married, and that you didn't seem to
want to. It used also"--she continued to make out "to seem easy for the
question not to come up. That's what I've made different. It does come
up. It WILL come up."

"You don't think I can keep it down?" Mr. Verver's tone was cheerfully
pensive.

"Well, I've given you, by MY move, all the trouble of having to."

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near
him, pass his arm about her. "I guess I don't feel as if you had 'moved'
very far. You've only moved next door."

"Well," she continued, "I don't feel as if it were fair for me just to
have given you a push and left you so. If I've made the difference for
you, I must think of the difference."

"Then what, darling," he indulgently asked, "DO you think?"

"That's just what I don't yet know. But I must find out. We must think
together--as we've always thought. What I mean," she went on after a
moment, "is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some
alternative. I ought to have worked one out