esn't
care, I mean, what we do. It's for us, he considers, to see things
exactly as we wish. Fanny herself," Maggie pursued, "thinks he's
magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for
accepting the 'social limitations' of our life, for not missing what we
don't give him."

Mr. Verver attended. "Then if he doesn't miss it his magnificence is
easy."

"It IS easy-that's exactly what I think. If there were things he DID
miss, and if in spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he
would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He COULD be a Hero--he WILL
be one if it's ever necessary. But it will be about something better
than our dreariness. _I_ know," the Princess declared, "where he's
magnificent." And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as
she had begun. "We're not, all the same, committed to anything stupid.
If we ought to be grander, as Fanny thinks, we CAN be grander. There's
nothing to prevent."

"Is it a strict moral obligation?" Adam Verver inquired.

"No--it's for the amusement."

"For whose? For Fanny's own?"

"For everyone's--though I dare say Fanny's would be a large part." She
hesitated; she had now, it might have appeared, something more to bring
out, which she finally produced. "For yours in particular, say--if
you go into the question." She even bravely followed it up. "I haven't
really, after all, had to think much to see that much more can be done
for you than is done."

Mr. Verver uttered an odd vague sound. "Don't you think a good deal is
done when you come out and talk to me this way?"

"Ah," said his daughter, smiling at him, "we make too much of that!" And
then to explain: "That's good, and it's natural--but it isn't great. We
forget that we're as free as air."

"Well, THAT'S great," Mr. Verver pleaded. "Great if we act on it. Not if
we don't."

She continued to smile, and he took her smile; wondering again a little
by this time, however; struck more and more by an intensity in it that
belied a light tone. "What do you want," he demanded, "to do to me?" And
he added, as she didn't say: "You've got something in your mind." It had
come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session
there she had been keeping something back, and that an impression of
this had more than once, in spite of his general theoretic respect for
her present right to personal reserves and mysteries, almost ceased to
be vague in him. There had been from t