did, at a given moment, sound. This was when
he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought--on
the manner of which he couldn't have improved--to complete his
successful simile by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the
touch for which it had till now been waiting. "For Mrs. Verver to be
known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband's wife,
something is wanted that, you know, they haven't exactly got. He should
manage to be known--or at least to be seen--a little more as his wife's
husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has
his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more--as
of course he has a perfect right to do--his own discriminations. He's so
perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact,
a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should
really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to
criticise him. To YOU, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for
you're not stupid--you always understand so blessedly what one means."

He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for
him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing
would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious
of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were,
so tight; she felt like the horse of the adage, brought--and brought by
her own fault--to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one
fact that she couldn't be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to
understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this
for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was
sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of
his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she
already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special
sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his
own, was presently not deterred by her silence. "What I really don't see
is why, from his own point of view--given, that is, his conditions, so
fortunate as they stood--he should have wished to marry at all." There
it was then--exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons
that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet she
was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the
martyrs, then and there; not to