place for the nominally main occupant of so large a house to retire to—­and this without prejudice, either, to the fact that his visitor wouldn’t, as he apprehended, explicitly make him a scene.  Should she frankly denounce him for a sneak he would simply go to pieces; but he was, after an instant, not afraid of that.  Wouldn’t she rather, as emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly, treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?—­show at least that they needn’t mind even though the vast table, draped in brown holland, 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