“Yes—­and to a certain extent you succeeded; as also in waking me.  But you made much,” he said, “of your difficulty.”  To which he added:  “It’s the only case I remember, Mag, of you ever making anything of a difficulty.”

She kept her eyes on him a moment.  “That I was so happy as I was?”

“That you were so happy as you were.”

“Well, you admitted”—­Maggie kept it up—­“that that was a good difficulty.  You confessed that our life did seem to be beautiful.”

He thought a moment.  “Yes—­I may very well have confessed it, for so it did seem to me.”  But he guarded himself with his dim, his easier smile.  “What do you want to put on me now?”

“Only that we used to wonder—­that we were wondering then—­if our life wasn’t perhaps a little selfish.”  This also for a time, much at his leisure, Adam Verver retrospectively fixed.  “Because Fanny Assingham thought so?”

“Oh no; she never thought, she couldn’t think, if she would, anything of that sort.  She only thinks people are sometimes fools,” Maggie developed; “she doesn’t seem to think so much about their being wrong—­wrong, that is, in the sense of being wicked.  She doesn’t,” the Princess further adventured, “quite so much mind their being wicked.”

“I see—­I see.”  And yet it might have been for his daughter that he didn’t so very vividly see.  “Then she only thought us fools?”

“Oh no—­I don’t say that.  I’m speaking of our being selfish.”

“And that comes under the head of the wickedness Fanny condones?”

“Oh, I don’t say she condones—!” A scruple in Maggie raised its crest.  “Besides, I’m speaking of what was.”

Her father showed, however, after a little, that he had not been reached by this discrimination; his thoughts were resting for the moment where they had settled.  “Look here, Mag,” he said reflectively—­“I ain’t selfish.  I’ll be blowed if I’m selfish.”

Well, Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce.  “Then, father, I am.”

“Oh shucks!” said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back.  “I’ll believe it,” he presently added, “when Amerigo complains of you.”

“Ah, it’s just he who’s my selfishness.  I’m selfish, so to speak, for him.  I mean,” she continued, “that he’s my motive—­in everything.”

Well, her father could, from experience, fancy what she meant.  “But hasn’t a girl a right to be selfish about her husband?”

“What I don’t mean,” she observed without answering, “is that I’m jealous of him.  But that’s his merit—­it’s not mine.”

Her father again seemed amused at her.  “You could be—­otherwise?”