“Oh, how can I talk,” she asked, “of otherwise?  It isn’t, luckily for me, otherwise.  If everything were different”—­she further presented her thought—­“of course everything would be.”  And then again, as if that were but half:  “My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous—­or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter.  But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.  When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all—­why then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.”

Mr. Verver listened as if he had nothing, on these high lines, to oppose.  “And that’s the way you love?”

For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered:  “It wasn’t to talk about that.  I do feel, however, beyond everything —­and as a consequence of that, I dare say,” she added with a turn to gaiety, “seem often not to know quite where I am.”

The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly, or sinking otherwise than in play, was impossible—­something of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he, in his day, had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving.  He sat awhile as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time; yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed.

Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, hadn’t, or even had, gained?  The beauty of her condition was keeping him, at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation.  That couldn’t be fixed upon him as missing; since if it wasn’t personally floating, if it wasn’t even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way—­for tasting the balm.  It could pass, further, for knowing—­for knowing that without him nothing might have been:  which would have been missing least of all.

“I guess I’ve never been jealous,” he finally remarked.  And it said more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was intending; for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she couldn’t speak.

But she at last tried for one of them.  “Oh, it’s you, father, who are what I call beyond everything.  Nothing can pull you down.”