He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy communion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity.  He might have been seeing things to say, and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back.  So he settled on the merely obvious.  “Well then, we make a pair.  We’re all right.”

“Oh, we’re all right!” A declaration launched not only with all her discriminating emphasis, but confirmed by her rising with decision and standing there as if the object of their small excursion required accordingly no further pursuit.  At this juncture, however—­with the act of their crossing the bar, to get, as might be, into port—­there occurred the only approach to a betrayal of their having had to beat against the wind.  Her father kept his place, and it was as if she had got over first and were pausing for her consort to follow.  If they were all right; they were all right; yet he seemed to hesitate and wait for some word beyond.  His eyes met her own, suggestively, and it was only after she had contented herself with simply smiling at him, smiling ever so fixedly, that he spoke, for the remaining importance of it, from the bench; where he leaned back, raising his face to her, his legs thrust out a trifle wearily and his hands grasping either side of the seat.  They had beaten against the wind, and she was still fresh; they had beaten against the wind, and he, as at the best the more battered vessel, perhaps just vaguely drooped.  But the effect of their silence was that she appeared to beckon him on, and he might have been fairly alongside of her when, at the end of another minute, he found their word.  “The only thing is that, as for ever putting up again with your pretending that you’re selfish—!”

At this she helped him out with it.  “You won’t take it from me?”

“I won’t take it from you.”

“Well, of course you won’t, for that’s your way.  It doesn’t matter, and it only proves—!  But it doesn’t matter, either, what it proves.  I’m at this very moment,” she declared, “frozen stiff with selfishness.”

He faced her awhile longer in the same way; it was, strangely, as if, by this sudden arrest, by their having, in their acceptance of the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically given up pretending—­it was as if they were “in” for it, for something they had been ineffably avoiding, but the dread of which was itself, in a manner, a seduction, just as any confession of the dread was by so much an allusion.  Then she seemed to see him let himself go.  “When a person’s of the nature you speak of there are always other persons to suffer.  But you’ve just been describing to me what you’d take, if you had once a good chance, from your husband.”

“Oh, I’m not talking about my husband!”

“Then whom, are you talking about?”

Both the retort and the rejoinder had come quicker than anything previously exchanged, and they were followed, on Maggie’s part, by a momentary drop.  But she was not to fall away, and while her companion kept his eyes on her, while she wondered if he weren’t expecting her to name his wife then, with high hypocrisy, as paying for his daughter’s bliss, she produced something that she felt to be much better.  “I’m talking about you.”