“Do you mean I’ve been your victim?”

“Of course you’ve been my victim.  What have you done, ever done, that hasn’t been for me?”

“Many things; more than I can tell you—­things you’ve only to think of for yourself.  What do you make of all that I’ve done for myself?”

“’Yourself’?—­” She brightened out with derision.

“What do you make of what I’ve done for American City?”

It took her but a moment to say.  “I’m not talking of you as a public character—­I’m talking of you on your personal side.”

“Well, American City—­if ‘personalities’ can do it—­has given me a pretty personal side.  What do you make,” he went on, “of what I’ve done for my reputation?”

“Your reputation there?  You’ve given it up to them, the awful people, for less than nothing; you’ve given it up to them to tear to pieces, to make their horrible vulgar jokes against you with.”

“Ah, my dear, I don’t care for their horrible vulgar jokes,” Adam Verver almost artlessly urged.

“Then there, exactly, you are!” she triumphed.  “Everything that touches you, everything that surrounds you, goes on—­by your splendid indifference and your incredible permission—­at your expense.”

Just as he had been sitting he looked at her an instant longer; then he slowly rose, while his hands stole into his pockets, and stood there before her.  “Of course, my dear, you go on at my expense:  it has never been my idea,” he smiled, “that you should work for your living.  I wouldn’t have liked to see it.”  With which, for a little again, they remained face to face.  “Say therefore I have had the feelings of a father.  How have they made me a victim?”

“Because I sacrifice you.”

“But to what in the world?”

At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as in a vise, her impression of his now, with his strained smile, which touched her to deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest.  This was the moment, in the whole process of their mutual vigilance, in which it decidedly most hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch.  It shook between them, this transparency, with their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard.  She held her breath, for she knew by his eyes, the light at the heart of which he couldn’t blind, that he was, by his intention, making sure—­sure whether or no her certainty was like his.  The intensity of his dependence on it at that moment—­this itself was what absolutely convinced her so that, as if perched up before him on her vertiginous point and in the very glare of his observation, she balanced for thirty seconds, she almost rocked:  she might have been for the time, in all her conscious person, the very form of the equilibrium they were, in their