He gave, none the less, no start—­and this as from the habit of taking anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious.  But it was quite written upon him too, for that matter, that holding out wouldn’t be, so very completely, his natural, or at any rate his acquired, form.  His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long time—­for a man so greatly beset.  This appearance, that is, spoke but little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses—­and all in spite of his being a small, spare, slightly stale person, deprived of the general prerogative of presence.  It was not by mass or weight or vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail.  There was even something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the footlights.  He would have figured less than anything the stage-manager or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be, at the best, the financial “backer,” watching his interests from the wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry.  Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed propriety of his greater stoutness.  He had lost early in life much of his crisp, closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a small neat beard, too compact to be called “full,” though worn equally, as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and chin.  His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was clear, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows.  There was something in Adam Verver’s eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was “big” even when restricted to stars.  Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor’s vision out or most opened themselves to your own.  Whatever you might feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them.  If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend’s dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple.  He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the