“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?”

“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.”