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.”

“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?”