“Ah, it’s exactly what I’ve gone upon.  If it wasn’t for that—!”

But she broke off, and they remained only another moment face to face.  “I’ll let you know, my dear, the day I feel you’ve begun to sacrifice me.”

“’Begun’?” she extravagantly echoed.

“Well, it will be, for me, the day you’ve ceased to believe in me.”

With which, his glasses still fixed on her, his hands in his pockets, his hat pushed back, his legs a little apart, he seemed to plant or to square himself for a kind of assurance it had occurred to him he might as well treat her to, in default of other things, before they changed their subject.  It had the effect, for her, of a reminder—­a reminder of all he was, of all he had done, of all, above and beyond his being her perfect little father, she might take him as representing, take him as having, quite eminently, in the eyes of two hemispheres, been capable of, and as therefore wishing, not—­was it?—­ illegitimately, to call her attention to.  The “successful,” beneficent person, the beautiful, bountiful, original, dauntlessly wilful great citizen, the consummate collector and infallible high authority he had been and still was—­these things struck her, on the spot, as making up for him, in a wonderful way, a character she must take into account in dealing with him either for pity or for envy.  He positively, under the impression, seemed to loom larger than life for her, so that she saw him during these moments in a light of recognition which had had its brightness for her at many an hour of the past, but which had never been so intense and so almost admonitory.  His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscrutable, incalculable energy; and this quality perhaps it might be—­all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable, traceable effort—­that placed him in her eyes as no precious a work of art probably had ever been placed in his own.  There was a long moment, absolutely, during which her impression rose and rose, even as that of the typical charmed gazer, in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated.  Extraordinary, in particular, was the number of the different ways in which he thus affected her as showing.  He was strong—­that was the great thing.  He was sure—­sure for himself, always, whatever his idea:  the expression of that in him had somehow never appeared more identical with his proved taste for the rare and the true.  But what stood out beyond everything was that he was always, marvellously, young—­which couldn’t but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination.  Before she knew it she was lifted aloft by the consciousness that he was simply a great and deep and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness was not to be distinguished, a whit,