His eyes, in any case, now saw Mrs. Rance approach with an instant failure to attach to the fact any grossness of avidity of Mrs. Rance's own--or at least to descry any triumphant use even for the luridest impression of her intensity. What was virtually supreme would be her vision of his having attempted, by his desertion of the library, to mislead her--which in point of fact barely escaped being what he (132) had designed. It was n't easy for him, in spite of accumulations fondly and funnily regarded as of systematic practice, not now to be ashamed; the one thing comparatively easy would be to gloss over his course. The billiard-room was not, at the particular crisis, either a natural or a graceful place for the nominally main occupant of so large a house to retire to--and this without prejudice, either, to the fact that his visitor would n't, as he apprehended, explicitly make him a scene. Should she frankly denounce him for a sneak he would simply go to pieces; but he was after an instant not afraid of that. Would n't she rather, as emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly, treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?--show at least that they need n't mind even though the vast table, draped in brown holland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand.
She could n't cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to change it into an obstacle he would have had to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be pursued, to be genially hunted. This last was a turn he was well aware the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed before him--for the mere moment--the prospect of her fairly proposing that they should knock about the balls.
That danger certainly, it struck him, he should manage in some way to deal with. Why too for that matter had he need of defences, material or other?--how was it a question of dangers really to be called such? The deep danger, the only one that made him, as an idea, positively (133) turn cold, would have been the possibility of her seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible issue. Here fortunately she was powerless, it being apparently so proveable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.
She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere--somewhere that, at old Fawns House in the county of Kent, scarcely figured as a definite place at all; it showed somehow from afar as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh--as they had appeared eager to mention; though when they were separately questioned their descriptions failed to tally. He would be at the worst, should it come to the worst, Mrs. Rance's difficulty, and he served therefore quite enough as the stout bulwark of any one else.
This was in truth logic without a flaw, yet it gave Mr. Verver less comfort than it ought. He feared not only danger--he feared the idea of danger, or in other words feared, hauntedly, himself. It was above all as a symbol that Mrs. Rance actually rose before him--a symbol of the supreme effort that he should have sooner or later, as he felt, to make. This effort would be to say No--he lived in terror of having to. He should be proposed to at a given moment--it was only a question of time--and then he should have to do a thing that would be extremely disagreeable. He (134) almost wished on occasion that he was n't so sure he WOULD do it. He knew himself, however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie's marriage and Maggie's finer happiness--happy as he had supposed her before--that had made the difference; he had n't in the other time, it now seemed to him, had to think of such things. They had n't come up for him, and it was positively as if she had herself kept them down. She had only been his child--which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had done for him more than he knew--much, and blissfully, as he always HAD known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation still, all the same, kept pace with her activity--his situation being simply that there was more than ever to be done.