IV
To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him. "Yes, there'll be others. But you'll see me through."
She hesitated. "Do you mean if you give in?"
"Oh no. Through my holding out."
Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness. "Why should you hold out for ever?"
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 wasn't 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
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