THE PRINCE
would probably think to suit him. "It seems to me," she went on, "that it's for you to be sure."
"Ah but I am sure," said Adam Verver. "On matters of importance I never speak when I'm not. So if you can yourself face such a union you needn't in the least trouble."
She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild slightly damp southwest, she met his eyes without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying: "I won't pretend I don't think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me, I mean," she pursued, "because I'm so awfully unattached. I should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another—a motive outside of myself. In fact," she said, so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour, "in fact, you know, I want to be married. It's—well, it's the condition."
"The condition—?" He was just vague.
"It's the state, I mean. I don't like my own. 'Miss,' among us all, is too dreadful—except for a shopgirl. I don't want to be a horrible English old-maid."
"Oh you want to be taken care of. Very well then I'll do it."
"I dare say it's very much that. Only I don't see why, for what I speak of," she smiled—"for a mere escape from my state—I need do quite so much."
219
