Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth, in the connection, to utter. "What I feel is that there is somehow something that used to be right and that I've made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn't married, and that you didn't seem to want to. It used also"—she continued to make out "to seem easy for the question not to come up. That's what I've made different. It does come up. It WILL come up."
"You don't think I can keep it down?" Mr. Verver's tone was cheerfully pensive.
"Well, I've given you, by MY move, all the trouble of having to."
He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. "I guess I don't feel as if you had 'moved' very far. You've only moved next door."
"Well," she continued, "I don't feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I've made the difference for you, I must think of the difference."
"Then what, darling," he indulgently asked, "DO you think?"
"That's just what I don't yet know. But I must find out. We must think together—as we've always thought. What I mean," she went on after a moment, "is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you."
"An alternative to what?"
"Well, to your simply missing what you've lost—without anything being done about it."
"But what HAVE I lost?"