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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30059 ***
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+BY HENRY JAMES
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+1909
+
+
+Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+"I say, you know, Kate--you _did_ stay!" had been Merton Densher's
+punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
+of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
+see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
+recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
+helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
+flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
+street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
+corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
+to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
+But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquent
+at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck
+him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his
+absence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved them
+to face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.
+That it would require some handling, that they should still have to
+deal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the
+great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
+consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had
+twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and
+the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He
+had arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the
+moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the
+station, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had
+praised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered frankly
+enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care
+to-day who saw her, and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow,
+inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
+would become a baser creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It
+was none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed
+their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
+obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,
+with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise
+to Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and had
+suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea
+that had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but
+nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in the
+refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the
+notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "have
+something" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
+come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
+
+He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
+hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
+to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
+there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
+rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
+nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
+Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
+and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
+they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
+did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
+which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit,
+the truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that
+once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop
+there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't
+be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
+deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,
+respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further
+fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
+single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
+the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
+garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
+seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
+coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
+love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
+happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
+how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
+Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
+would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
+one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
+red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
+She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
+coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
+yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
+such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
+of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
+that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
+did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
+well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
+him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
+and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.
+
+She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
+convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
+that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
+he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
+effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
+night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
+the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
+He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
+to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
+believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
+Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
+made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
+court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from
+such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
+suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
+subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
+names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
+love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
+have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
+course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
+whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
+he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
+money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
+the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
+bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
+produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
+change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
+without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
+lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
+might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
+something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
+tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
+personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
+almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
+Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
+waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
+had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
+all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
+master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
+final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
+the impossible.
+
+She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
+had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
+their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
+for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
+unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
+interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
+They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
+with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
+again, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and
+tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
+frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
+halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
+an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
+for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
+might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
+touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
+as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
+pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
+service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
+it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
+brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
+the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
+thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
+that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
+still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
+interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
+about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
+her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
+which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
+more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
+blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
+better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
+superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
+exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
+appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
+look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
+remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
+the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
+the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
+inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
+he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
+it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
+picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
+independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadful
+closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
+breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
+into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
+together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
+probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
+reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
+thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
+Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
+mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.
+
+What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
+by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
+greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
+new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
+there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
+answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
+however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
+things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
+individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
+moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
+went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
+phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
+group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
+persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
+to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
+pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
+him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
+that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
+yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
+fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
+some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
+separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
+aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
+later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
+pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
+put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
+part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and
+looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
+for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
+first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
+full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
+sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
+street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
+managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
+or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
+there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
+but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
+sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.
+
+He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
+direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
+a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
+though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
+from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
+added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
+troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
+really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
+of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
+what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
+first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
+at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
+than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
+part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
+meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
+weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
+the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
+Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
+stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
+this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
+for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
+with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
+he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
+when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
+sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than
+as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under
+providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
+concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,
+even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
+question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her
+appeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He
+recalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,
+funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
+itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt
+himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of
+her very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
+solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that
+time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--a
+surprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. It
+meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least
+out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made
+him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.
+
+"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And
+she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
+quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
+surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'll
+leave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of
+betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite
+the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it
+will be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask
+to-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my
+cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."
+
+He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
+now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
+that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
+This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
+questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
+about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
+Milly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
+popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
+felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
+advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
+had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
+know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
+foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
+scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
+the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
+not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
+weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
+after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
+meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
+that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
+might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
+them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
+hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
+their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
+this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
+preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
+at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.
+
+
+II
+
+It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
+when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
+the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of
+a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
+appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
+parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
+and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
+fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with
+the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
+American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,
+they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One
+couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,
+please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to
+help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak
+to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:
+Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate
+embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
+perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece
+than as receiving it in a steady light. He had always felt, however,
+that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he
+imaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even before
+his absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when
+we're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
+that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and
+the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to
+prevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a
+truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his
+immediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted
+questions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her
+patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for
+instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do
+nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
+possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms
+of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some
+occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me
+these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so
+accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And
+it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He
+was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you
+see we can't work it anyhow."
+
+If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was
+because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown
+himself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you
+hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully
+good-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You're
+quite right--so long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
+lucidly, that the dear things couldn't _help_, simply as charming
+friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but they
+won't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend
+always helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by this
+time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she
+particularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,
+make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
+made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, they
+could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of
+the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the
+first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of
+them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in
+truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,
+on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just
+what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"
+
+It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
+come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at
+her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
+back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he
+knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
+Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one
+of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but
+visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of
+blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and
+Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,
+that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular
+time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.
+But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him
+now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They
+_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and
+the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They
+connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in
+him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it
+amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he
+could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her
+inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine
+as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where
+their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse
+independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will
+you take me just as I am?"
+
+She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified
+to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he
+found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant
+into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with
+him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't
+spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only
+believe in me, and it will be beautiful."
+
+He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
+didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
+with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
+as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to
+say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she
+closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she
+could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response
+her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited
+by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
+appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
+they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
+certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger
+than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was
+that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity
+making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
+and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to
+swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact
+only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up
+more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,
+and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted
+was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow
+suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more
+consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
+certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of
+indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."
+
+"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"
+
+He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the
+first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after
+all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
+at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most
+people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,
+without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no
+more money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or than
+he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would
+be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some
+months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how
+their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity
+than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand
+he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her
+indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was
+would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that
+she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other
+terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of complicated
+brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact
+by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed
+her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he
+would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any
+_definite_ sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
+"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after
+all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
+there is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as we
+play with her."
+
+"She doesn't want to play with _me_, my dear," Kate lucidly replied;
+"she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares
+for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value.
+_This_ has a value--her being as she has been about us to-day. I
+believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself
+while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'--not a bit."
+
+"What is it then," the young man returned--"from the moment it isn't
+her blessing and a cheque?"
+
+Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is
+something in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn't
+propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a
+thing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really
+but one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about
+us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in
+detail we fight her."
+
+"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this,
+"that it's in detail we deceive her"--a speech that, as soon as he had
+uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
+to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
+
+Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,
+whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to
+make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she
+explained, "meet here."
+
+Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If
+Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come
+back at all?"
+
+"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's
+in love with you."
+
+But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make
+out, you know, that every one's in love with me."
+
+She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
+
+"You said just now Miss Theale."
+
+"I said she liked you--yes."
+
+"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued:
+"Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for
+_this_--as from myself."
+
+"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the
+implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general
+prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"
+
+Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well
+tell her all."
+
+It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a
+manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her
+anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;
+make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see that
+you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."
+
+But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I
+see, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged if
+I do! It _is_," he said with feeling, "a game."
+
+"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up--or I
+give _you_--if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."
+
+"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked,
+"what good does it do?"
+
+Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what--?"
+
+"Does my pleasing her--does anything. I _can't_," he impatiently
+declared, "please her."
+
+Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency;
+but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere
+complaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him
+under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and
+took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her
+form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met
+it, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified _all_ things so to
+possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these
+terms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
+everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments to
+one of her previous--and as positively seemed--her most precious ideas.
+"You accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love with you. Well,
+if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That's the good
+she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you--so that she'll help
+us to go on."
+
+Densher stared--she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basis
+does it make for my seeing _her?_"
+
+"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
+
+"Don't mind my leading her on?"
+
+She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading _you_."
+
+"Well, she won't--so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that
+'help,'" he pursued, "with what she knows?"
+
+"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
+
+He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
+
+"Prevent her helping you. She's _like_ that," Kate Croy explained.
+
+It took indeed some understanding. "Making nothing of the fact that I
+love another?"
+
+"Making everything," said Kate. "To console you."
+
+"But for what?"
+
+"For not getting your other."
+
+He continued to stare. "But how does she know--?"
+
+"That you _won't_ get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she
+doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of
+Aunt Maud's stand. _That_"--Kate was lucid--"gives her the chance to be
+nice to you."
+
+"And what does it give _me_," the young man none the less rationally
+asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"
+
+Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his
+violence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there
+are reasons. I mean others."
+
+"What others?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you," the girl added,
+"are enough to go on with."
+
+"To go on to what?"
+
+"Why, to seeing her again--say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on
+all grounds, is no more than decent of you."
+
+He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had
+passed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but it
+had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in
+the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindling
+consequence. "Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes," said
+Densher, "her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
+independently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received."
+
+It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you see. I shall meet you
+there."
+
+"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why she should wish to
+receive you for it."
+
+"She receives me for myself--that is for _her_ self. She thinks no end
+of me. That I should have to drum it into you!"
+
+Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's beyond me."
+
+Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She regards me as
+already--in these few weeks--her dearest friend. It's quite separate.
+We're in, she and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that, as
+if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out
+at last her own real light. "She doesn't of course know I care for
+_you_. She thinks I care so little that it's not worth speaking of."
+That he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made quickly clear, and
+Kate hailed the effect with surprise. "Have you been supposing that she
+does know--?"
+
+"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you show
+me--and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her." She uttered at
+this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. "You
+_have_ denied it to her?"
+
+She threw up her arms at his being so backward. "'Denied it'? My dear
+man, we've never spoken of you."
+
+"Never, never?"
+
+"Strange as it may appear to your glory--never."
+
+He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs. Lowder have spoken?"
+
+"Very probably. But of _you_. Not of me."
+
+This struck him as obscure. "How does she know me but as part and
+parcel of you?"
+
+"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, to
+have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it.
+Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation--that is
+out of my being in danger from you--by not having so much as suspected
+or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it
+and sinking it--if she only does so hard enough. Therefore _she_, in
+her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise
+than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed
+either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say,
+distinguished you."
+
+"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that they must have made it out
+for themselves?"
+
+"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's so
+funnily bumping against us on Tuesday."
+
+"She doesn't see from _that_--?"
+
+"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that
+you regard me with a complacent eye--for you show it, I think, always
+too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too
+much; I don't perhaps--to please you completely where others are
+concerned--show it enough."
+
+"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher demanded.
+
+It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. "Not where
+_you_ are concerned. Beyond seeing that you're rather gone," she went
+on, "Milly only sees that I'm decently good to you."
+
+"Very good indeed she must think it!"
+
+"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate smiled, "as very good
+indeed."
+
+The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining."
+
+"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essential
+plea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she
+added, "I _will_ explain."
+
+"And what will I do?"
+
+"Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here in
+truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment,
+took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had
+returned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that,
+Aunt Maud's liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn't
+spoil their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they should
+probably find it would help them. But she came back to Milly too. "Mind
+you go to see her."
+
+Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. "Then I may come
+again?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud--as much as you like. But we can't again," said Kate,
+"play her _this trick_. I can't see you here alone."
+
+"Then where?"
+
+"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
+
+"And what good will that do me?"
+
+"Try it and you'll see."
+
+"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher asked. "Say you are, how
+will that give us privacy?"
+
+"Try it--you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage as
+we can."
+
+"That's precisely what _I_ feel. It strikes me we might manage better."
+His idea of this was a thing that made him an instant hesitate; yet he
+brought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to _me?_"
+
+It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarce
+generous in expecting her definitely to answer, and by looking to him
+to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him
+feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that he
+thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of
+his flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
+again on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. It
+might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her
+mind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it will
+make."
+
+Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was
+stupid--the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But he
+made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
+bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle but
+strong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that the
+difference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"
+
+Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her
+more marked shows of impatience; with which in fact she sharply closed
+their discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and she
+accompanied him to the top of the stairs with an air of having so put
+their possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubts
+perverse. "I verily believe I _shall_ hate you if you spoil for me the
+beauty of what I see!"
+
+
+III
+
+He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw;
+and the very next occasion had for him still other surprises than that.
+He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the
+telegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with
+them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate even
+though in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting American
+friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American
+friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to
+the last bitterness. This apprehension, however, we hasten to add,
+enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
+the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after
+his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came
+in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the
+hour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as he
+was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
+field. He had thus had with her several bewildering
+moments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
+him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
+he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
+supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
+achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
+herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
+you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
+the article required was what might especially have caused him to
+stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
+dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
+it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
+all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
+his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
+small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
+truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
+feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
+comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
+ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
+quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
+avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
+This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
+discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
+him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
+being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
+that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
+that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
+"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
+convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
+irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
+already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
+ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
+afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
+gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
+impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
+keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
+been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the
+world as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
+welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her
+few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the
+amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a
+plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of
+America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the
+idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred
+to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her
+favourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this
+helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and
+blameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
+absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by
+the beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support
+all round, for no young man could have been less formidable than the
+person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The
+ostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, as
+prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his
+own reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--a
+relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving nor
+lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess,
+the girl had to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from head
+to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again
+the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually
+and consummately reckoned.
+
+That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon,
+under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to
+the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this
+estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so
+that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
+plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in
+respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a
+person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way
+to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the
+character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
+was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things
+all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet
+criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
+last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
+Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
+performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
+parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
+the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
+actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
+performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
+jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
+accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
+as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
+much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
+point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
+almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
+having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
+he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
+at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
+came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
+_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
+mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
+expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
+fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
+the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
+as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
+intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
+double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
+sign to the person in the house she loved best.
+
+The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
+on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
+gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
+presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
+like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
+opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
+"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
+contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
+two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what now
+offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless
+and full of the compunction of having had to come alone. Her companion,
+at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough,
+and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
+regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was the
+first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,
+without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she called
+it--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if the
+young man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been
+wholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
+dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar
+to the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Any
+knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
+supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the most
+privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a manner
+invented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caught
+her in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her
+by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a
+friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp
+flashlight or two?
+
+He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with
+interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as
+he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his
+pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction. The ear of
+society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
+paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he
+appeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settled
+himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the
+full revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if
+he could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
+gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What
+touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air
+of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
+career. There was of course more said about the heroine than if she
+hadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range
+of Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two
+wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,
+professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
+to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
+obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
+been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
+of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
+smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
+benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
+she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
+would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
+in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
+to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
+indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
+He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
+them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
+came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
+a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
+they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
+striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
+keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
+himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
+that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
+and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
+than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
+scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
+New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
+complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
+relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
+perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
+of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
+if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
+country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
+herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
+the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
+with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
+The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that
+they saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in the
+States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taught
+the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native
+product. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she was
+weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that
+New York, in having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck. There
+_were_ plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were
+awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank
+goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the
+Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to be
+calculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
+without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
+announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her
+young friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no
+manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the
+moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
+good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at a
+certain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest
+approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left
+them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly
+addressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least little
+bit--about my friend."
+
+He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs.
+Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn
+meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
+couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,
+but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't know
+enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,
+as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously
+appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
+immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then
+present."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it
+expressed he failed at the time to make out.
+
+"You weren't present _then_, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
+"You don't know," she continued with mellow gaiety, "how far things may
+have gone."
+
+It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had
+more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
+it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
+foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
+foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
+affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
+produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
+as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
+already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
+perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
+precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
+opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
+long."
+
+It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
+for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
+that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
+wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."
+
+"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
+to keep well with him.
+
+He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
+knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
+endlessly more to see."
+
+"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
+archness.
+
+"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
+impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
+about her."
+
+"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
+firmness.
+
+"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
+often quite prove the depth of the impression?"
+
+He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
+they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
+deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
+for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
+authority about her."
+
+Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
+had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
+easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
+sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
+and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
+half so much."
+
+The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
+fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross
+circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
+companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
+old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
+the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
+fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
+for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
+communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
+determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
+though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
+thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
+things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
+Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
+own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
+feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
+of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
+happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
+don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
+followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
+this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
+was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
+than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
+in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
+little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
+harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
+it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
+by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
+gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
+had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
+There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
+the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
+and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
+characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
+scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
+in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
+feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
+nature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
+be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
+Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
+of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
+only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
+inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
+American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
+creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
+marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
+
+So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
+thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
+society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
+independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
+civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
+within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
+there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
+the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
+world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
+of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
+struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
+Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
+imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
+practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
+aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
+relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
+London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
+your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
+away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
+She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
+having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
+_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
+developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
+but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
+
+Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
+pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
+light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
+property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
+also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
+Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
+glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
+feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
+only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
+passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
+life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
+entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
+observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
+on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
+drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
+if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
+feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
+admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
+somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
+this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
+from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
+her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
+that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
+she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
+stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
+Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
+was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
+Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
+practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
+friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
+unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
+take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
+perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
+This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
+might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
+measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
+covered ground.
+
+
+IV
+
+The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
+element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
+upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
+this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight.
+Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room;
+he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
+foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this
+general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks
+to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that
+intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;
+whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs
+sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.
+Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small
+sofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,
+of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know each
+other--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; and
+she arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to put
+Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
+world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the
+profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;
+there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he
+could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other
+hand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see on
+the spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
+in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. I
+mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you
+she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
+
+He took this in such patience as he could muster. "What in the world's
+the matter with her?"
+
+But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here has
+been just a reason for her funking it."
+
+"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher asked again.
+
+"Why just what I've told you--that she likes you so much."
+
+"Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?"
+
+Kate cast about--it would take so long to explain. "And perhaps it's
+true that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
+
+"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visibly
+preoccupied and worried."
+
+"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be only for that."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. "Why, if it's
+anything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, and
+she has done all she need to be civil."
+
+"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite beautifully civil."
+
+It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was
+already, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on two
+different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other
+makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell Milly all about you."
+
+"Well then," said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, "I'm glad I
+felt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to
+her?"
+
+"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's all," Kate declared,
+"as it should be."
+
+"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically suggested, "that she
+isn't getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on _this?_"
+And then as Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On our present
+disregard for appearances."
+
+"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make
+them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged
+that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had
+indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instance
+another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to
+respond just in order to make that impression."
+
+"Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! I
+hope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean
+judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as
+thrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,
+Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do you
+mean she's as ill as she looks?"
+
+Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech
+deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her
+own--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
+Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could
+scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.
+She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing her
+too--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on
+the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled
+up. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the night
+before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
+farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a
+day or two later. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
+When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
+They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
+brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
+man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
+Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
+She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
+you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
+hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
+doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
+out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
+
+Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
+she has had?"
+
+"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
+
+"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"
+
+"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
+to lose. And she wants more."
+
+"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
+"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"
+
+"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
+somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
+oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
+all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
+certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
+success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
+she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
+a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
+of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
+facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
+Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
+_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
+"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
+assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
+plain."
+
+Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
+then on earth can I do her?"
+
+Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
+
+"And for what?"
+
+"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
+care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
+it made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
+there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
+compassion. "She has nothing."
+
+"Not all the young dukes?"
+
+"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
+does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
+"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
+life. Oh she has you arranged!"
+
+"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
+rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
+
+"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
+
+"Then why shan't I be?"
+
+"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
+_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."
+
+"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
+
+"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
+the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
+you're therefore what I use most."
+
+He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
+which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
+he asked.
+
+Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
+think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
+
+"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
+has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
+really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
+spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
+conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
+a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
+days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
+has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."
+
+"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
+her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."
+
+"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
+short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
+she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."
+
+Kate on her side did this justice. "No--that's the beauty of her."
+
+"The beauty--?"
+
+"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your
+watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you
+convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
+won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won't
+taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know."
+
+"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?
+In what extraordinary state _is_ she?"
+
+Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. "I
+believe that if she's ill at all she's very ill. I believe that if
+she's bad she's not a _little_ bad. I can't tell you why, but that's
+how I see her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll have it
+all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think she'll have it all."
+
+Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having
+thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid.
+"You 'think' and you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
+without an inkling of her complaint?"
+
+"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't want
+knowledge. She moreover herself doesn't want one to want it: she has,
+as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a
+kind of--I don't know what to call it--intensity of pride. And then and
+then--" But with this she faltered.
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for you, my dear,"
+Kate continued, "that you're as sound as a bell."
+
+"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather good then for yourself too
+that you're as strong as the sea."
+
+She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their
+young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at
+least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the
+personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that
+very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the
+poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good
+they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this. "How
+we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were
+the facts. "From illness I keep away."
+
+"But you don't--since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the
+midst of it."
+
+"Ah I'm only watching--!"
+
+"And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!"
+
+"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of
+what I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon."
+
+She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the
+hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning
+brought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a case
+for surgery?"
+
+"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come
+to that. Of course she's in the highest hands."
+
+"The doctors are after her then?"
+
+"She's after _them_--it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it
+now--she sees Sir Luke Strett."
+
+It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an
+instant: "One seems to guess."
+
+Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you."
+
+For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it
+before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl."
+
+"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You
+understand moreover just how much--and just how little."
+
+"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand."
+
+"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has
+been your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making up
+to her goes, plenty of others will."
+
+Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing
+their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown,
+amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility.
+"Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free."
+
+"But so are you, my dear!"
+
+She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had
+sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at
+her. "You're prodigious!"
+
+"Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave a
+further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby
+had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately
+finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the
+announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
+less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the
+visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly
+rose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And then
+for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back from
+America."
+
+"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as he
+mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He
+recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have
+appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, he
+knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficial
+resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was
+the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and
+experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a
+thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of
+curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to
+which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask
+Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs.
+Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.
+
+"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?--as I seemed to hear outside, from
+below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable voice."
+
+"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell," the girl explained,
+"and was compelled to disappoint us."
+
+"Ah 'disappoint'--rather!" And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on
+Densher. "She isn't really bad, I trust?"
+
+Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in
+Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with
+whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without
+visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was
+doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was
+aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I think not. I've
+just been reassuring Mr. Densher," she added--"who's as concerned as
+the rest of us. I've been calming his fears."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark again--and again it was just as good. That was for
+Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the
+others: "_My_ fears would want calming. We must take great care of her.
+This way?"
+
+She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave
+them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy.
+What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently
+with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time
+quite ready for her. "It's _he_ who's your aunt's man?"
+
+"Oh immensely."
+
+"I mean for _you._"
+
+"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There he is. Now you can judge."
+
+"Judge of what?"
+
+"Judge of him."
+
+"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked. "I've nothing to do with
+him."
+
+"Then why do you ask about him?"
+
+"To judge of you--which is different."
+
+Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. "To take the
+measure, do you mean, of my danger?"
+
+He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare say, of Miss
+Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her--?"
+
+"With his interest in me?"
+
+"With her own interest in you," Densher said while she reflected. "If
+that interest--Mrs. Lowder's--takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
+rather to look out for the forms _he_ takes?"
+
+Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh he takes them easily,"
+she answered. "The beauty is that she doesn't trust him."
+
+"That Milly doesn't?"
+
+"Yes--Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really."
+
+Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he
+cheats?"
+
+"Yes," said Kate--"that's the way people are. What they think of their
+enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with
+what they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind, however,"
+she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt Maud's security, though she doesn't
+yet fully recognise it--besides being Milly's own."
+
+"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?"
+
+She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. "You oughtn't to
+make me say too much. But I'm glad I don't."
+
+"Don't say too much?"
+
+"Don't care for Lord Mark."
+
+"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which
+he added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
+
+"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her again
+impatient.
+
+Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, I
+suppose, one of the dukes."
+
+"Mercy, no--far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities,
+'in' it. Milly, it's true," she said, to be exact, "has no natural
+sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
+or know who's who or what's what."
+
+"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason for liking _me_."
+
+"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate, "who at least know
+what I lose."
+
+Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "And
+Aunt Maud--why shouldn't _she_ know? I mean that your friend there
+isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
+
+"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's
+undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get."
+
+"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.
+
+"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this;
+"because perhaps in the line of that alone--as he has no money--more
+could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the
+sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his
+family and at the other end of the string. _The_ thing's his genius."
+
+"And do you believe in that?"
+
+"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had
+yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so
+that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in
+time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
+
+"Political?"
+
+"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it
+when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,
+without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an
+effect without his being in any traceable way a cause."
+
+"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality,
+"isn't agreeable--?"
+
+"Oh but it is!"
+
+"Not surely for every one."
+
+"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you may have reasons--and
+men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not."
+
+"Then there you are!"
+
+"Yes, precisely--that takes, on his part, genius."
+
+Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus
+promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been
+found, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
+suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and
+overflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the
+future she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you are
+stupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--and
+then you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--except
+that you're so much too good for what she builds _for_. Even 'society'
+won't know how good for it you are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond
+it. You'd have to pull it uphill--it's you yourself who are at the top.
+The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read?
+You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
+ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've a
+subscription!"
+
+She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in
+answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their
+essential wealth of life. "It's you who draw me out. I exist in you.
+Not in others."
+
+It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself
+pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "See
+here, you know: don't, _don't_--!"
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
+
+She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. "So you think
+you'll kill _me_ in time to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the
+next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she
+had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come
+back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely
+connected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a
+distance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him before
+they joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understand
+she meant his way with Milly.
+
+He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had
+brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this
+light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
+undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitely
+tell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"
+
+She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though
+quite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growing
+intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
+yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me."
+
+"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
+
+"She doesn't suppose it."
+
+"How then can she imagine you never named her?"
+
+"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her. I've told her everything.
+She's in possession of reasons that will perfectly do."
+
+Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you exactly as I take
+them?"
+
+"Exactly as you take them."
+
+"She's just such another victim?"
+
+"Just such another. You're a pair."
+
+"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we can console each other?"
+
+"Ah something _may_ indeed happen," she returned, "if you'll only go
+straight!"
+
+He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you mean
+by going straight?"
+
+"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, and
+you'll see. You'll have me perfectly, always, to refer to."
+
+"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
+
+It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her back. There you are.
+You won't be able to say I haven't made it smooth for you."
+
+He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the
+queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous
+silken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"
+
+He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had
+caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her
+attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and
+who was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by
+Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened before
+any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found
+time to say to him with furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another
+was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew
+near to him with an almost reproachful "Come and talk to _me!_"--a
+challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness of
+their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the
+same he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs.
+Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as
+looking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which he
+afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few
+words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This
+impression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
+something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps
+a slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her "Good-night,
+sir!" as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing
+more to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this
+time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personage
+had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently--with
+a view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs on
+Milly--proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred
+was that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word for
+himself. It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she both
+detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he
+hadn't yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal.
+
+"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really interesting."
+
+"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly not forget her.
+But you must remember that, so far as her 'interest' is concerned, I
+myself discovered, I--as was said at dinner--invented her."
+
+"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't taken out the
+patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press of other things, too much
+neglect her."
+
+Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate's, he
+asked himself quickly if it mightn't help him with her. He at any rate
+could but try. "You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
+you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to me. _She_ keeps me up--she
+has had so much to say about them."
+
+He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his
+passage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring to
+herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
+if her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw his
+intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance;
+she only said imperturbably: "Yes, she'll herself do anything for her
+friend; so that she but preaches what she practises."
+
+Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate's devotion
+went. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in face
+of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself
+of the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate's mastery of
+the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
+What might really _become_ in all this of the American girl was
+therefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose none
+of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so
+far as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all the
+same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming."
+
+Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a chance."
+
+"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's--naturally now--leaving
+town and, as I take it, going abroad."
+
+Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing
+with this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "till
+she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving him
+uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall go
+too."
+
+He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And what
+good will that do _me?_"
+
+"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll come out to us."
+
+"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
+
+"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
+
+"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed
+putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he
+rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make
+of it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "to
+consider."
+
+"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
+
+"And pray what's that?"
+
+"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I'm
+treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I can
+smooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And her
+fortune's a real fortune."
+
+Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he
+felt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funny
+if it hadn't been so grave--with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
+derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm much obliged to you
+for the handsome offer--"
+
+"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it
+does--but there's no reason it shouldn't to _you_. Mind you,
+moreover"--she kept it up--"I'm not one who talks in the air. And you
+owe me something--if you want to know why."
+
+Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her
+consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive
+an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that
+she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
+while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this
+light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of
+course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
+inviting me for instance to-night--!"
+
+"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," she
+added, "how far I've gone for you."
+
+He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he
+laughed again as he could. "I see how far you're going."
+
+"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for
+you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only
+made him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has the
+weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with
+surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you."
+Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which,
+speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see
+what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to
+make me right!"
+
+The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had
+left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,
+under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the
+square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his
+brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
+Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had
+affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He
+made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
+starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
+Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
+very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
+Milly was successfully deceived.
+
+
+V
+
+To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
+see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
+visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
+face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
+with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
+Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
+been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
+excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
+American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
+in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
+both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
+mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
+the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
+other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
+her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
+a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
+him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
+oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
+interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
+appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
+was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
+in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
+perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
+breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
+good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
+ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
+which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
+in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
+reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
+patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
+thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
+acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of
+this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one
+way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had
+not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the
+night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed of
+being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of
+man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor
+evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one
+concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He liked
+Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He
+liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the
+evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had never
+known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,
+whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff
+not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he
+find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea of
+working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise
+much interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
+positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
+
+Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a
+margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his
+burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
+involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for
+him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This was
+simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully
+recovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
+had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the
+world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class was
+from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_
+ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable
+than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her in
+Kate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to
+Densher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from the
+National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore
+scarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much for
+her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
+simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy
+acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
+been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
+was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
+rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
+with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
+her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
+see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
+that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
+enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
+of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
+thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
+expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
+might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
+mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
+hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
+_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
+if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
+surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
+perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
+want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
+of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
+his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
+apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
+of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
+within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
+understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
+which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
+couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
+acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
+could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
+It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
+let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
+explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
+she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
+the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for
+insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
+reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
+Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
+personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
+a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
+disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
+was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
+appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
+been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
+exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
+much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
+for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
+out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
+whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
+ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
+longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
+then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
+Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
+hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
+quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
+round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
+it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
+situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
+that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
+as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
+honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
+
+Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
+the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
+quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
+straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
+charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
+conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
+he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
+unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
+spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
+because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
+came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
+an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
+immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
+almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
+to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
+had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
+value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
+so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
+his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
+if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
+quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
+_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
+what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
+on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
+on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
+miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
+whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
+himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
+him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
+would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
+was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
+difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
+with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
+was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
+_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
+would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
+but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
+virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
+this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
+would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
+extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
+complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
+loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
+length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
+abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
+presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one
+nothing but good.
+
+Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the
+immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have
+wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
+Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She
+would absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shall
+ever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be less
+delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be free
+to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better
+reason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
+failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross than
+doing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the
+fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own,
+on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her
+with the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in the
+impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
+above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as
+she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Densher
+therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a
+pure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this pure
+pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things
+she seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not
+all the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant in
+the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the
+question of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she did
+that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for
+_you_--that's all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall
+never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worry
+about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in
+short, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even now
+while you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_
+justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was folded
+finely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions and
+her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings,
+but he wouldn't have that to-day. As he thought of the way in which,
+the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently "jawing," he
+accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
+apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
+events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
+London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
+as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
+and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
+Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
+this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
+the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
+fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
+interrupted encounter in New York.
+
+At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
+them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
+sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
+their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
+originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
+remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
+time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
+whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
+have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
+of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
+beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
+steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
+and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
+which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
+communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
+themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
+to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
+face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
+their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
+the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
+control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
+the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
+the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
+freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
+acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman
+could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experiment
+went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as
+the marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a word
+about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question
+for them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
+comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night before
+appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he
+fairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
+course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown
+him by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt
+with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
+conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before
+going further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite so
+much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came
+up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never
+renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument against
+that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little
+eloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.
+
+Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that
+she was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Over
+the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the merit
+of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the
+chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to her
+freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, _I?_
+Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was to do, it thus
+appeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was just
+what would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar
+brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
+heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She
+would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incur
+whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue to
+be exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. It
+wouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn't
+before him one of those rare cases of exaltation--food for fiction,
+food for poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
+care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if
+Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in my
+society, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to make
+my society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a different
+impression if she _had_ so reasoned. All of which, none the less,
+didn't prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to
+be whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do you
+begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
+
+She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she
+would, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed view
+of the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. They
+weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks
+somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we've
+only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's done
+and the wind's in our sails."
+
+"May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you come
+back?"
+
+She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the wind
+turns. And what do you do with your summer?"
+
+"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work
+in your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of the
+pleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."
+
+"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different time
+from ours. If you could but have worked while we've been working--"
+
+"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn't so great
+with me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, in
+either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--you
+all," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real
+physical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. My
+labour's comparatively light."
+
+"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like mine."
+
+"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
+
+"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested. Oh I could go far."
+
+He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?--since you've got here, as I
+learn, the whole place in your pocket."
+
+"Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed so
+what you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'm
+watching over its future, that I can't help being anxious and careful.
+I want--in the interest itself of what I've had and may still have--not
+to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again
+to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,"
+she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her
+statement--"I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ return? Can you promise one that?"
+
+Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if
+bargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"
+
+He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he
+checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to
+social life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of a
+mob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should you
+come here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear
+for us--if it isn't a question of climate."
+
+She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't a question--?"
+
+"Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going
+somewhere for that."
+
+"For better air?"--she remembered. "Oh yes, one certainly wants to get
+out of London in August."
+
+"Rather, of course!"--he fully understood. "Though I'm glad you've hung
+on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
+"once more."
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently asked.
+
+It pulled him up an instant--representing, as he saw it might have
+seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was
+proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
+was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll find ready to
+surround you with sympathy."
+
+It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him
+afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
+
+"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we _shall_ feel for you will be
+much nearer worship."
+
+"As near then as you like!" With which at last Kate's name was sounded.
+"The people I'd most come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
+for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me."
+
+"So she has to _me_," said Densher. "I feel," he added as she at first
+answered nothing, "that, quite contrary to anything I originally
+expected, I've made a good friend of her."
+
+"I didn't expect it either--its turning out as it has. But I did," said
+Milly, "with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I'd do anything"--she
+kept it up--"for Kate."
+
+Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might
+for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the
+ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together
+and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at
+that moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do for
+Kate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he
+felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness
+stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his
+silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for
+Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
+trying the next minute but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself.
+"Of course I know what friends you are--and of course I understand," he
+permitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person so
+charming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean her
+working for your return."
+
+"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm really on her hands."
+
+He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show
+he knew. "Ah she's very masterful."
+
+"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
+
+"No--that's not the way. At any rate it isn't hers," he smiled. He
+remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways
+was just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no further
+than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of
+representing a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to call
+know."
+
+"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The words
+gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for
+his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
+to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity.
+Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far--if it _was_
+too far--without being false. His observation was one he would
+perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and
+before Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how just
+here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up
+not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly put
+there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to
+turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have
+given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled
+for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August
+afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy
+carriage-wheels and of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great
+shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded
+by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a
+due display of diminished prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
+Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
+
+"It's only my own carriage; it does that--isn't it wonderful?--every
+day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our
+hearts, very amusing." She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
+of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on
+the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed
+a brave show. "Is it very awful?"
+
+It was to Densher's eyes--save for its absurd heaviness--only
+pleasantly pompous. "It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I
+know? You're mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
+wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your
+carriage--well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one."
+But she was going out, and he mustn't stand in her way. What had
+happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was going
+out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said
+she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive--that in fact
+there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her
+to-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why the
+carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these
+things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they
+found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompany
+her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the
+matter--on the basis, that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
+happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have
+described in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The
+system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought him
+headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now
+it was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or the
+other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
+him longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watching
+himself wait. He couldn't keep that up for ever; and since one thing or
+the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
+became conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settled
+itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a
+firm object in the stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure.
+It's a charming idea."
+
+She gave no look to thank him--she rather looked away; she only said at
+once to her servant, "In ten minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the
+man went out, "We'll go somewhere--I shall like that. But I must ask of
+you time--as little as possible--to get ready." She looked over the
+room to provide for him, keep him there. "There are books and
+things--plenty; and I dress very quickly." He caught her eyes only as
+she went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.
+
+Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have
+said; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing to
+oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that
+she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige
+_her;_ which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite
+round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he
+stood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more--remained
+with several very living little matters to think about. One of these
+was the phenomenon--typical, highly American, he would have said--of
+Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had sought
+refuge--refuge from another question--in the almost exclusive
+contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even
+to a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous for
+his young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone--since she
+hadn't mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more
+advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn't an American
+girl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate _would_ have
+done it, though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
+spontaneous. And then in addition Kate _had_ done it--or things very
+like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate--even if his ostensibly not
+being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any
+rate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate,
+was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to
+anything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
+herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved about
+the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at
+his disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
+whereas Kate was backward--backward still, comparatively, as an English
+girl--and yet advanced in a high degree. However--though this didn't
+straighten it out--Kate was of course two or three years older; which
+at their time of life considerably counted.
+
+Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander;
+yet without keeping at bay for long the sense of having rounded his
+corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option
+of taking advantage of Milly's absence to retrace his steps. If he
+might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he
+couldn't turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his
+consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue
+was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss
+Theale's servant had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had met,
+obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door,
+he loudly announced as Miss Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped
+short at sight of Densher--only, after an instant, as the young man saw
+with free amusement, not from surprise and still less from
+discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation--Miss Theale had
+gone to prepare to drive--on receipt of which the servant effaced
+himself.
+
+"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
+
+"Yes--with your approval; which I've taken, as you see, for granted."
+
+"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!" She was thoroughly
+consistent and handsome about it.
+
+"What I mean is of course," he went on--for he was sensibly affected by
+her gaiety--"at your so lively instigation."
+
+She had looked about the room--she might have been vaguely looking for
+signs of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aid
+in taking a decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you like."
+She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made
+a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. "So much so as that? Do
+you know I think I won't wait?"
+
+"Not to see her--after coming?"
+
+"Well, with you in the field--! I came for news of her, but she must be
+all right. If she _is_--"
+
+But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?" He was moved to say
+more. "It's not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to me
+it's you." She struck him as making light of a matter that had been
+costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't both be quite just.
+Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn't want at
+all events to feel a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing--and shall not,
+I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
+
+Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his
+words; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he really
+needn't get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked
+it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she better--if she's able to
+see you?"
+
+"She assures me she's in perfect health."
+
+Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On which she added: "It won't
+have been really for illness that she stayed away last night."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+"Well--for nervousness."
+
+"Nervousness about what?"
+
+"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the
+next moment. "I've told you that."
+
+He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it
+was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: "What have you told
+_her?_"
+
+She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered
+where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even
+stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
+feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying
+things--! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. "Ask _her_, if
+you like; you're free--she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
+trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have told. I'm all right
+with her," said Kate. "So there you are."
+
+"If you mean _here_ I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable. If you
+also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you're so
+far right as that she certainly does believe in you."
+
+"Well then take example by her."
+
+"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued. "She's driving me
+out for you."
+
+"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity, "you can do it a
+little for _her_. I'm not afraid," she smiled.
+
+He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it
+and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in
+this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
+relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, a
+question of words. "I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But
+for you I'll do anything."
+
+"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
+
+He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to it?"
+
+"To 'it'? To what?"
+
+"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that, you know, that I'm
+letting you do--well, God knows what with me."
+
+She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense of
+which she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in me
+then, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gone
+further?"
+
+"Break off with you?"
+
+"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay and
+explain to her why it is."
+
+He wondered--as if it struck him. "What would you say?"
+
+"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that there's nothing for me
+but to bear with you as I best may."
+
+He considered of this. "How much do you abuse me to her?"
+
+"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
+
+Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought to mind her attitude."
+
+"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."
+
+He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
+itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
+back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
+and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
+now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
+here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"
+
+Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
+But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."
+
+"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.
+
+"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
+many conditions."
+
+She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
+pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
+suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
+any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
+being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
+circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
+speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
+begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
+translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"
+
+She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
+than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
+
+"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled
+something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
+his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
+check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
+she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
+deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
+renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
+where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
+victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
+dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
+was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
+he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
+he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
+she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
+
+"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
+with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
+understand."
+
+She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
+before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
+enough, you know, without understanding too much."
+
+"You don't need to see."
+
+He required then a last injunction. "I must simply go it blind?"
+
+"You must simply be kind to her."
+
+"And leave the rest to you?"
+
+"Leave the rest to _her_," said Kate disappearing.
+
+It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three
+minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,
+so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
+throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for
+an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
+fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
+like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their
+friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he
+said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his
+corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.
+
+She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed
+over whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see
+_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
+Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it
+should now be wholly left.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH
+
+I
+
+When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her
+meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to
+face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the
+warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again
+feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the
+quarter of his courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the two
+women stood there showing each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd
+had received their great doctor's visit, which had been clearly no
+small affair for her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
+in place, against communication and betrayal, as she now practically
+confessed, the barrier of their invited guests. "You've been too dear.
+With what I see you're full of you treated them beautifully. _Isn't_
+Kate charming when she wants to be?"
+
+Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in a high fine spasm,
+with different dangers, had now quite let itself go. She had to make an
+effort to reach a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh she
+was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham added. "She knew."
+
+Milly braced herself--but conscious above all, at the moment, of a high
+compassion for her mate. She made her out as struggling--struggling in
+all her nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself, given her
+nature, could only be a torment. Milly gathered from the struggle how
+much there was of the pity, and how therefore it was both in her
+tenderness and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
+Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression instantly steadied
+the girl. Ruefully asking herself on what basis of ease, with the drop
+of their barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt the
+question met with a relief that was almost joy. The basis, the
+inevitable basis, was that she was going to be sorry for Susie, who, to
+all appearance, had been condemned in so much more uncomfortable a
+manner to be sorry for _her_. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow would hurt Mrs.
+Stringham, but how could her own ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at
+all events, on the spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
+the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture of an
+energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate knew," she asked, "that you
+were full of Sir Luke Strett?"
+
+"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice; she seemed to want
+to help me through." Which the good lady had no sooner said, however,
+than she almost tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly with
+a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she saw one had been taken up
+with something. When I say she knows I should say she's a person who
+guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side, heroic. "But _she_
+doesn't matter, Milly."
+
+The girl felt she by this time could face anything. "Nobody matters,
+Susie. Nobody." Which her next words, however, rather contradicted.
+"Did he take it ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
+just what he wanted--to have it out, so much more simply, with _you_?"
+
+"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs. Stringham delicately
+quavered.
+
+"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on, "and didn't he think you
+the most charming person I could possibly have referred him to for an
+account of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together and in fact
+fall quite in love, so that it will really be a great advantage for you
+to have me as a common ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end
+of a good thing of me."
+
+"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham pleadingly murmured; yet
+showing as she did so that she feared the effect even of deprecation.
+
+"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?--altogether, whatever he may
+say, a lovely acquaintance to have made? You're just the right people
+for me--I see it now; and do you know what, between you, you must do?"
+Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: "You
+must simply see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out together.
+I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and we'll be--the three of us,
+with whatever others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you
+like!--a sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying a
+feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence that her young
+friend almost saw her--and scarcely withheld the observation--as taking
+it for "a part of the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
+she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate awfully interesting,
+isn't he?--which is so much to the good. We haven't at least--as we
+might have, with the way we tumbled into it--got hold of one of the
+dreary."
+
+"Interesting, dearest?"--Mrs. Stringham felt her feet firmer. "I don't
+know if he's interesting or not; but I do know, my own," she continued
+to quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you could possibly
+desire."
+
+"Certainly--that's it. Like all the world."
+
+"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very much more deeply and
+intelligently."
+
+"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the way, Susie, I want you.
+So 'buck' up, my dear. We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't
+worry."
+
+"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face registered the
+sublimity of her lie.
+
+It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her companion went to her,
+met by her with an embrace in which things were said that exceeded
+speech. Each held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
+unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning the torment of
+helplessness, the woe for Milly of having _her_, at such a time, to
+think of. Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
+friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it
+more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing
+in fact came to the proof between them but that they could thus cling
+together--except indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of
+protection and support was all the younger woman's own. "I don't ask
+you," she presently said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what he
+told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that I had left him to
+you, nor what passed between you about me in any way. It wasn't to get
+that out of you that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
+freely--for there are things I don't want to know. I shall see him
+again and again and shall know more than enough. All I do want is that
+you shall see me through on _his_ basis, whatever it is; which it's
+enough--for the purpose--that you yourself should know: that is with
+him to show you how. I'll make it charming for you--that's what I mean;
+I'll keep you up to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
+you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me. There. It's
+understood. We keep each other going, and you may absolutely feel of me
+that I shan't break down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a dig
+of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
+
+"He told me I _can_ help you--of course he told me that," Susie, on her
+side, eagerly contended. "Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I
+come out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful--nothing, nothing,
+nothing," the poor lady passionately protested. "Only that you must do
+as you like and as he tells you--which _is_ just simply to do as you
+like."
+
+"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to time go to him. But
+that's of course doing as I like. It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I
+like going to him."
+
+Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave a clutch at the account
+of their situation that most showed it as workable. "That's what _will_
+be charming for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me--to help
+you to do as you like."
+
+"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed, "to save me from the
+consequences? Of course," she added, "there must first _be_ things I
+like."
+
+"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham more bravely said. "I
+think there _are_ some--as for instance just this one. I mean," she
+explained, "really having us so."
+
+Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable about _him_, and
+him the same about you? Yes--I shall get the good of it."
+
+Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a slight confusion.
+"Which of them are you talking of?"
+
+Milly wondered an instant--then had a light. "I'm not talking of Mr.
+Densher." With which moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you can
+be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better."
+
+"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you
+know," Susie continued, "whom he reminds me of? Of _our_ great man--Dr.
+Buttrick of Boston."
+
+Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she dropped him after a
+tributary pause. "What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr.
+Densher?"
+
+It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her
+friend's, that Susie produced her answer. "I think he's very handsome."
+
+Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of
+a teacher with a pupil. "Well, that will do for the first time. I
+_have_ done," she went on, "what I wanted."
+
+"Then that's all _we_ want. You see there are plenty of things."
+
+Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best is not to know--that
+includes them all. I don't--I don't know. Nothing about
+anything--except that you're _with_ me. Remember that, please. There
+won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's
+all right."
+
+The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain
+Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the reassuring. "Most
+certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees
+no reason--"
+
+"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly had taken it straight
+up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed
+of it otherwise. "Oh of course I know _that_." She spoke as if her
+friend's point were small.
+
+Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he
+didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."
+
+"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but
+she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited
+the word.
+
+It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"
+
+"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
+anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."
+
+It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
+am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
+it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
+more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
+what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
+her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
+was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
+begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
+special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
+descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
+star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
+cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
+twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
+the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
+watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
+and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
+fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
+oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
+contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
+greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
+during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
+in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
+the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
+it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
+capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
+the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
+
+The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
+imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
+with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
+passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
+yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
+had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
+certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
+silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
+however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
+the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
+Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
+account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
+she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
+give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
+might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
+herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
+behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
+herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
+she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
+inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
+it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
+that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
+observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
+purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
+She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
+the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
+intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
+as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
+contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
+vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
+least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
+she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
+be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
+to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."
+
+"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."
+
+"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
+There's something that will prevent her."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
+
+"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's
+doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent
+form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept
+_her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that
+these same things, at such times, made still more for business,
+arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of
+servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said,
+"if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for
+her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative
+margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would
+have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when
+Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her
+addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman
+summoned by the pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were
+sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given
+their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's
+interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her
+about Milly.
+
+"He had wished it himself?"
+
+"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter
+of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"
+said Mrs. Stringham.
+
+"Do you mean in her case?"
+
+"He says it _isn't_ a case."
+
+"What then is it?"
+
+"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed
+it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my
+knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something
+she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.
+She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."
+
+"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
+
+"He didn't tell me."
+
+"And you didn't ask?"
+
+"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He
+gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He
+_is_, thank God, interested."
+
+"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed
+with kindness.
+
+Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean
+that he sees what he can do with me."
+
+Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For _her_."
+
+"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to
+the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for
+her is to be happy."
+
+"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore," Mrs.
+Lowder handsomely asked, "should we cry so hard about it?"
+
+"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange, so beyond us. I mean
+if she can't be."
+
+"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. "She _shall_ be."
+
+"Well--if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we _can_ help."
+
+Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way, what Sir Luke Strett
+thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque
+ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
+dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by
+one, into her capacious apron. "But is that all he came to you for--to
+tell you she must be happy?"
+
+"That she must be _made_ so--that's the point. It seemed enough, as he
+told me," Mrs. Stringham went on; "he makes it somehow such a grand
+possible affair."
+
+"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
+
+"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as
+_my_ part. The rest's his own."
+
+"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
+
+"I don't know. _His_ business. He means to keep hold of her."
+
+"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must be very much of one."
+
+Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. "It's only
+that it isn't _the_ case she herself supposed."
+
+"It's another?"
+
+"It's another."
+
+"Examining her for what she supposed he finds something else?"
+
+"Something else."
+
+"And what does he find?"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from knowing!"
+
+"He didn't tell you that?"
+
+But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I mean is that if it's
+there I shall know in time. He's considering, but I can trust him for
+it--because he does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
+
+"He's in other words not sure?"
+
+"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he means. She's to get away
+now, but to come back to him in three months."
+
+"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he oughtn't meanwhile to scare
+us."
+
+It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled in the great
+doctor's cause. This came out at least in her glimmer of reproach.
+"Does it scare us to enlist us for her happiness?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it scares _me_. I'm always
+scared--I may call it so--till I understand. What happiness is he
+talking about?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you know!"
+
+She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the
+latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
+light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
+with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
+is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
+
+"The point is will it _cure?_"
+
+"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"
+
+"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
+declared.
+
+"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
+
+"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.
+
+"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
+
+Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
+which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
+spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
+something to know he thinks it good for us."
+
+"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
+him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
+have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
+see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
+for nothing."
+
+"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
+propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
+him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
+but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
+had from you night before last."
+
+"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
+
+"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
+now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
+
+"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
+anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
+Densher."
+
+"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
+fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
+
+"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
+all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
+to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
+returned."
+
+"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "till you've seen him."
+
+"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision.
+"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
+care for her?"
+
+Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
+put in the way of it."
+
+"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
+You have him, one feels, in your hand."
+
+Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
+impression of him?"
+
+"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."
+
+Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
+wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
+a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."
+
+It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
+her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
+mean Kate cares for _him?_"
+
+That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
+enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
+her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
+whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
+decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
+surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
+Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
+suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
+A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
+been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
+liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
+felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
+thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
+in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
+She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
+"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
+things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
+weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
+rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."
+
+"Deny that she cares for him?"
+
+"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
+absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."
+
+Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean--if she asks?"
+
+"To Milly, naturally. No one else _will_ ask."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, "Milly won't."
+
+Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
+
+"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for _me_. I lie badly."
+
+"_I_ lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, "when, as
+sometimes will happen, there's nothing else so good. One must always do
+the best. But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we can work it
+out." Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some
+minutes, more enrolled and inflamed--presently felt in her what had
+made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the
+time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason
+for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud
+too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying.
+What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a
+little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this
+appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth
+about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the
+state of her affections, which might be removed--this was apparently
+the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham
+saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate's delusion--by arts,
+however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it
+perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?--success in which
+indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately,
+her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones
+what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a
+dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present--a
+cloud of questions out of which Maud Manningham's large seated self
+loomed, however, as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact for
+the consultative relation something of the form of an oracle. From the
+oracle the sound did come--or at any rate the sense did, a sense all
+accordant with the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
+sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall
+be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"--a view into which Mrs. Stringham
+could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange to
+say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at least to Kate's
+good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself
+in short not caring what became of Kate--only convinced at bottom of
+the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't
+pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
+She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even
+beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough
+plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must
+stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at
+dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an
+instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to
+prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while
+you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
+
+"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me. Though it was nothing
+more," Susie did herself the justice to observe, "than what I too had
+quite felt."
+
+But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she wondered what she had
+said. "I suppose I ought to be edified at what you can so beautifully
+give up."
+
+"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I give up nothing--I cling."
+
+Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with some stiffness to her
+great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a push to an object or two
+disposed there. "I give up then. You know how little such a person as
+Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know what I've been thinking
+perfectly possible."
+
+"Oh you've been great"--Susie was perfectly fair. "A duke, a duchess, a
+princess, a palace: you've made me believe in them too. But where we
+break down is that _she_ doesn't believe in them. Luckily for her--as
+it seems to be turning out--she doesn't want them. So what's one to do?
+I assure you I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream now."
+
+Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so fully her meaning
+that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking it in. They sat a
+moment longer confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
+
+"If it _will_ do anything for her."
+
+Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but she spoke for the
+instant of something else. "It does provoke me a bit, you know--for of
+course I'm a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things. Yet it
+doesn't prevent the fact that we must be decent."
+
+"We must take her"--Mrs. Stringham carried that out--"as she is."
+
+"And we must take Mr. Densher as _he_ is." With which Mrs. Lowder gave
+a sombre laugh. "It's a pity he isn't better!"
+
+"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined, "you'd have liked him
+for your niece; and in that case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie
+added, "interfere with _you_."
+
+"She interferes with me as it is--not that it matters now. But I saw
+Kate and her--really as soon as you came to me--set up side by side. I
+saw your girl--I don't mind telling--you helping my girl; and when I
+say that," Mrs. Lowder continued, "you'll probably put in for yourself
+that it was part of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what I
+give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line," she further set
+forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs.
+Densher! Heavens!" she growled.
+
+Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher my girl will be
+somebody."
+
+"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs. Lowder, "we're talking
+in the air."
+
+Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving everything out."
+
+"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder had another thought.
+"_He's_ not quite nobody either." It brought her back to the question
+she had already put and which her friend hadn't at the time dealt with.
+"What in fact do you make of him?"
+
+Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was
+moved a little to caution. So she remained general. "He's charming."
+
+She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own
+to which people resort when they are not quite candid--a circumstance
+that had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
+
+The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost
+determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. "I thought you
+didn't like him!"
+
+"I don't like him for Kate."
+
+"But you don't like him for Milly either."
+
+Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. "I like
+him, my dear, for myself."
+
+"Then that's the best way of all."
+
+"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for my niece, and he's not
+good enough for you. One's an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
+
+"Oh _I'm_ not--not either," Susie declared.
+
+But her companion kept on. "One lives for others. _You_ do that. If I
+were living for myself I shouldn't at all mind him."
+
+But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find him charming it's
+however I'm living."
+
+Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving
+herself away with a laugh. "Of course he's all right in himself."
+
+"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve; and the note in
+question--what Merton Densher was "in himself"--closed practically,
+with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
+
+
+II
+
+It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an
+informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to
+take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to
+himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs.
+Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a
+spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come
+back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of
+his reckoning. If what they had talked of _could_ happen--if Milly,
+that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself--it wouldn't do any
+harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn't happen--if,
+anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could
+do nothing to contribute to it--they would be in no worse a box than
+before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range
+for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the
+sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man,
+would--besides having more to show him--find him more ready to go on
+with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd--as well as being
+ground for a second report to her old friend--that Milly did her part
+for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned
+frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke
+Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for,
+his having been so easy about her behaviour.
+
+"You see I didn't know that--for the liberty I took--I shouldn't
+afterwards get a stiff note from him."
+
+So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her a trifle rash. "Oh
+you'll never get a stiff note from him in your life."
+
+She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her young friend's question.
+"Why not, as well as any one else who has played him a trick?"
+
+"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick. He could understand
+your action. It's all right, you see."
+
+"Yes--I do see. It _is_ all right. He's easier with me than with any
+one else, because that's the way to let me down. He's only making
+believe, and I'm not worth hauling up."
+
+Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare, poor Susie grasped
+at her only advantage. "Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
+of trifling with you?"
+
+She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion gave her--a
+strange half-amused perception of what she made of it. "Well, so far as
+it's trifling with me to pity me so much."
+
+"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned. "He just--the same as
+any one else--likes you."
+
+"He has no business then to like me. He's not the same as any one else."
+
+"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
+
+Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful smile. "Ah there
+you are!" Mrs. Stringham coloured, for there indeed she was again. But
+Milly let her off. "Work for me, all the same--work for me! It's of
+course what I want." Then as usual she embraced her friend. "I'm not
+going to be as nasty as this to _him_."
+
+"I'm sure I hope not!"--and Mrs. Stringham laughed for the kiss. "I've
+no doubt, however, he'd take it from you! It's _you_, my dear, who are
+not the same as any one else."
+
+Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her the last word. "No,
+so that people can take anything from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did
+indeed resignedly take after this was the absence on her part of any
+account of the visit then paid. It was the beginning in fact between
+them of an odd independence--an independence positively of action and
+custom--on the subject of Milly's future. They went their separate ways
+with the girl's intense assent; this being really nothing but what she
+had so wonderfully put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
+encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the idea that Susie had or
+was to have other encounters--private pointed personal; she favoured
+every idea, but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on as
+if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be worked for that would
+be her way; and though her companions learned from herself nothing of
+it this was in the event her way with her medical adviser. She put her
+visit to him on the simplest ground; she had come just to tell him how
+touched she had been by his good nature. That required little
+explaining, for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood he
+could but reply that it was all right.
+
+"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that clever lady. You've got
+good friends."
+
+"So each one of them thinks of all the others. But so I also think,"
+Milly went on, "of all of them together. You're excellent for each
+other. And it's in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
+
+There came to her on this occasion one of the strangest of her
+impressions, which was at the same time one of the finest of her
+alarms--the glimmer of a vision that if she should go, as it were, too
+far, she might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not of
+value. Going too far was failing to try at least to remain simple. He
+would be quite ready to hate her if she did, by heading him off at
+every point, embarrass his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt,
+rather constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't hate her,
+since Susie positively wanted to suffer for her; Susie had a noble idea
+that she might somehow so do her good. Such, however, was not the way
+in which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected to wish to
+do it. He wouldn't have time even should he wish; whereby, in a word,
+Milly felt herself intimately warned. Face to face there with her
+smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment quite such
+another lift of feeling as she had known in her crucial talk with
+Susie. It came round to the same thing; him too she would help to help
+her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't possibly be she would
+assist also to make this right.
+
+It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the basis in question,
+almost to reverse for her their characters of patient and physician.
+What _was_ he in fact but patient, what was she but physician, from the
+moment she embraced once for all the necessity, adopted once for all
+the policy, of saving him alarms about her subtlety? She would leave
+the subtlety to him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
+doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went so far as to imagine
+that the inward success of these reflexions flushed her for the minute,
+to his eyes, with a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
+and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour to the
+presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"--he noticed
+good-humouredly her harmless sally. "But, help or no help, you're
+looking, you know, remarkably well."
+
+"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was as if already she saw
+his line. Only she wondered what he would have guessed. If he had
+guessed anything at all it would be rather remarkable of him. As for
+what there _was_ to guess, he couldn't--if this was present to
+him--have arrived at it save by his own acuteness. That acuteness was
+therefore immense; and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
+leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad. Neither, for that
+matter, would hers be--which she was even actually enjoying. She
+wondered if really then there mightn't be something for her. She hadn't
+been sure in coming to him that she was "better," and he hadn't used,
+he would be awfully careful not to use, that compromising term about
+her; in spite of all of which she would have been ready to say, for the
+amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I _must_ be," for he had this unaided
+sense of something that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided,
+because who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain,
+hadn't yet seen him again, and there were things it was impossible she
+could have told him the first time. Since such was his penetration,
+therefore, why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept
+the new circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate
+her on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it
+might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of
+nursing. "You gave me the other day," she went on, "plenty to think
+over, and I've been doing that--thinking it over--quite as you'll have
+probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat," she
+smiled, "since you've already done me so much good."
+
+The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance
+so closely related to all one's possibilities that one missed the
+pleasure of really improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
+treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my wit."
+
+"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile a bit believed in his
+answer, convinced as she was that if she _had_ been difficult it would
+be the last thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said, "as I
+like."
+
+"Then it's as _I_ like. But you must really, though we're having such a
+decent month, get straight away." In pursuance of which, when she had
+replied with promptitude that her departure--for the Tyrol and then for
+Venice--was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with
+alacrity. "For Venice? That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a
+dream of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks off; three
+weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person
+who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I
+heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice."
+
+"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in
+advance or in any way, I can do for you--!"
+
+"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be
+capital to find you there."
+
+"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after a moment, "that I
+_am_ easy to treat."
+
+But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it. "You've not come to
+that _yet_."
+
+"One has to be so bad for it?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it--to 'ease' of treatment. I
+doubt if it's possible. I've not, if it is, found any one bad enough.
+The ease, you see, is for _you_."
+
+"I see--I see."
+
+They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on
+it; after which Sir Luke asked: "And that clever lady--she goes with
+you?"
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with me, I hope, to the end."
+
+He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of what?"
+
+"Well--of everything."
+
+"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end of everything is far
+off. This, you know, I'm hoping," said Sir Luke, "is only the
+beginning." And the next question he risked might have been a part of
+his hope. "Just you and she together?"
+
+"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've seen more here than of
+any one and who are just the right people for us."
+
+He thought a moment. "You'll be four women together then?"
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans. But I think," she added as
+if to say what she saw would reassure him, "that we shall not be
+unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of 'life' I
+suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
+
+"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a moment during which he
+might have been appreciating her raciness--"when I talk of life I think
+I mean more than anything else the beautiful show of it, in its
+freshness, made by young persons of your age. So go on as you are. I
+see more and more _how_ you are. You can't," he went so far as to say
+for pleasantness, "better it."
+
+She took it from him with a great show of peace. "One of our companions
+will be Miss Croy, who came with me here first. It's in _her_ that life
+is splendid; and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me. But
+she's above all magnificent in herself. So that if you'd like," she
+freely threw out, "to see _her_--"
+
+"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to you, for clearly it
+will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that if she's to be at Venice I _shall_
+see her?"
+
+"We must arrange it--I shan't fail. She moreover has a friend who may
+also be there"--Milly found herself going on to this. "He's likely to
+come, I believe, for he always follows her."
+
+Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
+
+"_He_ is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't care for him."
+
+Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter with him?"
+
+"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
+
+Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
+
+"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
+
+"And he's to be in Venice?"
+
+"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll be constantly
+about with her."
+
+"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
+
+"As we're great friends--yes."
+
+"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four women alone."
+
+"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen. But he won't," Milly
+pursued in the same wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
+
+"No--I see. But can't you help him?"
+
+"Can't _you?_" Milly after a moment quaintly asked. Then for the joke
+of it she explained. "I'm putting you, you see, in relation with my
+entourage."
+
+It might have been for the joke of it too, by this time, that her
+eminent friend fell in. "But if this gentleman _isn't_ of your
+'entourage '? I mean if he's of--what do you call her?--Miss Croy's.
+Unless indeed you also take an interest in him."
+
+"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
+
+"You think there may be then some chance for him?"
+
+"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
+
+"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke next asked, "have I
+to do with him?"
+
+"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to be there, so may he
+be. And also that we shan't in that case be simply four dreary women."
+
+He considered her as if at this point she a little tried his patience.
+"_You're_ the least 'dreary' woman I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you
+know? There's no reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
+
+"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
+
+"The conviction--strong already when I had seen you once--is
+strengthened in me by having seen your friend. There's no doubt about
+it. The world's before you."
+
+"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
+
+"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure. We talked about
+you--and freely. I don't deny that. But it shows me I don't require of
+you the impossible."
+
+She was now on her feet. "I think I know what you require of me."
+
+"Nothing, for you," he went on, "_is_ impossible. So go on." He
+repeated it again--wanting her so to feel that to-day he saw it.
+"You're all right."
+
+"Well," she smiled--"keep me so."
+
+"Oh you'll get away from me."
+
+"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with her gentle eyes on him.
+
+She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he thus for a moment did
+keep her. Something then, while he seemed to think if there were
+anything more, came back to him; though something of which there wasn't
+too much to be made. "Of course if there's anything I _can_ do for your
+friend: I mean the gentleman you speak of--?" He gave out in short that
+he was ready.
+
+"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
+
+"Mr. Densher--is that his name?"
+
+"Yes--but his case isn't so dreadful." She had within a minute got away
+from that.
+
+"No doubt--if _you_ take an interest." She had got away, but it was as
+if he made out in her eyes--though they also had rather got away--a
+reason for calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can do--?"
+
+She looked at him while she thought, while she smiled. "I'm afraid
+there's really nothing one can do."
+
+
+III
+
+Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into
+possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was
+still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool
+pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun
+on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played
+over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of
+purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old
+reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all
+flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded
+and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of
+the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller
+lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with
+the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
+eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,
+though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count as
+effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she had
+been alone--really to call alone--since she had left London, it
+ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the great
+Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
+and Americans, had entered her service during the last hours of
+all--had crossed from Paris, after multiplied _pourparlers_ with Mrs.
+Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on
+purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had
+dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures
+of his experience. She had judged him in advance--polyglot and
+universal, very dear and very deep--as probably but a swindler finished
+to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian
+hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket,
+which, as she had instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
+glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common
+consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed
+the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely,
+grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them
+and what most expressed it.
+
+She had seen quickly enough what was happening--the usual thing again,
+yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of five minutes,
+understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so
+much of the care with which she must be taken up as of the care with
+which she must be let down. All the world understood her, all the world
+had got hold; but for nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
+close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender. Gracefully,
+respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and
+the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black
+professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too
+old to make love, but with an art still to make money--did he on
+occasion convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious
+career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal.
+The others had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment
+was special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:
+there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between them
+every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on
+the surface. He had taken his place already for her among those who
+were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in the constant
+perspective, for the final function, side by side with poor Susie--whom
+she was now pitying more than ever for having to be herself so sorry
+and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact of a
+residuary legatee--which was a character that could be definitely worn;
+whereas she could see Susie, in the event of her death, in no character
+at all, Susie being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
+makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,
+with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked to
+believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he probably
+knew--he didn't after all know everything--in having, for the wind-up
+of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly
+established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At
+Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it
+can be at all managed--you know what I mean--some fine old rooms,
+wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the
+more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
+picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves,
+with a cook, don't you know?--with servants, frescoes, tapestries,
+antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement."
+
+The proof of how he better and better understood her was in all the
+place; as to his masterly acquisition of which she had from the first
+asked no questions. She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
+and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the transaction that
+mainly concerned her she would soon enough become acquainted, and his
+connexion with such values as she would then find noted could scarce
+help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming people,
+conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her,
+and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes
+alike over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what
+they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated,
+and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed.
+Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a
+painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about
+with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable
+character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us
+back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this
+October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly
+to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the
+sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;
+always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
+penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid
+voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she
+had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these
+had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent
+her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or
+threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a
+multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett
+as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a
+rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
+Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the
+Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;
+improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers
+waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends
+in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the
+addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more
+insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by
+Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at
+Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
+Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"
+to which they had opened the door.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.
+Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the
+concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of
+the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so
+different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising
+them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once
+sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
+many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly
+fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the
+acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the
+eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,
+possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own
+sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of
+her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she
+mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such
+a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence
+induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the
+light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good
+time, and yet too rich and too befriended--an intuitive cunning within
+her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in
+short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert
+wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
+compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
+things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't
+have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw
+that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York
+what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a
+series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on
+Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it
+had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a
+century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool
+controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her
+particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the
+person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,
+aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
+simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,
+like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too
+that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this
+young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,
+on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made
+up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily
+put off the mask.
+
+These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken
+by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and
+not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side
+whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They
+flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have
+flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but
+the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been
+suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we
+say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by
+either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
+relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing
+to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in
+the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly to Kate's
+advantage: Milly didn't quite see what her friend could keep back, was
+possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas
+it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a
+treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, an abject
+affection--concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase
+of such states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively bold
+and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the
+lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was
+the truth about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus was a
+wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the
+far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of
+the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight
+that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a
+Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk,
+of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
+that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung
+about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and
+that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who
+exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening
+gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick dark
+braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train,
+makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief
+and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense.
+This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
+they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their
+words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be
+tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled
+to a care of what they said.
+
+There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular, of the
+probability that if she wasn't so proud she might be pitied with more
+comfort--more to the person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
+sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate attitude, that
+this marvellous mixture of her weakness and of her strength, her peril,
+if such it were, and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly
+interesting. Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much
+Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our
+Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
+moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
+about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate
+imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good
+conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to
+be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of
+their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as
+Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be
+explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt
+contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have
+contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:
+to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived
+so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;
+though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of
+the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With
+so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
+withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a
+nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of
+chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they
+took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to
+face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of
+harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,
+in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness
+need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.
+
+She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for
+weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her
+companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed
+and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
+wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a
+word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the
+beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care
+where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:
+so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was
+conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
+as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for
+her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased
+respites. Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
+strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all
+the same--weren't they?--those experiments tried with the truth that
+consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now
+playing with the thought that Eugenio might _inclusively_ assist her:
+he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really
+quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete
+use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It
+had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she
+should just stupidly and awkwardly _want_--any more want a life, a
+career, a consciousness, than want a house, a carriage or a cook. It
+was as if she had had from him a kind of expert professional measure of
+what he was in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
+thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could closely compare with
+a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's part that--at least in Palazzo
+Leporelli when mornings were fine--showed as almost amateurish. Sir
+Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and leave the rest to
+_me_"--which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared
+indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference to a
+different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor
+reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn't sure of having at her
+command. Eugenio--this was the difference--could name, could reckon,
+and prices of _his_ kind were things she had never suffered to scare
+her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for anything,
+for everything, and here was simply a new view of the sufficient
+quantity. She amused herself--for it came to that, since Eugenio was
+there to sign the receipt--with possibilities of meeting the bill. She
+was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to
+pay too much. What else--if such were points at which your most trusted
+servant failed--was the use of being, as the dear Susies of earth
+called you, a princess in a palace?
+
+She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful
+while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer
+blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
+it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was _in_ it, as in the ark
+of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why
+shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,
+never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than
+to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the
+real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the
+positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she
+had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a
+little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started
+on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
+Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was
+following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.
+He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never
+before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with
+patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
+though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd
+thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what
+had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five
+minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to
+see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,
+as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.
+He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him
+very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude
+more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was
+neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for
+the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to
+her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so
+thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the
+great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the
+high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears
+themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her
+consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf
+of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His
+presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how
+kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,
+unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for
+such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she
+hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
+receive him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly,
+as delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil
+it--these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they might
+have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge. She gave an
+account of her companions while he on his side failed to press her
+about them, even though describing his appearance, so unheralded, as
+the result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been shivering at
+Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing
+where they all were, he had simply caught the first train. He explained
+how he had known where they were; he had heard--what more
+natural?--from their friends, Milly's and his. He mentioned this
+betimes, but it was with his mention, singularly, that the girl became
+conscious of her inner question about his reason. She noticed his
+plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently
+noticed also that it didn't affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had
+written to him, Kate apparently--and this was interesting--had written
+to him; but their design presumably hadn't been that he should come and
+sit there as if rather relieved, so far as _they_ were concerned, at
+postponements. He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!" when she sketched
+their probable morning for him, under Eugenio's care and Mrs.
+Stringham's--sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he should
+overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would leave him
+temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a little, operated
+for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
+had known where they all were from the others, but it was not for the
+others that, in his actual dispositions, he had come. That, strange to
+say, was a pity; for, stranger still to say, she could have shown him
+more confidence if he himself had had less intention. His intention so
+chilled her, from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just
+for the pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of
+their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax of
+her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to
+reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten minutes,
+with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this clearly
+pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even though he
+couldn't know it--amends for her not having been originally sure, for
+instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
+human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at
+Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present
+benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
+that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the
+charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the
+pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for
+his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she
+mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general
+prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced
+her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find
+her susceptible.
+
+
+IV
+
+She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the
+whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful
+hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her
+visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection
+of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state
+in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in
+its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke
+with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled
+afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,
+yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as
+in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
+remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but
+the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they
+moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not
+to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her
+friend.
+
+"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase
+in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and
+bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
+
+She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not
+understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that
+the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"
+she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you
+happily found me."
+
+Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go
+about?"
+
+She looked over the place, the storey above the apartments in which she
+had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting
+the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the
+arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the
+canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
+white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But
+there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to
+anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her
+adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of
+not stirring. "I go about just here."
+
+"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"
+
+They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded
+palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a
+minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
+saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on
+the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the
+window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her
+forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
+answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She
+would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible
+for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even
+on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that
+from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless
+really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him
+thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the
+relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of
+relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with
+the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been
+determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be
+mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed
+within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
+herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what
+might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't
+her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage
+of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in
+whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be
+most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on
+her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive
+attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,
+appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the
+doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,
+disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:
+she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the
+handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.
+
+She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits
+her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush
+should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had
+early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact
+as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the
+present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of
+imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's
+cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her
+imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified
+itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her
+companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
+her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was
+that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and
+humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to
+be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as
+threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,
+making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
+probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what
+remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper
+incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
+had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?
+If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to
+raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better
+service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
+strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
+sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she
+wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would
+keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for
+himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded
+them within and without did so much toward making appreciative
+stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she
+hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she
+were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of
+it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,
+"and I don't want in the least to give it up."
+
+"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's
+_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"
+
+"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die
+here."
+
+Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a
+person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of
+darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.
+But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you
+in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and
+you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself
+here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion
+for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."
+
+"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"
+
+"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
+
+"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.
+England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my
+form."
+
+"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy
+it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for
+money enough."
+
+"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I
+shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking
+sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my
+great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and
+hunt me up."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.
+
+"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;
+rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."
+
+"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better
+for you than that."
+
+"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"
+
+He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of
+some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression
+of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the
+view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you remember
+something I said to you that day at Matcham--or at least fully meant
+to?"
+
+"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It's another life."
+
+"Certainly it will be--I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it
+to represent for you. Matcham, you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I
+think I tried to rub that into you a little."
+
+She met him with the full memory of what he had tried--not an inch, not
+an ounce of which was lost to her. "What I meant is that it seems a
+hundred years ago."
+
+"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember
+it," he pursued, "is that I was quite aware of what might have been
+said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I
+should perhaps be able to look after you--well, rather better. Rather
+better, of course, than certain other persons in particular."
+
+"Precisely--than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark promptly amended.
+
+It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could
+show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she
+had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
+made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the
+tears it had started at the time. "You could do so much for me, yes. I
+perfectly understood you."
+
+"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained, "to _fix_ your
+confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place."
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, you did--it's just exactly now, my confidence, where
+you put it then. The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now
+to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel
+you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."
+
+He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said
+them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are
+you _really_ in any trouble?"
+
+To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a
+little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything
+that's impossible. There are much better things you can do."
+
+He looked straight at it and then straight over it. "It's too monstrous
+that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know."
+
+"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a
+slight hardness. "Do you want to know if I'm badly ill?"
+
+The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested
+the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark
+winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude
+together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can
+see you suffer and not say a word?"
+
+"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public
+nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in
+itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
+anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And
+you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the
+remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for
+_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been
+unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm
+very badly ill."
+
+"And you don't do anything?"
+
+"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.
+One can't do more than live."
+
+"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why
+haven't you advice?"
+
+He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty
+things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most
+absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in
+the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in
+talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
+
+"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
+
+"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;
+now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself
+as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There
+she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she
+added, "have missed everything."
+
+"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,
+to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person
+in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call
+it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely
+require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you
+believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."
+
+Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or
+almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much
+worried."
+
+"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry
+you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.
+"You're not loved enough."
+
+"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
+
+"Why to get the full good of it."
+
+Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full
+good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in
+return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I
+might find myself forced to love _you?_"
+
+"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the
+least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion
+somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had
+absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single
+intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such
+shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,
+and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of
+existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is
+it inconceivable to you that you might try?"
+
+"To be so favourably affected by you--?"
+
+"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.
+
+Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"
+
+"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
+however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
+expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
+almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
+which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
+healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
+do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
+And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
+of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
+the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
+she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
+itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
+against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
+own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
+encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
+gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
+eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
+find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
+dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
+speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no
+decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
+practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
+only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
+alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
+wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
+about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
+disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
+in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
+like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
+brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
+having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
+her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
+to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
+innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
+some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
+meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
+it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
+couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
+fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
+had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
+her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
+quite ceased to be so.
+
+By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
+walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
+the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
+independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
+one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
+in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
+of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
+that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
+was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
+not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
+was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
+native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
+assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
+him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like
+another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the
+rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of
+his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said,
+reappeared for her--breaking out moreover, with an effect of
+strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of
+health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in
+the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a
+charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. "It's true, you know, all
+the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up."
+He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared.
+"Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference
+doesn't notice. And that's why I know that _I_ notice."
+
+"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather
+that affection was supposed to be blind."
+
+"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
+
+"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic
+complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of--are
+they beauties?"
+
+"Yes, for those who care for you--as every one does. Everything about
+you is a beauty. Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the
+seriousness of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should have _any_
+trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right
+thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know? You're the
+first young woman of your time. I mean what I say." He looked, to do
+him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear--simply so
+competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
+the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all
+in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
+if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
+simply to torment us--you were born to make us happy. Therefore you
+must listen to us."
+
+She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her
+mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you--that's just what I mustn't do.
+The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
+to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I
+give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be--"
+And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give--there you are;
+stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't
+listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
+can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
+say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
+
+He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
+because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
+"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
+in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
+if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
+
+She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
+point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
+events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
+being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
+his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
+nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
+wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
+usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
+convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
+first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
+allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
+you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
+listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
+listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
+you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
+older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
+at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
+honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
+in the world."
+
+When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
+more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
+had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
+apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
+coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
+asked.
+
+It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
+Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
+attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
+the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
+
+Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do you want me to marry
+Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar! But she
+wouldn't in any way have that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
+isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There's no cold
+world for you at all, I think," she went on; "nothing but a very warm
+and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment
+you choose to take it up."
+
+He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete and he
+had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you
+want me to marry Kate Croy?"
+
+"Mrs. Lowder wants it--I do no wrong, I think, in saying that; and she
+understands moreover that you know she does."
+
+Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it; and it wasn't obscure
+to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman.
+"It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But what's
+the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
+
+Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point out. "Because she's
+the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and
+because if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact I do as it
+is." It was a luxury of response.
+
+"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But that can't further
+the case of _all._"
+
+"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If the case of one's bad,
+the case of another's good. I don't see what you have to fear from any
+one else," she said, "save through your being foolish, this way, about
+_me_."
+
+So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making of
+what she didn't see. "Is it your idea--since we're talking of these
+things in these ways--that the young lady you describe in such
+superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But don't be humble." She
+was almost gay.
+
+It was this apparently, at last, that was too much for him. "But don't
+you really _know?_"
+
+As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence she could
+pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that
+a particular person's very much in love with her."
+
+"Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with
+a particular person."
+
+"Ah I beg your pardon!"--and Milly quite flushed at having so crude a
+blunder imputed to her. "You're wholly mistaken."
+
+"It's not true?"
+
+"It's not true."
+
+His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very sure?"
+
+"As sure as one can be"--and Milly's manner could match it--"when one
+has every assurance. I speak on the best authority."
+
+He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
+
+"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
+
+"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
+about her's so good."
+
+"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
+her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
+you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
+from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
+emphasis, pulled up.
+
+"You take it from Kate?"
+
+"From Kate herself."
+
+"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
+
+"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
+given me her word for it."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
+word?"
+
+It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
+instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
+little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
+_you_ call her word?"
+
+"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
+
+Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
+especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
+that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
+things."
+
+Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
+of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
+
+Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
+sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
+the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
+saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
+Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
+
+"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
+interest--"
+
+"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
+
+Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
+again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."
+
+At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
+thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
+had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
+couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
+signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further;
+he fell back on the spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
+rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should
+she be swearing to you?"
+
+She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to herself; which
+disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the
+aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
+part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you, we're such
+tremendous friends."
+
+"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have
+stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as
+if he had in a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
+Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to leave-taking, that
+she had given rather more than she intended or than she should be able,
+when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
+Strange enough in fact that he had had from her, about herself--and,
+under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight--what no
+one else had had: neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor
+Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was
+aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take
+himself off, so that she might either recover it or bear the loss
+better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time
+saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
+sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed
+for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most
+decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the
+theory that she might whimsically want him--which she never, in her
+caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes
+over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
+could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too noiseless almost for
+her nerves, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a
+ship--Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
+held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card. Lord Mark--and as
+if also for admiration of him--delayed his departure to let her receive
+it; on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her
+presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that
+even for dealing with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its
+disappearance. The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had
+asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
+come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
+the staircase.
+
+"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
+while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
+great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
+judgement of his identity heard and noted once before
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
+more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
+discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
+polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
+mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
+touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
+but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
+it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
+made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
+at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
+been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
+pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
+notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
+and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
+lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
+tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
+should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
+shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
+end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
+independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
+occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
+with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
+humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
+befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
+in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
+his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
+figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
+his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he
+responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
+arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
+weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
+home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
+museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
+something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
+for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
+subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
+lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
+white papers.
+
+He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
+there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
+the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
+and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
+Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
+two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
+even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
+had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
+sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
+taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
+parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
+that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
+especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
+up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
+him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
+whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
+of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
+landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
+such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
+intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
+alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
+strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
+easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
+when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
+made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
+with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
+much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
+her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
+his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
+angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
+complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
+star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
+American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
+certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
+was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
+in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
+always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
+least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
+admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
+wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
+palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
+a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
+therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
+the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
+they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
+through space.
+
+Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
+suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
+his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
+see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
+image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
+the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
+his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
+Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
+been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
+difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
+which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
+of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
+make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
+even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
+across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
+past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
+general necessity of which he was conscious? That necessity of making
+the best was the instinct--as he indeed himself knew--of a man somehow
+aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he
+took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
+the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute
+and admit the light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly
+because he was nervous that he _could_ go straight; yet if that
+condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in
+short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the
+proprieties--once he could face at all remaining there--reduced
+themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him,
+and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one
+foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
+management of him. It wasn't that she had put him in danger--to be in
+real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
+him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having; an exasperation, a
+resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
+to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It
+was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless
+that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from
+the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called
+it, _bon prince_ with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity,
+the contempt, in the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
+savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There
+were things enough, goodness knew--for it was the moral of his
+plight--that he couldn't afford; but what had had a charm for him if
+not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way?
+of not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap
+edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
+actually as present as ever--how he had admired and envied what he
+called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from his
+own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only
+it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now, ever so
+characteristically, standing out in her.
+
+It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily, that he was just
+where he was and that he was above all just _how_ he was. The proof of
+a decent reaction in him against so much passivity was, with no great
+richness, that he at least knew--knew, that is, how he was, and how
+little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was,
+for the moment, wistful--that above all described it; that was so large
+a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him,
+on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question
+connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered
+soreness, his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame
+were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
+regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
+conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved,
+had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously--ridiculously
+so far as just complacently--exposed to. How little it _could_ be
+complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had
+moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it,
+was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. How
+could he know--that was the point--without putting the matter to the
+test? It had been right to be _bon prince,_ and the joy, something of
+the pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now
+compatible with the impulse to look into their account; but he held his
+breath a little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that,
+whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
+done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea of
+the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself,
+in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
+night--"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of--to the glimmer,
+more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers
+on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had
+been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and
+reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he had found his answer
+to the idea that had grown so importunate. Since a proof of his will
+was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him--it lurked there
+on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little pier had from
+time to time accosted him; but it was a part of the play of his
+nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he
+walked, very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto.
+The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
+with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
+ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
+their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
+veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
+in on the morrow.
+
+He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
+first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
+merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
+he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
+in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
+gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
+evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
+in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
+high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
+this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
+his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
+as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
+go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
+autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
+It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
+things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
+as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
+soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
+view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
+company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
+to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
+foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
+gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
+response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
+instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
+shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
+failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
+planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
+She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
+her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
+announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing
+and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
+two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
+by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
+his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
+she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
+friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
+there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
+point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
+would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
+Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
+recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
+in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
+was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
+was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
+impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
+appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
+gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
+motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
+it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
+before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
+dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
+in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
+of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
+hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
+game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
+one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
+him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
+advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
+himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
+possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
+already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
+beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
+things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
+but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
+would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple were for
+_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
+admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
+to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.
+
+That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
+came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
+plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
+hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
+act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
+in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
+supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
+the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
+the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
+familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
+after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
+insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
+idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
+that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
+how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
+reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
+hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
+written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
+his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
+find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
+ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
+as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
+Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
+had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
+had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
+remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
+attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
+were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
+little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
+off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
+solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
+simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
+with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she
+had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate
+declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his
+general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits,
+to be a mode of life like another--certainly better than some, and
+particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he
+had really come for--this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the
+style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high
+wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when
+there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
+wrong.
+
+In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing,
+the interest of seeing--and quite for the first time in his
+life--whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to
+happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never
+doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure--he who had never
+thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was
+able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his
+hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was
+finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
+_campi_, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
+at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the
+enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall
+deserted--during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to
+the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are
+the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but
+as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of
+Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as
+painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that
+departure wouldn't curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and
+that above all, as he hadn't really "begun" anything, had only
+submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
+beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
+superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications
+was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman--to which
+was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that
+complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of
+the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten
+to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
+women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
+never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
+had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
+a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
+from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
+to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
+brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
+suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
+brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
+was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
+gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
+poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
+dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
+conditions, than any ever known to him.
+
+This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
+scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
+himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
+frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
+he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
+her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
+observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
+effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
+imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
+dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
+ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
+well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
+off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
+that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
+advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
+even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
+in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
+really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
+were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
+effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
+his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
+propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
+breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
+passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
+himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
+state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
+produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
+which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
+her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
+at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
+influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
+had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
+from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
+it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
+with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
+more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
+at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
+in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
+Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
+as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
+in New York.
+
+
+II
+
+There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
+he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
+answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
+His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
+Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
+chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
+the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
+rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
+grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
+note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
+visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
+of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
+expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
+very much out of our meetings?"
+
+"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
+I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
+Maud."
+
+"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand what Aunt Maud
+gets."
+
+"Exactly so--and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so
+fascinated with the question. _She_ gives me no light; she's
+prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural--!"
+
+"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate I shall be making my
+reflexions about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on,
+"that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that
+what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The
+very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for
+yourself, is that when she adopts a view she--well, to her own sense,
+really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any
+other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've
+often thought success comes to her"--Kate continued to study the
+phenomenon--"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to
+prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of
+everything, become the right one."
+
+Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response.
+"Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn't not
+'understand.' I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently
+explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he
+pursued: "Does she think she terrorises _us?_" To which he added while,
+without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
+believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He
+knew now that he was probing the girl deep--something told him so; but
+that was a reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that you
+dislike me?"
+
+To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong. "You could yourself
+easily put it there!"
+
+He wondered. "By telling her so?"
+
+"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; "I don't ask that
+of you."
+
+"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask, you know, so little--!"
+
+There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist
+the impulse to take up. "I'm perfectly justified in what I've asked,"
+she quietly returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their eyes
+again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. "You're
+not a bit unhappy."
+
+"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
+
+"It doesn't practically show--which is enough for Aunt Maud. You're
+wonderful, you're beautiful," Kate said; "and if you really want to
+know whether I believe you're doing it you may take from me perfectly
+that I see it coming." With which, by a quick transition, as if she had
+settled the case, she asked him the hour.
+
+"Oh only twelve-ten"--he had looked at his watch. "We've taken but
+thirteen minutes; we've time yet."
+
+"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
+
+Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of
+the Square. "They're still in their shop. They're safe for half an
+hour."
+
+"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
+
+This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco,
+always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber
+of amenity, favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
+middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse
+after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and
+pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast
+empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement
+and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice
+of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the
+parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual
+feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions
+hadn't yet been, and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
+by the lace-shop, in one of the _loggie_, where, shortly before, they
+had left them for a look-in--the expression was artfully Densher's--at
+Saint Mark's. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought
+this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn't
+been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that
+could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
+in presence--in presence of every one; every one consisting at this
+juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly.
+But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become
+special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of
+their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had
+assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the least
+the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the
+fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace,
+Milly had not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom and use
+had hitherto seemed fairly established; on his coming round, day after
+day--eight days had been now so conveniently marked--their friends,
+Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her
+till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he
+had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there
+was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He
+_had_, for Mrs. Lowder--he couldn't help it while sitting there--the
+air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
+sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess
+each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that
+she hadn't been well enough to see him.
+
+That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which,
+gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all
+bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
+they--the rest of them--simply looked at each other. It was
+lurid--lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately--that they
+had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above
+all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to _that_ degree, the hush of
+gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the
+most the case--that of the guests--could permit itself. The hush, for
+that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the
+gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she
+hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had
+produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one
+quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for
+the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
+his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
+pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs.
+Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any
+of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in
+exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure,
+approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at
+home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the
+slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a
+preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond
+dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
+away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had,
+the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality in her own
+failure of real acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
+sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had by this time a
+corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at
+Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action,
+ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the
+most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest.
+They were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there were too
+many persons, at least three, and too many things, between them; but
+meanwhile something was preparing that would draw them closer. He
+scarce knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when
+it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood
+him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the
+understanding of every one else would fail and this deep little
+person's alone survive.
+
+Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that
+hung about our young friends; these had been the small accidents and
+quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some
+sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they
+stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so
+notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than
+any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from
+earshot, with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession,
+they could say what they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence
+of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It
+was most of all for them, moreover, as if this very quantity, seated on
+their lips in the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
+ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each a fear.
+There might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the
+silence resting on her last words. "What did you mean just now that I
+can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you will,
+I don't see, from the moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
+lying."
+
+Well, she could tell him. "You can say something both handsome and
+sincere to her about Milly--whom you honestly like so much. That
+wouldn't be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an effect. You
+don't, you know, say much about her."
+
+And Kate put before him the fruit of observation. "You don't, you know,
+speak of her at all."
+
+"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told you so?" Then as the girl,
+for answer, only seemed to bethink herself, "You must have
+extraordinary conversations!" he exclaimed.
+
+Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary conversations."
+
+His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed to hear more
+about them; but there was something in her own, apparently, that
+defeated the opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a different
+matter, which had been in his mind a week, yet in respect to which he
+had had no chance so good as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such
+wonderful things pass between you, what she makes of the incident, the
+other day, of Lord Mark's so very superficial visit?--his having spent
+here, as I gather, but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
+friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off by the same
+night's train, for seeing any one else. What can she make of his not
+having waited to see _you_, or to see herself--with all he owes her?"
+
+"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He came to make Milly his
+offer of marriage--he came for nothing but that. As Milly wholly
+declined it his business was for the time at an end. He couldn't quite
+on the spot turn round to make up to _us_."
+
+Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of taste on such an
+adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't see it. But Densher was lost in
+another thought. "Do you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
+leaving her, that was what had been taking place between them?"
+
+"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
+
+"What sort of a blundering weathercock then _is_ he?" the young man
+went on in his wonder.
+
+"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled. "Do you pretend that
+Milly didn't tell you?"
+
+"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
+
+Kate continued to smile. "You _are_ in love with her, you know."
+
+He gave her another long look. "Why, since she has refused him, should
+my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think
+well of him for such treatment of the other persons I've mentioned, and
+I feel I don't understand from you why Mrs. Lowder should."
+
+"She doesn't--but she doesn't care," Kate explained. "You know
+perfectly the terms on which lots of London people live together even
+when they're supposed to live very well. He's not committed to us--he
+was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied man," she asked, "always have
+his try?"
+
+"And come back afterwards, with confidence in a welcome, to the victim
+of his inconstancy?"
+
+Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of as a victim. "Oh but
+he has _had_ his try at _me_. So it's all right."
+
+"Through your also having, you mean, refused him?"
+
+She balanced an instant during which Densher might have just wondered
+if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped
+on the right side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
+discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on--now as lucid as
+ever--"considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him in respect
+to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
+As the case stands that makes no difference."
+
+Densher laughed out. "It isn't _his_ merit that he has failed."
+
+"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark. He's just what he
+was, and what he knew he was. It's not for me either to reflect on him
+after I've so treated him."
+
+"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated him beautifully."
+
+"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be jealous." But before he
+could take it up she had more to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle
+you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
+else can displease her. What does she see but that Milly herself
+recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a
+recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
+your own recognition. Out of which she therefore gets it that the more
+you have for Milly the less you have for me."
+
+There were moments again--we know that from the first they had been
+numerous--when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her
+mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at
+once to conviction and to reaction. And this effect, however it be
+named, now broke into his tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have
+for you--!"
+
+It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. "Luckily for us we may
+really consider she doesn't. So successful have we been."
+
+"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what you give me, and I
+suppose that, to be consistent--to stand on my feet where I do stand at
+all--I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to
+me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It
+seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me. It never
+seems to me somehow what I may expect of _you_. There's so much you
+_don't_ give me."
+
+She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I don't--?"
+
+"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me none."
+
+"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment ventured to ask.
+
+"Your doing something for me."
+
+She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing _this_ for you? Do you
+call this nothing?"
+
+"Nothing at all."
+
+"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
+
+They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. "I
+thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you
+risk nothing!"
+
+It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he
+had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant moreover that she
+didn't like it--either the being so or the being seen, for she soon
+spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that
+produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of
+indulgence. "What then do you wish me to risk?"
+
+The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would
+have said, worse. "What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this
+rate that I _am_?" Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely
+disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't.
+Deep, always, was his sense of life with her--deep as it had been from
+the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two
+winters ago they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for
+unguarded, ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
+intenser faith between them this was because he believed it could reach
+her and she could meet it. "I can go on perhaps," he said, "with help.
+But I can't go on without."
+
+She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. "We
+ought to be there--I mean when they come out."
+
+"They _won't_ come out--not yet. And I don't care if they do." To which
+he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that
+his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make:
+"Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?" It broke
+from him in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only _take_ me!"
+
+It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after
+all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than
+bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her
+an instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less pulled herself
+together to reply. "Do you want to kill her?"
+
+He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt
+Maud?"
+
+"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."
+
+Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"
+
+He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had
+naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank
+you very much."
+
+Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already
+risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance
+of it I'll go this very night."
+
+"Then go," said Kate Croy.
+
+He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what
+was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but
+much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They
+walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had
+become of a sudden, in all truth, a split--as if the basis of his
+departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
+recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the
+arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that
+produced for them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any your
+idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
+
+"Come to you?"
+
+"Come to me."
+
+"How? Where?"
+
+She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in
+her being so equal to him. "To my rooms, which are perfectly possible,
+and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt,
+in view. We can arrange it--with two grains of courage. People in our
+case always arrange it." She listened as for the good information, and
+there was support for him--since it was a question of his going step by
+step--in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had
+in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence
+of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
+possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to
+_see_ her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
+light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
+listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet
+done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
+beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a
+fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. _With_
+you I can do it--I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself.
+Without you--I'll be hanged! And I must be sure."
+
+She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased
+to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing her close, and though
+they had again, for the time, stopped walking, his talk--for others at
+a distance--might have been, in the matchless place, that of any
+impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. On
+possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
+afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of which his eyes moved
+while she twiddled her parasol. She now, however, made a motion that
+confronted them finally with the opposite end. Then only she
+spoke--"Please take your hand out of my arm." He understood at once:
+she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others
+from their place of purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
+was all right. The others had seen them as well and waited for them,
+complacent enough, under one of the arches. They themselves too--he
+argued that Kate would argue--looked perfectly ready, decently patient,
+properly accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse--always
+by Kate's system--than a pair of the children of a supercivilised age
+making the best of an awkwardness. They didn't nevertheless hurry--that
+would overdo it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
+felt, ever so distinctly--it was with this he faced Mrs. Lowder--that
+he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted. There was more
+to come--everything; he had by no means, with his companion, had it all
+out. Yet what he was possessed of was real--the fact that she hadn't
+thrown over his lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
+this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled was in itself
+of the nature of bliss. The danger had dropped--it was behind him there
+in the great sunny space. So far she was good for what he wanted.
+
+
+III
+
+She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening,
+and with further ground for it, the next sharpest question that had
+been on his lips in the morning--which his other preoccupation had
+then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity was again
+made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as
+usual, with the close of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them
+again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down
+later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where
+even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
+daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
+it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
+with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
+illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
+candles.
+
+"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"
+
+He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
+glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
+was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
+ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
+everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
+him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
+as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
+practically been none, that morning, on her explained
+non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
+awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
+licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
+the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
+function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
+against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
+was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
+himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
+curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
+have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
+have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
+was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
+established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
+feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
+deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
+interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
+cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
+have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
+represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
+the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
+his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
+wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
+terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
+fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
+no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
+rest was fully to come.
+
+He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
+of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
+experience."
+
+"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
+feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
+should like to say to you."
+
+"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.
+
+"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
+seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."
+
+He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
+was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
+of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
+with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."
+
+"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
+better."
+
+"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
+been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."
+
+"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
+only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
+point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
+
+Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
+You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
+little party."
+
+"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."
+
+"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
+for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
+mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
+It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
+dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
+effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
+should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
+charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
+thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
+Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
+the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
+attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
+everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
+few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
+respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
+ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
+_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
+see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
+too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
+was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
+her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
+
+He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
+into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
+
+"Well, that you'll stay on."
+
+"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
+he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
+
+"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
+songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
+arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
+in the picture."
+
+"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
+
+"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
+his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
+that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
+few days."
+
+Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
+comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
+had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
+smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
+pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
+unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
+acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
+explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
+partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
+for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
+would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
+of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
+infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
+these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
+on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
+thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
+breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
+floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very
+tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
+pinch, the pressure in London."
+
+But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the
+pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. "Oh the
+daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
+knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious
+deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've
+given up all to follow _her_. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't
+you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
+
+He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did;
+and he smiled for her kindly. "Do _you_ write about Venice?"
+
+"No; but I would--oh wouldn't I?--if I hadn't so completely given up.
+She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess--"
+
+"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
+
+"Precisely. There you are!"
+
+It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places
+at once. "I quite understand that she's yours. Only you see she's not
+mine." He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the
+moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder,
+who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he
+liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave
+him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in
+itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent
+and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could
+see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
+was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate
+wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
+way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then
+Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly
+what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the
+midst. Such perceptions made occasions--well, occasions for fairly
+wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to _be_
+the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in
+it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no
+male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a
+man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke
+Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of
+Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a
+distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
+vision of great London surgeons--if this one was a surgeon--as incisive
+all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
+ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was
+not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a
+train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
+Mark had caught him twice in the fact--the fact of his absurd posture;
+and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind
+Lord Mark.
+
+His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm
+her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess. "Of
+course she's not. You must do something first."
+
+Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be rather _she_ who must?"
+
+It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. "I
+see. No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in
+eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the
+wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
+
+It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course she has. No one could
+be more charming. She has treated me as if _I_ were somebody. Call her
+my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you
+altogether. Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see
+that it's quite court life."
+
+She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. "That's
+all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of
+the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
+vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
+
+"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you
+know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
+
+"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty
+here; it's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her
+court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
+settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
+
+He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. "I think you
+were right just now. One must do something first."
+
+"Well, you've done something."
+
+"No--I don't see that. I can do more."
+
+Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
+everything, you know."
+
+"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
+modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
+different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
+if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
+
+"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
+"He has wanted to come."
+
+"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"
+
+"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
+these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
+him easy."
+
+"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
+"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"
+
+"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
+one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."
+
+"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."
+
+"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."
+
+"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
+large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."
+
+It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
+him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
+showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
+he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
+Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."
+
+"And why should he get at me?"
+
+"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."
+
+All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
+immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
+sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
+to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
+half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
+ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
+call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
+Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
+opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
+of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
+a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
+some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
+seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
+no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
+together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
+the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
+the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
+care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
+without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
+had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
+the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
+differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
+let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
+into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
+if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
+not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
+traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
+almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
+accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
+yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
+him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
+the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
+challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
+having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
+reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
+change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
+was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
+amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
+visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
+Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
+perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
+the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
+couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
+himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
+put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
+cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
+a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
+nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
+between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
+ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
+consciousness brushed by him.
+
+She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
+some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
+inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
+that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
+appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
+display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
+her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
+at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
+he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
+company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
+her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
+world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
+in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
+most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
+was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
+word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
+introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
+toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
+affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
+what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
+done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
+done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
+interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
+from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
+him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
+getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
+could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
+or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
+herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
+that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
+pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
+her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
+such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that
+her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave
+him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted
+him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
+minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived
+long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to
+be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was
+a liking greater than Milly's--or it would be: he felt it in him to
+answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that
+Kate was somehow--for Kate--wanting in lustre. As a striking young
+presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly
+diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
+dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
+indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
+perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
+wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes--he had never forgotten
+it--the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She
+was, in her accepted effacement--it was actually her acceptance that
+made the beauty and repaired the damage--under her aunt's eyes now; but
+whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the
+less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an
+exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
+
+"Don't you think her good enough _now?_" Almost heedless of the danger
+of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
+renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little
+orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference
+enlivened by native humours--things quite in the line of old Venetian
+comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy--a real solvent of
+shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
+general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good
+manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but
+of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at
+all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
+
+"But she's _too_ nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything
+suits her so--especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll
+trouble you really to look at them." Densher, though aware he had seen
+them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
+done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
+kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
+face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
+wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
+wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
+of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
+presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
+somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
+the ground."
+
+"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
+her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
+companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
+figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
+that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
+under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
+power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
+one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
+well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
+such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
+he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
+that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
+Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
+nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
+a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
+presently going on.
+
+"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
+
+"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
+
+"Oh yes, I see myself!"
+
+As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
+and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
+ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
+character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
+was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
+well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
+Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
+difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
+represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was
+nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
+married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
+little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
+afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
+only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
+come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
+good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
+better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
+me about it. She evidently believes her better."
+
+"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"
+
+"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"
+
+"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
+Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
+be taught.
+
+"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
+
+It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
+nothing to do with it."
+
+"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
+
+But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
+doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
+watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
+kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
+inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
+been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
+
+"It's beautiful indeed."
+
+He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
+no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
+Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
+can't deceive him."
+
+Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
+you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
+sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"
+
+Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
+doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
+direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
+precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
+and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
+to you."
+
+"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
+
+"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
+to the previous question, "to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's
+necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can
+see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to
+do with me."
+
+"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
+
+"For not caring for _you?_ Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven
+by it into your relation with Milly--as all _that_ I leave you to him."
+
+"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for
+leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
+
+She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her
+place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of
+introducing him. "All the more reason why I should commit you then to
+Lady Wells."
+
+"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from
+afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at
+the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of
+whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when
+they were married. It was furthermore that the consciousness of
+something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically
+much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments--to
+say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of
+opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud,
+over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might
+pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to
+confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
+now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
+immediately to show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any
+finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're
+right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs.
+Lowder's being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued,
+"can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't
+deceive other people--not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He
+won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest
+friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud,
+who's her own."
+
+Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth
+his having kept her for. "Why will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing
+your way so little."
+
+Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick,
+its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to
+a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
+his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
+turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
+see it!"
+
+"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
+nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
+you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
+
+"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
+
+"To please you."
+
+"And how in the world can it please me?"
+
+Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
+density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
+Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
+there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
+
+He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
+corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
+queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
+But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
+on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
+so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
+
+"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
+
+Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
+difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
+yours does serve me."
+
+"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
+gains you time."
+
+"Time for what?"
+
+"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
+as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
+
+Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
+cryptic, love!"
+
+It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
+those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
+a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
+he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
+dreamed I should take for any human creature."
+
+Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
+reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
+can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
+again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
+make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. There need be nothing
+but our sense of each other."
+
+It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took
+up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. "You can tell
+her anything you like, anything whatever."
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? I _have_ nothing to tell her."
+
+"You can tell her about _us_. I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that
+you do still like me."
+
+It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still
+like me."
+
+She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat
+it."
+
+"I see. To Aunt Maud."
+
+"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate
+then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he
+was; and she showed it again as she went on. "_There_, accordingly, is
+your time."
+
+She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke,
+though not quite all at once. "You must let me say I _do_ see. Time for
+something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time
+too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
+
+"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of
+concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully
+made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll
+do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them."
+
+He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was
+only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly
+fitted. "Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
+
+It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no
+wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to
+their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
+bravely moved. "To marry her."
+
+"So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course
+have money?"
+
+It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had
+only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all
+along--to his stupidity, his timidity--it had been, it had been only,
+what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn't
+forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't
+pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as
+if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. "You'll in
+the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free."
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to Lady Wells."
+
+He never budged--there was too much else. "I'm to propose it
+then--marriage--on the spot?"
+
+There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he
+spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof.
+"Oh I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash
+your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act as you
+like and as you can."
+
+He thought again. "I'm far--as I sufficiently showed you this
+morning--from washing my hands of you."
+
+"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
+
+"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll come?"
+
+But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant.
+"You'll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance--well, quite ideal."
+
+"Your descriptions"--her "ideal" was such a touch!--"are prodigious.
+And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
+
+"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I
+don't like."
+
+It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into
+this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled
+his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the
+greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too,
+moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what _he_ did. But
+something else on his lips was uppermost. "What I don't make out then
+is how you can even bear it."
+
+"Well, when you know me better you'll find out how much I can bear."
+And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many
+implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually,
+"better" after his long sacrifice to knowledge--this for instance was a
+truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had
+mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own
+generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she
+might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying
+him on. "All you'll have to do will be to stay."
+
+"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
+
+"Oh dear no--we shall go."
+
+"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
+
+"In a day or two--straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now."
+
+It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then what becomes of
+Miss Theale?"
+
+"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her."
+
+He stared. "All alone?"
+
+She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. "You're old
+enough--with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
+
+Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it,
+as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these
+successive cues, that he was essentially "seeing what she would
+say"--an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a
+need to know her better to which she had a moment before done
+injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams that she would
+somewhere break down, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she
+wasn't breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. "Is
+your going Mrs. Lowder's idea?"
+
+"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I
+don't," she added, "refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of
+the general propriety of it."
+
+"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment. "It makes
+everything fit."
+
+"Everything."
+
+The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the
+while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he
+had in fact been looking at something else. "You leave her here then to
+die?"
+
+"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay. I mean," Kate
+explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
+
+"And that's all that's necessary?"
+
+Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we long ago agree that what
+she believes is the principal thing for us?"
+
+He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. "Oh yes.
+I can't deny it." Then he added: "So that if I stay--"
+
+"It won't"--she was prompt--"be our fault."
+
+"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
+
+"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
+
+Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing
+more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn't
+presently found: "But what if she doesn't accept me?"
+
+It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her
+tone the next moment touch him. "You can but try."
+
+"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard
+to propose to a dying girl."
+
+"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined in Kate the
+flash of _justesse_ he could perhaps most, on consideration, have
+admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the
+fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her
+eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
+literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to
+where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so
+that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side,
+happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them
+in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the
+value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together
+again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their
+plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
+only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out
+afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last
+spoke it was under cover.
+
+"I might stay, you know, without trying."
+
+"Oh to stay _is_ to try."
+
+"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?"
+
+"I don't see how you can have the appearance more."
+
+Densher waited. "You think it then possible she may _offer_ marriage?"
+
+"I can't think--if you really want to know--what she may _not_ offer!"
+
+"In the manner of princesses, who do such things?"
+
+"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
+
+Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be for me then to
+accept. But that's the way it must come."
+
+Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: "You'll,
+on your honour, stay then?"
+
+His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. "Without
+you, you mean?"
+
+"Without us."
+
+"And you yourselves go at latest--?"
+
+"Not later than Thursday."
+
+It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay, on my honour, if
+you'll come to me. On your honour."
+
+Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigour out of
+which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigour was more to
+him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the
+woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a "dodge."
+She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain.
+Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady Wells is
+tired of waiting: she's coming--see--to _us_."
+
+Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to
+cross, and he still had time. "If you decline to understand me I wholly
+decline to understand you. I'll do nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
+
+"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
+
+He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase
+was--and for vulgar triumphs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
+Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
+understand?"
+
+"I'll do everything."
+
+She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
+playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
+relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
+sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
+conflict. "Well, I understand."
+
+"On your honour?"
+
+"On my honour."
+
+"You'll come?"
+
+"I'll come."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK NINTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
+most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
+the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
+within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
+that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
+it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
+hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
+risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
+engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
+name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
+come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
+importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
+memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
+itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
+watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
+with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
+futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
+not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
+bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
+yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
+survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
+have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
+there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
+a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
+had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
+ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
+this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
+directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
+historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
+convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
+present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
+and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
+in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
+and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
+value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
+possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
+round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?
+
+It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
+treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
+finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
+key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
+and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
+other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
+hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
+whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
+as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
+be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
+play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
+remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
+orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
+slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
+importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
+occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
+acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
+sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
+approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
+third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
+profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
+broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
+anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
+up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
+engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
+the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
+way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been
+magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
+items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
+outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
+fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
+spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
+chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
+was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
+warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
+it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
+it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
+still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
+him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
+which the other name was careful action.
+
+Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
+immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
+faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
+straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
+time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
+was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
+as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
+always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
+had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
+after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
+free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
+_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
+it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
+left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
+made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
+inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
+what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
+virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
+there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
+Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
+that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
+case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
+well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He
+then fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at its
+highest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
+Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
+neither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged it
+was. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he was
+concerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
+and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more than
+anything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed
+a little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask
+himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for
+them--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
+and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,
+however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not to
+profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go
+directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered
+in Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go
+directly against Milly.
+
+To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,
+from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was
+possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on
+the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactly
+why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of
+the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach
+out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It
+was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be
+almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and
+call it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,
+of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
+couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered
+about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe
+it; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, he
+could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he
+was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet
+Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never
+took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none
+the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving
+them alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
+with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
+supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
+pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
+three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
+degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
+incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
+Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
+some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
+last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
+induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
+lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
+respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
+only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
+palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
+in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
+
+Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
+ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
+creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
+relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
+very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
+to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
+young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
+truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
+way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
+didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
+following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
+which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
+him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
+have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
+sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
+token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
+had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
+sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
+London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
+appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,
+out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
+uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
+meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
+everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
+by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
+their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
+would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
+so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
+for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
+half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
+hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
+mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
+thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
+letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
+inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
+yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
+
+These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
+whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
+on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
+Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
+felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
+sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
+the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
+to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
+inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
+scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
+letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
+of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
+Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
+difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
+explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.
+
+The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"
+
+"I hope to begin it."
+
+"It's something you haven't begun?"
+
+"Well, only just."
+
+"And since you came?"
+
+She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
+easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
+ground."
+
+Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper.
+"I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."
+
+"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to
+repair that ravage."
+
+"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
+
+"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mind
+anything."
+
+"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your
+days."
+
+He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh
+I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."
+And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he
+visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for
+comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
+also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
+effort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was so
+interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he
+found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
+answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
+particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea
+with him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
+on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--the
+extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.
+Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,
+he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though
+it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
+top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,
+deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not been
+modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
+likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.
+It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; that
+glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
+sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it would
+serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten
+Milly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less
+wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
+casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put
+his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it be
+safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"
+
+"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
+he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
+soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
+she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
+her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
+not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
+saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
+the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
+life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
+couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
+Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
+bad?"
+
+He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
+mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
+believe whatever you tell me."
+
+"Well then, I'm splendid."
+
+"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
+
+"I mean I'm capable of life."
+
+"I've never doubted it."
+
+"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"
+
+"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
+
+"Well, that I know I _can_."
+
+"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
+
+"Whatever I do. If I want to."
+
+"If you want to do it?"
+
+"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
+
+He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
+pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
+
+"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
+turned for him to mere light and sound.
+
+He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"
+
+It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
+why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
+
+"Will it help you to live?"
+
+"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
+general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"
+
+"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
+
+"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
+
+It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
+him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
+inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
+when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
+
+What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
+of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
+face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for
+something else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about it
+and that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's no
+matter."
+
+"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
+
+"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
+
+It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at
+any rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."
+
+"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
+
+"You mean you won't come to me?"
+
+"No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart from
+that," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm
+not forced to."
+
+"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at
+all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the least
+coercible of creatures."
+
+"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
+
+"The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."
+
+"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
+
+On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you
+don't complain."
+
+As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His
+telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas
+his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
+gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well
+have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the
+way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she
+took him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one sees
+one's way."
+
+"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
+
+"I mean to keeping what one has."
+
+"Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,
+"it's enough to try for."
+
+"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she added
+with a change: "And now about your book."
+
+"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
+
+"The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie
+or me to run the risk of spoiling."
+
+He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not doing a book."
+
+"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"
+
+He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm
+doing."
+
+It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was
+afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he
+feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
+didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of
+the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly
+wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps
+able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,
+she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see
+her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
+
+"Then if it's not for your book--?"
+
+"What _am_ I staying for?"
+
+"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it rather
+empty for you?"
+
+"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose
+marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally
+begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a
+loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the
+vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
+
+"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could
+protest. "You stay because you've got to."
+
+He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have
+said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It
+gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
+Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
+He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission
+from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either
+niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the
+girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he
+was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he
+thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's
+other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
+
+"Oh you must judge."
+
+He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too
+restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that
+was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
+kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was
+staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against
+her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
+didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or
+worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_
+judging!"
+
+
+II
+
+He didn't go home, on leaving her--he didn't want to; he walked
+instead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, to
+a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more
+than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with
+solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
+It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
+leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror
+and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might
+have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
+because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen
+his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took
+sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
+When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly
+on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on
+the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
+seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
+mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pass
+everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
+a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her
+deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have
+close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his
+hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on
+the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the
+cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made
+him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for
+three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more
+cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him
+had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action
+itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference
+even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep
+from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil
+lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might
+have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
+
+What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the
+perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to
+destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his
+really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing
+so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another a
+catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
+be better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion might
+either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these
+considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously
+amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all
+with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without
+the girl's leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,
+whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to this
+his wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. That
+was the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum of
+vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall
+of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step
+would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
+when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn't at this
+juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was
+wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the
+idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap,
+and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported
+him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to
+dinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he should
+probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should
+be able to be still enough through everything.
+
+He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not
+having failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't
+trying--quite the contrary--to be either distant or dull. That would
+not have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.
+That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; so
+that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as
+it were, to let himself go--go in the direction, that is to say, of
+staying. It depended on where he went; which was what he meant by
+taking care. When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreat
+without betraying the manoeuvre. Perfect tact--the necessity for which
+he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised--was to keep all
+intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus
+for instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
+well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the
+relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,
+at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
+of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't
+diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as
+possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping
+her, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for want
+of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many words
+speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to
+intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was
+an impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he was
+careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all
+was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
+elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not
+stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within
+bounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much
+disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the
+queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,
+even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
+in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of
+facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have
+to be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, without
+prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as
+doing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judge
+where it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other at
+the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,
+and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and
+yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the
+line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for
+us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what
+figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above
+and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
+been felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not the
+national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,
+in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he could
+unlimitedly take for granted.
+
+He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the
+undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his
+nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to
+mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. All
+women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but
+the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,
+practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character
+that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual
+non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days
+had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the
+information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." The
+announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the
+gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the
+knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,
+could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli
+among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among
+the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he
+recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of
+the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not
+prepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared to
+say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher
+mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in
+whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but a
+place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always
+ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour
+the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, any
+cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health
+was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
+taken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
+carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio,
+whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
+protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led
+from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in
+meditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would
+have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which
+required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for
+each--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything
+but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from
+occult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely
+formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't
+himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;
+it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
+court.
+
+The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first
+sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought him
+down the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of the
+court, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the one
+chance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,
+_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by the
+obvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him for
+the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young
+lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
+attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a
+connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious
+to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of
+the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,
+had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic
+sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of
+politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's
+servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third
+was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him after
+all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that
+might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to
+fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that
+came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"
+because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him
+see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever
+so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as
+insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the
+pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in the
+augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established
+between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to Miss
+Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he could
+also bethink himself that, so long as the word never came--and it was,
+on the basis he had arranged, impossible--he enjoyed the imagination of
+mounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as
+during these minutes in the damp _loggia_ where the storm-gusts were
+strong; and there came in fact for our young man, as a result of his
+presence, a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to the
+dismal. Something had happened--he didn't know what; and it wasn't
+Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought
+the ladies--as if their liability had been equal--were a "leetle"
+fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it.
+It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a
+profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's
+Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
+slightly smiled at him in the process--but ever so slightly this time,
+his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,
+whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.
+
+This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other over all
+they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Densher's
+protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for
+them alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they really
+could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black
+sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and
+interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled,
+stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges.
+Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such
+a depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly
+prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equally
+weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash of
+mutual suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility, they were
+more united than disjoined. But it was to have been a moment for
+Densher that nothing could ease off--not even the formal propriety with
+which his interlocutor finally attended him to the _portone_ and bowed
+upon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the air
+had made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew of
+course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to return
+was not what he missed; yet he knew at the same time that what had
+happened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond
+the _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out
+where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled
+his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
+enough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,
+just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acute
+person in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
+scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no
+disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to a
+queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
+mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had
+been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that the
+vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
+
+Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the more
+impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite
+of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the
+Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the
+high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the
+limit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the
+Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for
+him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if the
+difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of
+a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh
+note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,
+and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at
+a stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
+margin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had held
+out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and he
+wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as
+himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There
+were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
+now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the
+grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than
+ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
+and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with
+brown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendent
+jackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs
+that overflowed from the cafés were gathered, still with a pretence of
+service, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, with
+his coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These were
+impressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit thrice
+before he stopped short, in front of Florian's, with the force of his
+sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the café--he had spotted an
+acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused long
+enough to look at twice was seated, well within range, at a small table
+on which a tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still
+remained; and though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of a
+French newspaper--the heading of the _Figaro_ was visible--he stared
+straight before him at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
+for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity
+produced, however quickly, all the effect of establishing
+connexions--connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were
+the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of the
+head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being
+noticed. This wider view showed him _all_ Lord Mark--Lord Mark as
+encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
+to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out,
+on that occasion, as he came in--he had felt it, in the hall, at the
+time; and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
+seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface, the same
+potential quantity.
+
+It was a matter, the whole passage--it could only be--but of a few
+seconds; for as he might neither stand there to stare nor on the other
+hand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, this
+time to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause,
+as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had
+simply faced him--as he had faced _him_, not placed by him, not at
+first--as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging
+fire, had then clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struck
+from these certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for
+neither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what
+now mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
+place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher, as inevitably
+a haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that case have seen him
+before. He paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for him
+even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come back
+for something--as a sequel to his earlier visit; and whatever he had
+come back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived but
+last night or that morning; he had already made the difference. It was
+a great thing for Densher to get this answer. He held it close, he
+hugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept him
+going and going--it made him no less restless. But it explained--and
+that was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in
+the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weather
+had changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible,
+_because_ of Lord Mark. It was because of him, _a fortiori_, that the
+palace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he found the visitor
+each time as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
+before him; the next time he was looking over his _Figaro_, which he
+had opened out. Densher didn't again stop, but left him apparently
+unconscious of his passage--on another repetition of which Lord Mark
+had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would be off that night;
+he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were as
+plain to Densher as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
+cleared for him--if cleared it was; there was something he didn't see,
+the great thing; but he saw so round it and so close to it that this
+was almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what he
+had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man
+had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit
+would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was
+the reason why he himself had found her door shut.
+
+He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that
+he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could
+now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
+as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he asked himself why it
+should prevent this that he could feel, in connexion with the crisis,
+so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all the
+benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn't
+feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had
+touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability
+so to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a
+kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
+by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark's
+return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there
+were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even to
+his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing
+it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about it
+than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop
+on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a
+visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely
+one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to
+spare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
+reflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
+straight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating a
+person in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.
+With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of the
+contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,
+and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and he
+drew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.
+Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it
+straight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled into
+just the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the very
+person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative
+innocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wished
+to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To
+keep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, to
+keep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
+consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.
+
+The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,
+extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed
+but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the
+better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the
+particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either of
+the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
+impossible--the being again denied; for it made him practically
+answerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglect
+either in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didn't get in, the
+one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health.
+Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him
+he had only to wait--which he was actually helped to do by his feeling
+with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in
+themselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted,
+the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about
+was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and
+listened to the wind--listened also to tinkles of bells and watched for
+some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never
+came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he
+wasn't at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hour
+of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd of
+refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafés on the chance the
+brute, as he now regularly imaged him, _might_ be still there. He could
+only be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and that--one had but to
+think of it--would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however--it was
+proved; though Densher's care for the question either way only added to
+what was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came
+round to what he was doing for Milly--spending days that neither relief
+nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject
+for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but
+sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
+and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find
+himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible
+meeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of
+everything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the
+third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he
+wouldn't have budged for the world.
+
+He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all
+events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely
+wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
+else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her
+wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,
+stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the
+pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified
+though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be
+accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a
+proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it
+were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have
+been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium
+as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.
+These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what
+she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a
+qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such
+things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she
+had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
+he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
+intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
+talk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
+deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?
+Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently
+caught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strange
+inconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in the
+breach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, done
+justice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
+in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have written
+had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and
+her idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only
+it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,
+in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on
+the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
+with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,
+for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the grinning padrona threw
+open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a
+difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It
+appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she
+allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without
+consciousness or care, and that her face, under her veil, richly rosy
+with the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if the
+rain were her tears.
+
+
+III
+
+They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
+fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+"You mean she's worse?"
+
+The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
+instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
+of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
+relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
+veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
+to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
+know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."
+
+"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
+feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
+
+She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
+"Have you been wretched?"
+
+Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
+him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
+visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
+draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
+had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
+above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
+seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
+been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
+
+This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
+his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
+been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
+
+"Yet it has done no good?"
+
+"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
+headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"
+
+"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
+
+"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
+
+"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
+
+She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
+taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
+themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
+him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
+had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
+in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
+conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
+Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
+you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"
+
+"Only nothing now matters?"
+
+She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
+expressed. "Then you know?"
+
+"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
+was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
+
+"Not for three days?"
+
+"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
+the faintest allusion."
+
+"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
+_me?_"
+
+"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
+
+"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."
+
+"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
+waterproof.
+
+It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
+it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
+but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
+mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
+impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
+withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
+
+It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
+pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"
+
+"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
+do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
+
+"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
+
+"Everything?"
+
+Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
+That's why I've come."
+
+"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
+affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
+him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
+was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
+possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
+it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
+so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
+an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
+it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
+far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
+abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
+of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened
+when she met his groan with an attenuation.
+
+"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."
+
+It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
+feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
+he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
+his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
+something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
+had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
+her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
+measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
+in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
+which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
+me?"
+
+And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
+effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
+believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
+helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
+
+It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
+She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
+accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
+ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
+she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
+consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
+rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
+meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
+larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
+they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
+don't mean not of me."
+
+"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
+as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
+age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
+Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
+to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
+inconsequence.
+
+He wondered. "You thank God--?"
+
+"That she's so quiet."
+
+He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"
+
+"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So
+you see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It would
+kill me if she _were_ to tell me."
+
+"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
+
+"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."
+
+"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a
+long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they
+could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought
+out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to
+him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been
+waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and
+talk of her here with you."
+
+It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"
+
+"I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."
+
+"She'll never tell?"
+
+"She'll never tell."
+
+Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
+
+"She _is_ magnificent."
+
+His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he
+could, all over. "Would she see me again?"
+
+It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"
+
+"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him
+some time. "No."
+
+"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
+
+"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
+
+She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don't
+see what you can do."
+
+"I don't either. But _she_ might."
+
+Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."
+
+"Too late for her to see--?"
+
+"Too late."
+
+The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled in
+him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"
+
+"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved
+and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that
+I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly
+enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
+events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has
+told him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that he
+may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
+only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to
+entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and
+meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an
+agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of
+her."
+
+"By her request?"
+
+"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of
+provisions."
+
+"By her request too?"
+
+"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first
+time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we
+liked."
+
+Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"
+
+"None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing's
+any comfort."
+
+"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, _I'm_ not."
+
+"No. But I didn't come for that."
+
+"You came for _me_."
+
+"Well then call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyes
+filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper
+still. "I came at bottom of course--"
+
+"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as
+you say, too late for me to do anything?"
+
+She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow
+in her, from the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"--and
+she turned her vision again strangely about her--"with you here, and
+with everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her."
+
+"God forbid we should abandon her."
+
+"Then you _won't?_" His tone had made her flush again.
+
+"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons _me?_ What can I do if she
+won't see me?"
+
+"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
+
+"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I
+shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I
+could help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "she
+would have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to make
+out, "is the devil of it. She _won't_ want it herself. She _can't!_"
+
+He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he
+helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and
+even for that there are difficulties. But there _is_ that." He stood
+before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from
+her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave
+to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on
+the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but,
+as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really
+know yourself what it is."
+
+He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said--rather!--there
+were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment;
+he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider,
+like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood
+at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in
+fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first
+again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer
+to her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came back
+to her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if he
+had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
+where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
+Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the one
+least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without
+him?"
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the
+first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only
+he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
+
+"Well then that's something."
+
+She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."
+
+"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
+October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
+and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
+both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
+him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
+said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
+
+"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
+
+"Ah I know nothing about that."
+
+"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
+saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
+will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
+he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
+
+"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
+_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
+her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."
+
+He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
+saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
+distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
+confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
+
+There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
+dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
+was here, we all liked him."
+
+"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
+with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,
+"yourself."
+
+Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
+of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
+nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
+
+Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
+plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
+professional propriety."
+
+"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
+something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
+couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"
+
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"I can't talk to any one about her."
+
+"Except to _me_," his friend continued.
+
+"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
+waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
+honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
+sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
+visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
+him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
+precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
+She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
+statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
+nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
+was impossible for us, and--"
+
+"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
+more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
+straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
+there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
+
+"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
+
+"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
+together."
+
+Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
+back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
+of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
+which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
+perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
+could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
+believe that he thinks she's gone."
+
+She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."
+
+"Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More and
+more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something
+with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to
+postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he
+was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
+wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of
+Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of
+Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
+swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast on
+it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent
+to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
+absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
+first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility
+so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,
+and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.
+"Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for me
+to see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have
+conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she
+had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness
+would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for
+insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,
+she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.
+Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? I
+mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh she
+was earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"
+
+"The opportunity to put what?"
+
+"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
+
+Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarter
+of an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,
+however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
+his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of
+his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If I
+deny what to her?"
+
+Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along been
+letting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."
+
+"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenly
+perverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was she
+who now blushed deep.
+
+It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things.
+"Then _you_ know--"
+
+"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's what has done it."
+
+"Yes--I understand that. But you also know--"
+
+He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. "I'm
+speaking," she said soothingly, "of what he told her. It's _that_ that
+I've taken you as knowing."
+
+"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
+
+It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality of
+relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else.
+Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
+it for _true!_"
+
+Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayed
+himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still
+better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there
+was no postponing. They were left with her idea--the one she was
+wishing to make him recognise. He had expressed ten minutes before his
+need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
+he was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even than
+as yet appeared.
+
+He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; he
+mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of course
+she could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly,
+without delay, see it; on which her sense of having "caught" him became
+as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What I mean
+is that he told her you've been all the while engaged to Miss Croy."
+
+He gave a jerk round; it was almost--to hear it--the touch of a lash;
+and he said--idiotically, as he afterwards knew--the first thing that
+came into his head. "All _what_ while?"
+
+"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness. "I only repeat to
+you what he told her."
+
+Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caught
+himself up. "Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you're talking
+about. I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained, "in the
+Piazza; only just saw him--through the glass at Florian's--without any
+words. In fact I scarcely know him--there wouldn't have been occasion.
+It was but once, moreover--he must have gone that night. But I knew he
+wouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over--what he would
+have come for."
+
+Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
+
+Densher approved. "He came to let her know that he knows better than
+she for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool's
+paradise, refused him."
+
+"How you _do_ know!"--and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.
+
+"I know that--but I don't know the good it does him."
+
+"The good, he thinks, if he has patience--not too much--may be to come.
+He doesn't know what he has done to her. Only _we_, you see, do that."
+
+He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him--what she felt?"
+
+"She was able--I'm sure of it--not to show anything. He dealt her his
+blow, and she took it without a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain,
+spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of what
+she related. "She's magnificent."
+
+Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
+
+"And _he_," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
+
+"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom in
+it, they looked at each other. "Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
+
+"So awfully--it's Maud Lowder's own view. And he was nice, in London,"
+said Mrs. Stringham, "to _me_. One could almost pity him--he has had
+such a good conscience."
+
+"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
+
+"Yes, but it wasn't--I could see from the only few things she first
+told me--that he meant _her_ the least harm. He intended none whatever."
+
+"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned. "He only of
+course meant harm to me."
+
+"And good to himself--he thought that would come. He had been unable to
+swallow," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "what had happened on his other
+visit. He had been then too sharply humiliated."
+
+"Oh I saw that."
+
+"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while he
+was turned away."
+
+"Perfectly," Densher said--"I've filled it out. And also that he has
+known meanwhile for _what_ I was then received. For a stay of all these
+weeks. He had had it to think of."
+
+"Precisely--it was more than he could bear. But he has it," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "to think of still."
+
+"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point,
+was having more to think of even than he had yet had--"only, after all,
+how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
+
+"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
+
+"He can only have acted--it would have been his sole safety--from full
+knowledge."
+
+He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as they
+were, something had none the less passed between them. It was this
+that, after an instant, made her again interrogative. "What do you mean
+by full knowledge?"
+
+Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?"
+
+"I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason to
+believe, straight from there."
+
+"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
+
+"Well, to try again--with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make
+himself possibly right with her--a different attempt from the other. He
+had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
+opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half
+an hour would be just what was most effective. It _has_ been!" said
+Susan Shepherd.
+
+Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as she
+lighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quite
+dared--putting the absent dots on several i's--he saw new questions
+swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; and
+they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was
+at any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder."
+
+"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly."
+
+He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally, upon news of _me?_"
+
+His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
+
+"I've given her none that hasn't been decently good. This will have
+been the first."
+
+"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
+
+"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as she is."
+
+He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs. Lowder written about him?
+Has she written that he has been with them?"
+
+"She has mentioned him but once--it was in her letter before the last.
+Then she said something."
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well it was in reference to
+Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I
+should say rather that he was thinking of _her_--only it seemed this
+time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him."
+
+Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised
+them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of
+a queerness in his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged to
+_propose_ to her niece?"
+
+"I don't know what she means."
+
+"Of course not"--he recovered himself; "and I oughtn't to seem to
+trouble you to piece together what I can't piece myself. Only I
+'guess,'" he added, "I _can_ piece it."
+
+She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I dare say I can piece
+it too."
+
+It was one of the things in her--and his conscious face took it from
+her as such--that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark
+for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
+They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep
+down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it
+wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful--at
+least this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so,
+most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been
+feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all _such_
+petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that,
+in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his
+putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark.
+"Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?"
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "_her_ friend also. But not a single word
+that I know of."
+
+He had taken it for certain she hadn't--the thing being after all but a
+shade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for six
+weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter but
+a shade more strange than Milly's not having mentioned her. In spite of
+which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
+He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he
+could get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been
+judging. "How did he manage to get _at_ her? She had only--with what
+had passed between them before--to say she couldn't see him."
+
+"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier," the good lady
+explained with a slight embarrassment, "than at the other time."
+
+"Easier?"
+
+"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
+
+"Yes. But exactly not _the_ difference."
+
+"Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. She
+could afford to be the opposite." With which, as he said nothing, she
+just impatiently completed her sense. "She had had _you_ here for six
+weeks."
+
+"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
+
+"Besides, I think he must have written her first--written I mean in a
+tone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then on
+the spot--"
+
+"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked? The horrid little beast!"
+
+It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for
+hope, the intensity of her look at him. "Oh he went off without an
+alarm."
+
+"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
+
+"Ah that, certainly."
+
+"Then it _was_ mere base revenge. Hasn't he known her, into the
+bargain," the young man asked--"didn't he, weeks before, see her, judge
+her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than a
+few months to live?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; and
+it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. "He has doubtless
+been aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware."
+
+"He has wanted her, you mean, just _because_--?"
+
+"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with a
+hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in
+his visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more
+taken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion.
+"Shall we have lights--a lamp or the candles?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a
+thought. "He _will_ have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has
+happened."
+
+Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."
+
+"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poor
+lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Densher
+continued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
+
+"And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"
+
+"Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact
+to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has
+believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at
+Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in
+Venice."
+
+Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to
+what?"
+
+"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some
+duplicity."
+
+"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous
+supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long for
+each--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,
+which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
+This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it
+even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
+left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their
+further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an
+advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the
+absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she
+addressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had already
+used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for
+_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so
+dreadfully to believe?"
+
+Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely
+certain then that she does believe it?"
+
+"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"
+
+He took his time again to judge. "Do _you_ believe it?"
+
+He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a
+little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered
+none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
+will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly
+settle it--if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if,
+to save her life, you consent to a denial."
+
+"But a denial, when it comes to that--confound the whole thing, don't
+you see!--of exactly what?"
+
+It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged.
+"Of everything."
+
+Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. "Oh!"
+he simply moaned into the gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought
+also blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the
+stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,
+but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an
+almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
+bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and
+called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
+scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of
+vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this
+on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
+He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at
+present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where
+the event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed him
+before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more
+than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of
+them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
+almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,
+as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
+other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
+had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
+nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
+would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
+to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
+of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
+going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
+Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
+of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
+had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
+he possibly _could_.
+
+It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
+station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
+turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
+and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
+as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
+proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
+life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
+afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
+prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
+current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
+aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
+prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
+great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
+brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
+brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
+Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
+made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
+was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
+it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
+went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
+platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
+presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
+that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
+anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
+hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce
+have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
+might have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in
+presence of the fact.
+
+Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkable
+young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up
+again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt
+himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof
+of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now
+connected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.
+The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as
+he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
+him. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, the
+remarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of his
+face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred
+its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
+suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
+now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a
+symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,
+of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,
+in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble to
+sink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densher
+began wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
+make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been
+on the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the
+palace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching
+mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
+together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity
+refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the
+palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this
+susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All
+he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,
+the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
+headshake, "go there now."
+
+"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that the
+thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite
+inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it
+that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
+moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
+craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
+the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
+a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
+hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
+Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
+swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
+of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
+Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
+time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
+him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
+he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
+about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
+instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
+and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
+personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
+of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
+only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
+within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
+smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
+all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
+now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
+interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
+really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
+_cliché_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
+of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
+in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
+reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
+had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
+of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
+outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
+been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
+been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
+befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
+had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quite
+on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,
+absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on
+this occasion moved away.
+
+The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance
+grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was to
+be the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
+making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left to
+be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should
+one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
+It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or two
+that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That he
+couldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this was
+as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact
+of the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
+taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
+gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
+meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time
+nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless the
+great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densher
+further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's
+having decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend as
+well--for there would be practically some difference to her--on her
+actually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke
+would make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his own
+view of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of response
+it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
+personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be
+prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked
+himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the
+worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man
+should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him
+for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and
+consequently there was nothing to hope.
+
+It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to all
+probability; but it pressed on him that there were few possible
+diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was
+so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
+Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
+taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
+The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
+tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
+the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
+difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
+Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
+as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
+quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
+value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
+the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
+phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
+did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
+Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
+his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
+tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
+made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
+mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
+he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
+original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
+his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
+time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
+this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
+knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
+no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
+described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
+on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
+to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
+
+That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
+saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
+stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
+gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
+himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
+days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
+sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highest
+medical lights in the world; so that really when the personage in
+question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the
+doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
+like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the
+magnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.
+The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her
+immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some
+hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with
+his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
+at once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_
+still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and
+quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now to
+be prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not
+only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't
+dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that
+during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in
+sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The
+demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous
+acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him
+come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but
+there were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. It
+was for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity of
+Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he
+had looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon as
+the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined
+itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing
+could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher was
+well aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period in
+the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
+nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor's
+entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the
+fact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to say
+he had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she
+might _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
+was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all
+their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
+as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
+wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
+have said, quiet.
+
+The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
+a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
+superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
+he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
+stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
+they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
+Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
+wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
+all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
+Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
+them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
+his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
+He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
+all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
+to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
+in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
+it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
+response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
+held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
+spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
+it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
+because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
+him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
+aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
+system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
+man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
+Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
+man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
+man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
+He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
+and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
+the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
+concerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
+he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
+have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
+way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
+odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
+exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
+complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
+have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
+abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
+station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
+would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
+doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
+dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.
+
+That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
+three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
+wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
+term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
+Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
+friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
+naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
+was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
+personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
+that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
+errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
+call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
+had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
+with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
+proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
+Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
+companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
+as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
+authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
+affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
+awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
+the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
+short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
+was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,
+though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
+prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
+involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
+only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
+right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
+and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
+questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
+now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
+knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
+Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
+habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
+it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
+farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
+his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
+looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
+one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
+shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
+ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
+last spoken made him start.
+
+"I shall come back."
+
+"Then she's better?"
+
+"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
+the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
+still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
+hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
+see her."
+
+Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
+betrayed. "She asks me?"
+
+Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
+closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
+but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
+as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
+
+Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
+the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
+Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"
+
+"She can receive you."
+
+"And you're coming back--?"
+
+"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
+
+"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
+friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had
+announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
+come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
+colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
+world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
+but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
+remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
+"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
+his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
+slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
+the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
+"Then she's better?"
+
+Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
+the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
+to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
+successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
+to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
+reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
+him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
+observation of Eugenio.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TENTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your
+making a sign?"
+
+Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate
+and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it
+straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her
+instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility
+between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general
+trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh
+sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,
+something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still
+more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had
+been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on
+either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
+had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her
+as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed
+of taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere first
+look--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the
+firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the London
+fog, as the flower of her difference; just as her difference
+itself--part of which was her striking him as older in a degree for
+which no mere couple of months could account--was the fruit of their
+intimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosen
+together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their
+wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened--of what in
+fact, for the spirit of each, was still happening--been showing it to
+him for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, so
+still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to
+tackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast of
+it in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his present
+visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it would
+doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write
+to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him--he had come up slowly; but
+it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That was
+exactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to
+her feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. He
+had come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them;
+and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits,
+his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, so
+the inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of
+intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell
+her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he felt on the spot, he
+couldn't have brought it all with him before this afternoon. He _had_
+brought it, to the last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't
+be hard--as he in fact found--to produce, for Kate's understanding, his
+first reason.
+
+"A fortnight, yes--it was a fortnight Friday; but I've only been
+keeping in, you see, with our wonderful system." He was so easily
+justified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her saying
+she didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid for
+her; and such a gage of its equal vividness for himself was precisely
+what she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
+remark that on the very face of it, she would remember, their wonderful
+system attached no premium to rapidities of transition. "I couldn't
+quite--don't you know?--take my rebound with a rush; and I suppose I've
+been instinctively hanging off to minimise, for you as well as for
+myself, the appearances of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I
+knew you'd understand." It was presently as if she really understood so
+well that she almost appealed from his insistence--yet looking at him
+too, he was not unconscious, as if this mastery of fitnesses was a
+strong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struck
+her as expert for contingencies in the very degree of her having in
+Venice struck _him_ as expert. He smiled over his plea for a renewal
+with stages and steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and
+graduated; though--finely as she must respond--she met the smile but as
+she had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at that
+moment--which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
+charged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow--had not
+qualified her welcome; what had done this being much more the presence
+in the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman who had introduced
+him and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea-table.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to appoint the tea-hour,
+five o'clock on Sunday, for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired
+him, without a signature, "Come on Sunday _before_ tea--about a quarter
+of an hour, which will help us"; and he had arrived therefore
+scrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room and
+hadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily gathered,
+was to be, for the interval--not long but precious--engaged with an old
+servant, retired and pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
+was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to have
+the scrap of time, after the withdrawal of the footman, to themselves,
+and there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
+spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety of shades, it
+proclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice--that was
+what kept it noble--to Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful
+self-command. If he had his discretion she had her perfect manner,
+which was _her_ decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he had, to finish with the
+question of his delay, furthermore observed, Mrs. Stringham would have
+written to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so that it
+wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longer
+there.
+
+"Yes, we've known it."
+
+"And you continue to hear?"
+
+"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I mean Aunt Maud does."
+
+"Then you've recent news?"
+
+Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day or two I believe. But
+haven't _you?_"
+
+"No--I've heard nothing." And it was now that he felt how much he had
+to tell her. "I don't get letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder
+does." With which he added: "Then of course you know." He waited as if
+she would show what she knew; but she only showed in silence the dawn
+of a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for him
+to ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
+
+Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you _know?_"
+
+"How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himself
+stared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she
+slowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
+
+It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her
+lips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"
+
+"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had to
+think a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--so
+far as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"
+he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,
+what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," he
+explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
+
+She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so
+far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the
+wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
+unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect
+for misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felt
+her closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitude
+would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling
+uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew
+in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the
+quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too
+far, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
+the sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out
+himself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of
+everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would
+confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
+or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that she
+wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
+that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
+to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
+at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
+Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
+She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
+That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
+handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
+dreadful for you much of it must have been."
+
+He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
+first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
+I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
+little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"
+
+"She's dying."
+
+It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
+could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
+Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
+present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
+Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
+
+"I believe he's there now."
+
+"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
+
+She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
+otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
+him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
+
+"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
+
+"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
+
+"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
+
+"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
+three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
+gone. He had started I believe some days before."
+
+"And won't then by this time be back?"
+
+Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."
+
+"He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while she
+lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."
+
+"I think _she_ is," said Kate.
+
+It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from
+him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"
+
+"Well, she's after all my friend."
+
+It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least
+expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,
+his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.
+You _were_ sure of it."
+
+"Of course I was sure of it."
+
+And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however,
+presently broke. "If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what
+do you think of Lord Mark's?"
+
+She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
+
+"You haven't seen him?"
+
+"Not since he saw her."
+
+"You've known then of his seeing her?"
+
+"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"
+
+Kate wondered. "What rest?"
+
+"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't stand--it was what
+then took place that simply killed her."
+
+"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw
+that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't
+put on. "Mrs. Stringham hasn't said _that_."
+
+He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then taken
+place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. "The way
+it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
+all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
+
+"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him
+pursue.
+
+"One can see now that she was living by will--which was very much what
+you originally told me of her."
+
+"I remember. That was it."
+
+"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse
+was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke. He told her, the
+scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."
+
+Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know it!"
+
+"That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"
+Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last see
+him?"
+
+But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what made
+her worse?"
+
+He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he
+spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
+
+"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
+
+Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he
+continued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since of
+course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
+And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there not
+being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she
+need regard as a warning."
+
+She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_
+did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It was
+by the conviction she got from me."
+
+"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
+
+"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
+
+Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
+which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
+absolutely of what they would have called between them her
+straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
+ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
+suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
+responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
+for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
+impressions as it was our idea to give."
+
+"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.
+
+He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
+character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
+
+It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
+born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
+been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
+Mark's."
+
+Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
+
+"Why for you."
+
+"To tell her he lied?"
+
+"To tell her he's mistaken."
+
+Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at by
+Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to
+put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference
+in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,
+my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."
+
+"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"
+
+He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to
+be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense
+of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many
+things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to
+admiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear about
+it--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question
+of it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; but
+to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+
+"You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She had
+spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;
+but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she
+meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
+
+"I hadn't even a chance."
+
+Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it
+all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn't
+see you?"
+
+"Not after your friend had been with her."
+
+She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
+
+It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her face
+to the wall."
+
+This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now
+for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the
+minimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
+
+"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitively
+ill."
+
+"Well, that was what she had been before."
+
+"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don't
+pretend that she's not magnificent."
+
+"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
+
+He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"
+he wound up; "and there we are."
+
+His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more
+deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had
+fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,
+as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the
+same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to
+hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
+of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if
+her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had
+fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on
+Milly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.
+But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such
+things were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure
+on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general
+that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then
+that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"
+
+It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--so
+far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."
+
+"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
+
+"Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.
+She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."
+
+His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"
+
+"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I had
+wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."
+
+"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not just _because_ she was
+dying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know that
+seeing her you could judge."
+
+"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied
+you moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to
+it."
+
+She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that to
+convince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"
+
+"I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"
+
+Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"
+
+"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
+back afterwards."
+
+With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
+flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
+You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
+conscience?"
+
+"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
+how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
+it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
+remember what I say."
+
+Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
+pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."
+
+"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
+it matter?"
+
+It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
+relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
+from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
+gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
+Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
+different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
+
+"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
+moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
+say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
+to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
+she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
+truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
+for it."
+
+"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted
+_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been
+glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her
+from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it
+was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and
+clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear
+man--that she loves you with passion."
+
+"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
+
+"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
+then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
+once more to look at you?"
+
+"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
+longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
+first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
+taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
+another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
+Densher, "affected her."
+
+"Of course it affected her."
+
+Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
+for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
+know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
+wished herself to tell me so."
+
+"And she did tell you so?"
+
+"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
+
+"And as _you_ of course did."
+
+"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
+did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
+
+"You only went to oblige her?"
+
+"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
+
+"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
+
+"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
+
+"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
+stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
+
+"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
+
+"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
+such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
+added--"to see her die."
+
+"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
+
+"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
+
+He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
+visit--just like another."
+
+"Like another person?"
+
+"Like another visit."
+
+"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
+his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
+indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
+had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
+room?"
+
+"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
+glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
+inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
+the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what you
+originally said to me of her?"
+
+"Ah I've said so many things."
+
+"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.
+Well, she didn't."
+
+"So that it was really almost happy?"
+
+It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling
+how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone
+that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "I
+don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.
+For it would be worth it for us."
+
+"Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke
+again abruptly. "She'll recover."
+
+"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
+
+She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of her
+feeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having been
+misled."
+
+She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would
+have rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and her
+strength."
+
+"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"
+
+He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given
+it up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."
+
+"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was ever
+alienated."
+
+"I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."
+
+"But she was ill."
+
+"That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--during
+the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no
+difference with her."
+
+"She would still have received you?"
+
+"She would still have received me."
+
+"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"
+
+"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"Because you've told her?"
+
+"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a
+person who does see."
+
+Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious.
+You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you
+needn't be afraid."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
+
+Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked
+five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge
+silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not
+soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. "Well, it's all most
+wonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign her
+friend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
+this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming
+water. "You'll have some?"
+
+He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their old
+law, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
+done it!"
+
+"Humbugged her?"
+
+"Squared her. You've pleased her."
+
+Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something
+else, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a brute then I must
+be!"
+
+"A brute--?"
+
+"To have pleased so many people."
+
+"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please
+_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What I
+don't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "is
+what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you
+up for days and days, what brought her back to you?"
+
+She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him
+ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going
+into it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
+back. His visit, his presence there did it."
+
+"He brought her back then to life."
+
+"Well, to what I saw."
+
+"And by interceding for you?"
+
+"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."
+
+Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
+
+"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak of
+her."
+
+Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
+
+"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"
+
+"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
+
+"He understood," said Densher.
+
+"But understood what?"
+
+He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."
+
+"Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing.
+"But how did he convince her?"
+
+Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."
+
+He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "The
+great thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," she
+continued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."
+
+"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
+
+"Well, at peace with you."
+
+"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.
+
+"The peace of having loved."
+
+He raised his eyes to her. "Is _that_ peace?"
+
+"Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound
+up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_
+she wanted."
+
+Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority
+that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look
+at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he
+intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so
+take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think it
+hideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point of
+the word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."
+
+"Oh!" he only again murmured.
+
+She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came
+to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and
+enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing
+that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that
+knowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
+"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but she
+insisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."
+
+
+II
+
+He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this
+inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but
+interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
+Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of
+the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his
+intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder
+alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate
+gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them
+was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him
+to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had
+fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard
+fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to
+his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare
+alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been
+uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,
+and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she
+resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my
+dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to
+leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this
+extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the
+protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their
+tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their
+hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his
+scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed
+for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been
+entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had been
+at one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come back
+to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the
+fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic
+turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.
+Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an
+awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he
+marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the
+fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was
+but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for
+consideration, melted into it and out of sight.
+
+He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of the
+remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice
+had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of
+their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not
+sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that
+were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without
+her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish
+them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking
+place had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him from
+poor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they would
+have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the
+scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by which
+she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the
+memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him for
+unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the
+guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth
+in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She
+treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
+and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness
+with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches
+to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;
+it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile
+to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,
+he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freely
+for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.
+Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a
+week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.
+Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him
+on--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had
+private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
+others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of
+candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely
+sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
+himself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not false
+that he _had_ been through a mill.
+
+It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to
+him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I
+want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"
+his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was
+with him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even if
+it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just
+brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her
+in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in
+the world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest
+reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two
+or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--two
+and a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now
+that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn
+of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that
+when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come
+up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
+queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He
+liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to
+himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met
+_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than
+her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy
+her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course
+the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which
+he was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have
+come about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be free
+with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being
+alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had
+been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in
+fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy
+moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed
+herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to the
+end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all
+to his help.
+
+"You simply couldn't stand it?"
+
+"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.
+
+"Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;
+luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--men
+haven't, in many relations, the courage of women."
+
+"They haven't the courage of women."
+
+"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come away
+for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."
+
+Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behaviour
+since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--he
+couldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy
+would have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was
+Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothing
+but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth
+she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that
+compromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as a
+change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even
+without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal
+it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for
+all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.
+Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,
+shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
+leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.
+She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but this
+was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had
+taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as
+already dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable way
+to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited
+her, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;
+which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
+interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have
+nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious
+of her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
+for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in
+London while the pain went on--what would that do but make his days
+impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by some
+art about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed.
+"What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
+it? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment may
+be--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'm
+good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." He
+consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly
+about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be
+guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The
+days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the
+suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was
+the taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottom
+of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that
+if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just
+for that reason.
+
+She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle
+enough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insist
+on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was
+thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one
+better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together
+that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in
+the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_
+stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't for
+Densher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.
+It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came
+to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in
+particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
+as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed
+the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he
+couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
+might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the
+family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl
+must have wanted to live.
+
+"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with
+everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if
+it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"
+
+Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly
+giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have
+been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had
+her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,
+and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about
+them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to
+herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,
+the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep
+it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so
+naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its
+vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
+shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she
+was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully
+silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,
+in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object
+clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the
+case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make
+him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had
+been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud
+by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had
+let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received
+on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so
+perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of
+princely state.
+
+Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,
+all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth
+of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and the
+situation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite London
+gossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at Lancaster
+Gate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
+the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He
+himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the
+page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation
+inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half
+understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding
+himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these
+moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
+and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He
+had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious
+of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
+lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gathered
+all--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of their
+associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far
+as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the
+essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too
+beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
+sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherently
+express. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder's
+faith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
+scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence
+within--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their association
+deepened by it, they turned together away.
+
+That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of a
+week the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morning
+with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to
+gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a
+haunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but the
+degree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his new
+aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he
+hadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; it
+was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.
+There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plain
+honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper
+corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year
+was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the
+still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked
+empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep
+browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks
+lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it
+fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and
+then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a
+telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,
+for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
+to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion
+of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made
+his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
+for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a
+good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich
+impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
+later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of
+their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be
+reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he
+had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at
+hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller
+now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he
+was graver as he lingered and looked out.
+
+Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if
+she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that
+was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,
+even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return
+to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
+begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might
+be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with
+ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,
+other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special
+danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he
+had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all
+that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.
+The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
+place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the
+days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This
+and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over
+the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--for
+they really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness of
+their prime. It was to all intents however this very reference that
+showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward
+him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
+nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him
+afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he
+certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,
+at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these for
+instance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's
+eyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
+from America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundays
+ago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from
+Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got it
+the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune
+of the moment.
+
+Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred to
+him, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect produced
+for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much
+intensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of
+the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of
+response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't
+possibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she had
+beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of
+studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.
+Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were living
+under; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,
+distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by her
+own air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herself
+though it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,
+could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of her
+superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alone
+that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming
+courage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he had
+presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined
+him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her
+hand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that he
+wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he
+should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
+whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in high
+happiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing at
+the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only
+make-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that they
+couldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering at
+no point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished the
+present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great
+wintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.
+
+"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,
+we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not to
+wait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't you
+see?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my
+impatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."
+
+"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,
+though she had listened to him without confusion.
+
+"To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce it
+as done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. We
+shall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
+wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a
+bad dream."
+
+She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought at
+his call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dear
+man, what has happened to you?"
+
+"Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.
+Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I am
+that you must have me."
+
+He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also
+not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, with
+her clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, you
+know, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've been
+going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"
+
+It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,
+upon my soul--!"
+
+"I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where I
+was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for
+_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only
+right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't
+think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talked
+her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
+to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He
+had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--which
+was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood
+everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,
+the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of all
+her strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really
+_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he
+could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he
+only looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "You
+do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to
+me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in
+hearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"
+
+"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.
+
+"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that case
+wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I
+don't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with your
+moral certainty."
+
+By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. The
+point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he
+recognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
+
+"You've not an idea?"
+
+"I've not an idea."
+
+"I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd go
+home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an
+idea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.
+There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meeting
+you."
+
+If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he
+could but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in high
+passion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made it
+all out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,
+and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, and
+his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her
+lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but
+that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to
+something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
+she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,
+between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,
+when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she
+leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
+irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an
+advantage with his passion now.
+
+
+III
+
+He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
+"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
+her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
+return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
+had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
+preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
+Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
+night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
+first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
+with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
+quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
+him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
+next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
+wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
+distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
+hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
+sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
+difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
+and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
+other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
+and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
+monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
+the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
+him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
+his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
+for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
+event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of
+convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
+stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
+Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
+determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
+doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
+commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
+life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
+another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
+his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
+felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
+state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
+Christmas day.
+
+Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
+certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
+final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
+Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
+urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
+once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
+sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
+earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
+reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
+dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
+walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
+to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
+before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
+mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
+assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
+drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
+for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
+enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
+his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
+Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
+back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
+and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
+himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
+that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
+that what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness
+who had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in his
+presence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of his
+consciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on the
+spot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He became
+aware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the brougham
+had a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to his
+knowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
+nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the face
+that, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely have
+noticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
+Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,
+presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearly
+getting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--only
+Mrs. Lowder was with him.
+
+It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher again
+delayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred to
+him. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a case
+of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,
+might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this event
+she might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had had
+the effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range of
+the window. It wasn't there he had wished to see her; yet if she _was_
+there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
+made out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,
+with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a
+conscious face from behind the clear plate of a café in Venice. The
+great glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with the
+window down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,
+none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could
+occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedly
+remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as
+his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched
+the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by
+Kate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for
+the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
+young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the
+disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more
+than he had looked from his bench at his café. Densher was thinking
+that _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was
+thinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--more
+ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of
+the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,
+associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside
+Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient
+identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and
+Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_
+wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with
+presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the
+brougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
+word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her
+passage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; you
+needn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the
+steps.
+
+"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not come
+to learn."
+
+"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "to
+Lancaster Gate."
+
+"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was
+attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and
+he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
+functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and
+that yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"
+
+He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_
+had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallest
+hesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."
+
+"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."
+
+"Yes--folded them."
+
+It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and
+she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it's
+more true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."
+
+He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words
+fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread them
+the wider."
+
+"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"
+
+"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,
+that did a little warn her off.
+
+"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled to
+direct news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise I
+shouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"
+
+He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of
+the brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching him
+moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest.
+"Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just
+now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they
+stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage
+might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,
+understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
+you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the
+image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.
+It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
+exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since the
+night before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper
+reserve.
+
+But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I should
+otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"
+Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
+with which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dear
+friend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be
+still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Or
+wouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with
+me _tête-à-tête?_"
+
+It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making the
+difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather
+mystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall
+you mind if I don't tell you at once?"
+
+"Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you
+needn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of all
+days, I shall otherwise sit there alone."
+
+Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
+
+"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs. Lowder, "is spending her
+Christmas in the bosom of her more immediate family."
+
+He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his face might show. "You
+mean she has left you?"
+
+Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the enquiry with a
+consciousness in which he saw a reflexion of events. He was made sure
+by it, even at the moment and as he had never been before, that since
+he had known these two women no confessed nor commented tension, no
+crisis of the cruder sort would really have taken form between them:
+which was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered her boat. The
+situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's present expression lighted up by
+contrast that superficial smoothness; which afterwards, with his time
+to think of it, was to put before him again the art, the particular
+gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed, so intimately familiar
+for him, as her talent for life. The peace, within a day or two--since
+his seeing her last--had clearly been broken; differences, deep down,
+kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as deep, had been shaken to
+the surface by some exceptional jar; with which, in addition, he felt
+Lord Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season vaguely
+associated. The talent for life indeed, it at the same time struck him,
+would probably have shown equally in the breach, or whatever had
+occurred; Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a strain rather than a
+stroke. Of these quick thoughts, at all events, that lady was already
+abreast. "She went yesterday morning--and not with my approval, I don't
+mind telling you--to her sister: Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean,
+who lives somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs--that I
+should have to say such things to-day!--are a constant worry; so that
+Kate, in consequence--well, of events!--has simply been called in. My
+own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with _such_ events she need have,
+in her situation, next to nothing to do."
+
+"But she differed with you?"
+
+"She differed with me. And when Kate differs with you--!"
+
+"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point in the scale of hypocrisy
+at which he could ask himself why a little more or less should signify.
+Besides, with the intention he had had he _must_ know. Kate's move, if
+he didn't know, might simply disconcert him; and of being disconcerted
+his horror was by this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
+allude to events at all calamitous."
+
+"No--only horrid and vulgar."
+
+"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered in
+free speech to him a momentary balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I
+suppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."
+
+"Oh!" said Densher again.
+
+"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marian
+has shrieked for help."
+
+Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromised
+for an instant with his discretion. "Come upon her--for money?"
+
+"Oh for that of course always. But, at _this_ blessed season, for
+refuge, for safety: for God knows what. He's _there_, the brute. And
+Kate's with them. And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the
+steps, "is her Christmas."
+
+She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer.
+"Yours then is after all rather better."
+
+"It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But why
+do I talk of _our_ troubles? Come if you can."
+
+He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
+
+"And now--I dare say--you'll go to church?"
+
+She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by way
+of sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little more
+to the purpose than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
+finishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself to
+all appearance receiving her hint as happy. "Why yes--I think I will":
+after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had opened
+from within, he was free to turn his back. He heard the door, behind
+him, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another direction
+than his own.
+
+He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he
+was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the
+south. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
+there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally
+talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing was
+open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the
+influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that
+possessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everything
+else, an awful sound--what were they, a thousand times over, but his
+own? His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hour
+longer taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would have
+held his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just lied
+to Mrs. Lowder--a term it perversely eased him to keep using--even more
+than was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, in
+such a state of his nerves, _could_ he go?--he pulled up short again,
+as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And
+yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. He
+was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he
+bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He
+had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before
+it. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really--as it
+struck him--consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid
+service--the flocking crowd told of it--which glittered and resounded,
+from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of
+organ and choir. It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of a
+discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory in
+short, to make him right, would do.
+
+
+IV
+
+The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from an
+early hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
+gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in
+Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt
+independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
+achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club
+library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,
+closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the
+night. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thing
+he did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,
+he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
+He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to
+trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return
+with a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face with
+Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that
+his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent
+prepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,
+counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of
+his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp
+and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen
+her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's
+pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied
+ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as
+the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a
+still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with
+her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.
+Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
+flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
+Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
+stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
+best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
+was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
+stranger in it than she.
+
+A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
+from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
+the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
+for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
+case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
+curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
+circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
+florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
+mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
+Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
+Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
+blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
+of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
+asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
+having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
+reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
+him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
+He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
+him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
+sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
+the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
+might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
+wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
+anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
+make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
+is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
+what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
+took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
+she was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made
+for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
+same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
+companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
+assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
+her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
+her and how above all must she not feel them?
+
+Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
+tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
+the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
+left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
+and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
+So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
+conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
+nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
+be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
+her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
+reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
+explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
+gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
+It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
+did tell me, so suddenly come here."
+
+"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
+firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
+He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
+door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
+what _you_ mean."
+
+"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
+after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
+that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
+But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
+taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
+and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
+Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
+bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
+stay."
+
+Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
+he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"
+
+"No--I've had no telegram."
+
+She wondered. "But not a letter--?"
+
+"Not from Mrs. Stringham--no." He failed again however to develop
+this--for which her forbearance from another question gave him
+occasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confronted
+with her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that she
+respected this impulse she made her enquiry different. "Should you like
+to go out to her--to Mrs. Stringham?"
+
+About that at least he was clear. "Not at all. She's alone, but she's
+very capable and very courageous. Besides--!" He had been going on, but
+he dropped.
+
+"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembers
+Eugenio."
+
+She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender;
+and he showed equally every reason to assent. "One remembers him
+indeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value to
+her--he's capable of anything. What I was going to say," he went on,
+"is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive."
+
+On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. "Mr.
+Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly's
+affairs--her first trustee, I suppose--had just got there at Mrs.
+Stringham's last writing."
+
+"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me--I mean the last
+time before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said,
+"they'll do."
+
+"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as if it wasn't what each
+was most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that.
+"But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning had
+taken you to Sir Luke?"
+
+"Oh something else--which I'll presently tell you. It's what made me
+instantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. But
+in a minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at seeing you in
+this place." He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectly
+still. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with
+his back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confined
+himself to his point. "Is it anything very bad that has brought you?"
+
+He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; so
+that, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. "Do you
+mean, if I may ask, that _she_, dying--?" Her face, wondering, pressed
+it more than her words.
+
+"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said. "What has come to me
+is what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting
+you know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me last
+night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And
+he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her
+as mechanical.
+
+She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went
+with her. "You didn't want to come?"
+
+"It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if it
+had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,
+I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and
+portentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for my
+happiness."
+
+This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it.
+"You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."
+
+"Oh--well enough!"
+
+But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."
+
+"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
+so simple even as that."
+
+She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
+with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
+still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
+at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
+then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
+explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
+_haven't_ decided what to do."
+
+She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
+say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
+Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
+you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
+part of the room to another.
+
+"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
+
+It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
+you've had to come?"
+
+"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
+Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
+whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
+And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
+little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."
+
+"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
+suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
+a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
+as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
+oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
+
+She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
+very awful?"
+
+"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
+you find my idea--"
+
+He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
+impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
+anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
+
+It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
+making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
+turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
+recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
+storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
+Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
+might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
+the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
+stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
+possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
+The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
+anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
+she'd understand.
+
+It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
+instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
+the world like her?"
+
+"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
+never any one in the world like her."
+
+Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
+unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
+she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
+communication is?"
+
+"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.
+
+"Do you mean a letter?"
+
+"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."
+
+Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
+
+"Oh perfectly."
+
+It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
+next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"
+
+"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
+very short ones."
+
+"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
+enough if you're sure you remember."
+
+"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
+in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
+Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then she
+once copied me something."
+
+"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of
+your reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as if
+precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:
+"And the writing has its usual look?"
+
+Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's
+beautiful."
+
+"Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further
+remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's
+possible."
+
+"Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's
+what I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle
+vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
+
+She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his
+pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the
+room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. He
+looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid
+London street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--as
+he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of
+the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness
+that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of
+his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so
+driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him
+to say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the
+inanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
+minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly
+presented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to
+things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try
+to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she
+again took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"
+
+It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by an
+hour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But my
+eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I
+recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
+
+"One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however was
+so singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this while
+you _hadn't_ touched it."
+
+"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching
+nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took
+hold of it."
+
+"Then where is it?"
+
+"Oh I have it here."
+
+"And you've brought it to show me?"
+
+"I've brought it to show you."
+
+So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,
+almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.
+She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his
+own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought.
+"But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
+
+"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."
+
+She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable
+child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You
+haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you
+require don't come from your document itself." Then as he answered
+nothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"
+
+"I haven't read it."
+
+She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"
+
+Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and
+again he was before her. "By telling me _this_. It's something, you
+know, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."
+
+She was vague. "The other day?"
+
+"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he
+doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What
+does his having been with her there mean?"
+
+"Of whom are you talking?"
+
+"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
+
+"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
+
+"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;
+and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the
+question."
+
+Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any
+hour."
+
+"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his
+second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a
+matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact
+remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
+
+Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly
+than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked
+just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something
+back."
+
+"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.
+All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a
+connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was
+practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what
+has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
+for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
+
+
+V
+
+Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
+down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
+that I must have told him?"
+
+She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
+he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
+anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
+What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
+
+"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
+
+She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
+allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
+really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
+often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
+him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
+knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
+stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
+her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
+to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
+none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
+Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"
+
+"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--since
+when?"
+
+"Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And then
+she explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--like
+Aunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn't
+after all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,
+she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for
+the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."
+
+"You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"
+
+"Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfully
+added--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."
+
+He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,
+"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"
+
+"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has
+some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
+let--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of
+money, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at."
+
+Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything? In spite of
+what?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to
+do that sort of thing."
+
+"To try to get money?"
+
+"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has
+had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days'
+notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud,
+who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come then
+to Lancaster Gate--to sleep at least--till, like all the world, you go
+to the country.' He was to have gone to the country--I think to
+Matcham--yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was."
+
+Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement,
+beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. "Told you, you mean, so that
+you needn't leave the house?"
+
+"Yes--so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was
+part of my reason."
+
+"And _was_ it part of your reason?"
+
+"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here--as I knew there would
+be--without it. So that," she said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad
+I am here: even if for all the good I do--!" She implied however that
+that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as you tell me, get off then to
+Matcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going this
+afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable--and it's really, I'm
+bound to say, quite amiable of him--is that he has declined to leave
+Aunt Maud, as I've been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone.
+If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it's a _procédé_ that won't
+please her less. It's small wonder therefore that she insists, on a
+dull day, in driving him about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
+"what may happen between them; but that's all I see in it."
+
+"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher returned,
+"something that, while I'm with you at least, I always take from you as
+the truth itself."
+
+She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the
+sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that
+seemed to show how fine she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
+everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and,
+yielding to the impulse to which he hadn't yielded just before, he laid
+his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
+little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled
+things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he
+applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an
+instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all
+passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn't
+prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was
+enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid
+connexion and as she made it sat down again. "I've been trying to place
+exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were
+in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me--spoke out."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled round.
+
+"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it, by having refused
+to meet him as he wanted--as he pressed--I plead guilty to being so.
+Would you have liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
+would have kept him from going?"
+
+It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you know he was going?"
+
+"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that--even if it doesn't fit your
+strange suppositions--I should have given him just the same answer if I
+had known. If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust upon
+you, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which I
+find a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," she
+continued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
+
+"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the next
+moment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."
+
+"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he was unfortunately the
+one person we hadn't deceived, I can't contradict you."
+
+"No--of course not. But _why_," Densher still risked, "was he
+unfortunately the one person--? He's not really a bit intelligent."
+
+"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in
+anything so unnatural as--all things considered and when it came to the
+point--my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his
+conviction he acted."
+
+Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's conviction as if it
+were a blot on the face of nature. "Do you mean because you had
+appeared to him to have encouraged him?"
+
+"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where _were_ we?"
+
+"'Where'--?"
+
+"You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn't mattered. What
+mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
+that he has had all along his impression of _you_. You can't help it,"
+she said, "but you're after all--well, yourself."
+
+"As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and
+kept myself there--what," Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
+
+"Your being in Venice and liking to be--which is never on any one's
+part a monstrosity--was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite
+capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
+
+"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before
+what you call his second descent, hadn't convinced him--all the more
+that my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back convinced." And
+then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: "I mean after he
+had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
+
+"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
+
+"That you were sincere. That it was _her_ you loved." It came to him
+from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found
+himself yet again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return here," she
+meanwhile continued, "had it from him. And that's why you're now so
+well with Aunt Maud."
+
+He only for a minute looked out in silence--after which he came away.
+"And why _you_ are." It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect
+between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps
+rather if it hadn't been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp
+because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
+so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while
+they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of
+everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word
+might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he
+drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his
+waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her
+eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place
+and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and
+unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he
+thus finally spoke of was a different matter. "Did I understand from
+Mrs. Lowder that your father's in the house?"
+
+If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was
+not to take her so now. "In the house, yes. But we needn't fear his
+interruption"--she spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in bed."
+
+"Do you mean with illness?"
+
+She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill. He's a marvel. He's
+only--endless."
+
+Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you with him?"
+
+"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. "By our
+making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him--and for
+Marian too."
+
+"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't--could I?--not have
+come."
+
+"No, you couldn't not have come."
+
+"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?"
+
+Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day, put ugly words into my
+mouth. I've enough of my trouble without it."
+
+"I know--I know!" He spoke in instant pleading. "It's all only that I'm
+as troubled _for_ you. When did he come?"
+
+"Three days ago--after he hadn't been near her for more than a year,
+after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her
+existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in."
+
+Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such want--?"
+
+"No, not of food, of necessary things--not even, so far as his
+appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he
+was--well, in terror."
+
+"In terror of what?"
+
+"I don't know. Of somebody--of something. He wants, he says, to be
+quiet. But his quietness is awful."
+
+She suffered, but he couldn't not question. "What does he do?"
+
+It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
+
+Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. "What _has_ he done?"
+
+It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face.
+Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. "If you love
+me--now--don't ask me about father."
+
+He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because I love you that I'm
+here. It's because I love you that I've brought you this." And he drew
+from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
+
+But her eyes only--though he held it out--met the offer. "Why you've
+not broken the seal!"
+
+"If I had broken the seal--exactly--I should know what's within. It's
+for _you_ to break the seal that I bring it."
+
+She looked--still not touching the thing--inordinately grave. "To break
+the seal of something to you from _her?_"
+
+"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by whatever you think
+of it."
+
+"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you yourself think?" And then
+as he didn't answer: "It seems to me _I_ think you know. You have your
+instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
+
+Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an
+accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to
+face. "I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it
+out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour." He held up
+his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. "This thing
+had been timed."
+
+"For Christmas Eve?"
+
+"For Christmas Eve."
+
+Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season of gifts!" After which,
+as he said nothing, she went on: "And had been written, you mean, while
+she could write, and kept to _be_ so timed?"
+
+Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn't reply. "What do
+_you_ mean by the proof?"
+
+"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved. But I won't," she
+said, "break your seal."
+
+"You positively decline?"
+
+"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly: "I know without."
+
+He had another pause. "And what is it you know?"
+
+"That she announces to you she has made you rich."
+
+His pause this time was longer. "Left me her fortune?"
+
+"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But money to a large
+amount. I don't care," Kate went on, "to know how much." And her
+strange smile recurred. "I trust her."
+
+"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
+
+"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought. "That wouldn't, on my
+part, have been playing fair with her. And I did," she added, "play
+fair."
+
+Densher, who had believed her--he couldn't help it--continued, holding
+his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had
+somehow passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and that's why--since
+we talk of proofs--I want to give _you_ one. I've wanted to let you
+see--and in preference even to myself--something I feel as sacred."
+
+She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
+
+"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can
+peculiarly recognise--"
+
+"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he dropped.
+
+"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice
+of an act of splendid generosity."
+
+"And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?"
+
+He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol of my attitude."
+
+She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraid
+of yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to do
+yourself violence."
+
+"So it is then you meet me?"
+
+She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand
+still stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"
+
+"I absolutely desire you to take it."
+
+"To do what I like with it?"
+
+"Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon my
+making the point--between you and me."
+
+She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."
+Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes
+again rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
+before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."
+
+"Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.
+
+"Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearer
+to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing
+into the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: his
+arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,
+with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'll
+have it all," Kate said, "from New York."
+
+It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that
+she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as she
+had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need
+recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the
+prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a
+note from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed him
+by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he
+had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,
+and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale's
+copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the
+gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the
+girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act on
+receipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to the
+bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted in
+strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what
+Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair
+since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little
+vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had
+at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention
+of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when
+they met again the subject was made present to them--at all events till
+some flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutely
+expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
+often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of
+February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's
+stay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt
+which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at
+Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of
+them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she
+really despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with my
+own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
+_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proud
+as the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--having
+nothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. She
+calls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holiday
+to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the
+scullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
+not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quite
+decent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has been
+good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I
+don't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one
+hoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,
+after all, you clever creature, what that was."
+
+It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that
+Densher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, after
+Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on
+his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent
+was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then
+acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been
+painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of
+which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite
+high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.
+Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on
+her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was
+prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger
+passed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he
+would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away
+westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in
+this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
+which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
+answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
+again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
+post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
+question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
+companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
+a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
+might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
+current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
+it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
+that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
+as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
+same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
+even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
+wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
+image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
+bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
+several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
+was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
+say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
+him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
+within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
+these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
+none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
+publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
+good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
+to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
+view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
+delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
+Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
+in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
+and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
+world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
+that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
+impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness
+of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't
+undo.
+
+Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of
+arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which
+they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made
+everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.
+Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered
+alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on
+her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for
+them at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time an
+appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--though
+he didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, for
+a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster
+Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
+It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
+which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of
+cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way
+of a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to
+helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion
+that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful
+warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under
+their feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.
+He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
+Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying
+his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she
+admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in
+the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--she
+was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about
+misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and all
+unconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that they
+didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point
+for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the
+river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was
+mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together
+to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never
+been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--he
+scarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk of
+what they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as
+if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They
+concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;
+they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come
+of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
+off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their
+change--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being so
+damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
+point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What
+danger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had long
+since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he
+asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
+
+Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being the
+interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such
+different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a
+difference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;
+she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been
+more agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: he
+felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which he
+even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at
+all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people
+she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have
+something fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top of
+a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a
+person she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for the
+so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,
+what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at
+once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
+She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck
+him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,
+but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the
+impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
+She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out
+of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look
+with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
+prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
+That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
+sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
+to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
+really _do_ anything it would be another matter."
+
+He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
+a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
+her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
+might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
+objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
+consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
+day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
+contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
+are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
+actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
+to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
+something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
+thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
+precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
+thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
+he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
+left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
+the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
+of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
+handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
+handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
+else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
+words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
+letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
+only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
+part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
+given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
+about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
+It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
+of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save
+it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice
+of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual
+ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he
+cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and
+guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the
+inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,
+should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which
+they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one
+with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't
+complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.
+
+The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion
+we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.
+This would have marked immediately the difference--had there been
+nothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their other
+terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been
+_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they
+had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,
+almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
+around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air
+in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in
+the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the
+way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil
+symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,
+she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these
+things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her
+after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of
+reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
+who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very
+prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your
+seal."
+
+She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long
+envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in
+another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--his
+belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had
+happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and
+it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any
+approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my
+intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
+as not mine."
+
+"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
+
+"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
+New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
+and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
+back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
+his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
+
+Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
+signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
+touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
+sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
+possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
+for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"
+
+"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
+_know_--!"
+
+"But you don't know," she said very gently.
+
+"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
+handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
+one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
+the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."
+
+She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
+mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
+
+Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
+"Well yes--something of that sort."
+
+"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
+spoils the beauty?"
+
+"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
+confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
+received it."
+
+"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
+
+"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
+if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."
+
+"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
+
+He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
+air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
+wanted--in so good a case--to test you."
+
+She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
+good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
+"has ever been known."
+
+"The better the case then the better the test!"
+
+"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
+
+"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
+sooner."
+
+"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
+you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
+
+"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
+correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
+
+She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
+Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"
+
+He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"
+
+"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not
+accepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such
+cases? Not taking up the bequest."
+
+"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My
+asking you to join with me in doing so."
+
+Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her
+less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
+
+"How? By a single word."
+
+"And what word?"
+
+"Your consent to my giving up."
+
+"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."
+
+"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.
+
+She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I
+_don't_ consent?"
+
+"Yes. I do nothing."
+
+"That, as I understand, is accepting."
+
+Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
+
+"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
+
+"I won't touch the money."
+
+It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
+"Who then in such an event _will?_"
+
+"Any one who wants or who can."
+
+Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
+time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
+you?"
+
+"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
+you."
+
+"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
+
+"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
+he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
+must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
+you 'have' me."
+
+"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
+thoroughly up to it!"
+
+"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
+as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.
+Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
+
+It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
+and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
+dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
+in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
+each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
+before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
+said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
+further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
+them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
+air.
+
+There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
+intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."
+
+She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
+she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
+absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
+interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
+done for you?"
+
+"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"
+
+"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"
+
+"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
+Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."
+
+She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
+facts be published?"
+
+"'Published'?"--he winced.
+
+"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
+
+"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
+
+It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
+insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
+help you to renounce?"
+
+"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
+that the amount of money's not small."
+
+"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
+inevitably not be meagre."
+
+Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
+was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."
+
+He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
+of them. "Stupendous?"
+
+"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
+face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
+uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but that
+made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really
+is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're
+afraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
+indeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in
+love with her."
+
+"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
+
+She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for
+the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.
+But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she
+died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you
+_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_
+us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "I
+used to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove.
+Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached.
+They cover us."
+
+"They cover us," Densher said.
+
+"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done
+for you."
+
+His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,
+his tears. "Do I understand then--?"
+
+"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll
+marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
+consent _you_ don't."
+
+"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of
+her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every
+penny."
+
+Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare.
+"Precisely--so that I must choose."
+
+"You must choose."
+
+Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,
+while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath
+come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save
+you from my choice."
+
+"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
+
+"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your
+surrender of that."
+
+"What is it then?"
+
+"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
+
+"Oh--her memory!"
+
+"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't
+be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her
+memory's your love. You _want_ no other."
+
+He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then
+he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
+
+"As we were?"
+
+"As we were."
+
+But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We
+shall never be again as we were!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30059 ***
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+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">BY</h3>
+<h2 align="center">HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">VOLUME II</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">NEW YORK</h3>
+<h2 align="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h2>
+
+<h3 align="center">1909</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5 align="center">Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons</h5>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+
+
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK SIXTH</h2>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p>
+"I say, you know, Kate&mdash;you <i>did</i> stay!" had been
+Merton Densher's punctual remark on their adventure
+after they had, as it were, got out of it; an observation
+which she not less promptly, on her side, let
+him see that she forgave in him only because he was a
+man. She had to recognise, with whatever disappointment,
+that it was doubtless the most helpful he could
+make in this character. The fact of the adventure
+was flagrant between them; they had looked at each
+other, on gaining the street, as people look who have
+just rounded together a dangerous corner, and there
+was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
+to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal
+in her action. But the amount of light men <i>did</i>
+need!&mdash;Kate could have been eloquent at this moment
+about that. What, however, on his seeing more,
+struck him as most distinct in her was her sense that,
+reunited after his absence and having been now half
+the morning together, it behooved them to face without
+delay the question of handling their immediate
+future. That it would require some handling, that
+they should still have to deal, deal in a crafty manner,
+with difficulties and delays, was the great matter he
+had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
+consciousness of their personal need of each other.
+This need had had twenty minutes, the afternoon
+before, to find out where it stood, and the time was
+fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration.
+He had arrived at Euston at five, having wired
+her from Liverpool the moment he landed, and she
+had quickly decided to meet him at the station, whatever
+publicity might attend such an act. When he had
+praised her for it on alighting from his train she had
+answered frankly enough that such things should be
+taken at a jump. She didn't care to-day who saw her,
+and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow, inevitably,
+she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
+would become a baser creature, a creature of
+alarms and precautions. It was none the less for to-morrow
+at an early hour that she had appointed their
+next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
+obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six
+o'clock. She had given, with imprecations, her reason&mdash;people
+to tea, eternally, and a promise to Aunt
+Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot
+and had suggested the National Gallery for the morning
+quite as with an idea that had ripened in expectancy.
+They might be seen there too, but nobody
+would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in
+the refreshment-room to which they had adjourned,
+they would incur the notice but, at the worst, of the
+unacquainted. They would "have something" there
+for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
+come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
+</p>
+<p>
+He found himself on English soil with all sorts of
+feelings, but he hadn't quite faced having to reckon
+with a certain ruefulness in regard to that subject as
+one of the strongest. He was aware later on that there
+were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby
+it actually rather smote him, for want of preparation
+and assurance, that he had nowhere to "take" his
+love. He had taken it thus, at Euston&mdash;and on
+Kate's own suggestion&mdash;into the place where people
+had beer and buns, and had ordered tea at a small
+table in the corner; which, no doubt, as they were
+lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It
+perhaps did as well as her simply driving with him
+to the door of his lodging, which had had to figure as
+the sole device of his own wit. That wit, the truth
+was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision
+that once at his door they would have to hang back.
+She would have to stop there, wouldn't come in with
+him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able to
+ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
+deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced
+stage, respect for her: that again was all that
+was clear except the further fact that it was maddening.
+Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
+single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for
+him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head
+as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting
+sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow&mdash;he
+scarce knew what to call it&mdash;a fifth wheel to
+the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an
+outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make
+happiness less. They had met again for happiness,
+and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment
+or two, how he must keep watch on anything that
+really menaced that boon. If Kate had consented to
+drive away with him and alight at his house there
+would probably enough have occurred for them, at
+the foot of his steps, one of those strange instants between
+man and woman that blow upon the red spark,
+the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
+She would have shaken her head&mdash;oh sadly,
+divinely&mdash;on the question of coming in; and he,
+though doing all justice to her refusal, would have yet
+felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible
+word at such a time could reach. This would have
+meant the suspicion, the dread of the shadow, of an
+adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case that
+the scant minutes took another turn and that by the
+half-hour she did in spite of everything contrive to
+spend with him Kate showed so well how she could
+deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
+him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to
+leave her, now and henceforth, to treat them in her
+own way.
+</p><p>
+She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their
+early convenience, one of the great museums; and
+indeed with such happy art that his fully seeing where
+she had placed him hadn't been till after he left her.
+His absence from her for so many weeks had had such
+an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had
+grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed,
+beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he
+had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He
+hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was
+on his way to say to her that really their mistake must
+end. Their mistake was to have believed that they
+<i>could hold out</i>&mdash;hold out, that is, not against Aunt
+Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and
+exasperated, made a man ill. He had known more
+than ever, on their separating in the court of the station,
+how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel
+from such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing
+that he had already suffered Kate to begin finely
+to apply antidotes and remedies and subtle sedatives.
+It had a vulgar sound&mdash;as throughout, in love, the
+names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were,
+compared with love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was
+as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself
+"put off," though it would take him of course a
+day or two to see. His letters from the States had
+pleased whom it concerned, though not so much as he
+had meant they should; and he should be paid according
+to agreement and would now take up his money.
+It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he
+hadn't in the least come back flourishing a cheque-book;
+that new motive for bringing his mistress to
+terms he couldn't therefore pretend to produce. The
+ideal certainty would have been to be able to present
+a change of prospect as a warrant for the change of
+philosophy, and without it he should have to make
+shift but with the pretext of the lapse of time. The
+lapse of time&mdash;not so many weeks after all, she might
+always of course say&mdash;couldn't at any rate have
+failed to do something for him; and that consideration
+it was that had just now tided him over, all the more
+that he had his vision of what it had done personally
+for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour
+that almost scared him even in their small corner
+of the room at Euston&mdash;almost scared him because
+it just seemed to blaze at him that waiting was
+the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature
+he had originally seen; not yet had he felt so
+soundly safely sure. It was all there for him, playing
+on his pride of possession as a hidden master in a
+great dim church might play on the grandest organ.
+His final sense was that a woman couldn't be like
+that and then ask of one the impossible.
+</p><p>
+She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and
+so for the hour they had been able to float in the mere
+joy of contact&mdash;such contact as their situation in
+pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
+for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty
+small signs of unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate;
+so little could a decent interest in the interesting place
+presume to remind them of its claims. They had met
+there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
+with an equal want of invention and of style, at a
+railway-station; not again, either, in Kensington
+Gardens, which, they could easily and tacitly agree,
+would have had too much of the taste of their old
+frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning
+in the pictured halls, had been a variation; yet
+Densher had at the end of a quarter of an hour fully
+known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled
+him for their awkwardness, as if he had been
+watching it affect her. She might be as nobly charming
+as she liked, and he had seen nothing to touch her
+in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
+as those she herself <i>believed</i> it enough to appease him.
+She couldn't pretend she believed he
+would believe it enough to render her a like service.
+It wasn't enough for that purpose&mdash;she as good as
+showed him it wasn't. That was what he could be
+glad, by demonstration, to have brought her to. He
+would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
+the spot: "<i>Now</i> am I to understand you that you consider
+this sort of thing can go on?" It would have
+been open to her, no doubt, to reply that to have him
+with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
+still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in
+their yearning interval, was a sort of thing that he
+must allow her to have no quarrel about; but that
+would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport
+of her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they
+wanted; in spite of which indeed he scarce could have
+said how beautifully he mightn't once more have
+named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
+blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon
+seated themselves for better talk, and so they had remained
+a while, intimate and superficial. The immediate
+things to say had been many, for they hadn't
+exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them
+freely now, and Kate appeared quite to forget&mdash;which
+was prodigiously becoming to her&mdash;to look
+about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and
+try in vain, to remember what speech or what silence
+of his own, what natural sign of the eyes or accidental
+touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in the
+midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had
+got up, with inconsequence, as if to break the charm,
+though he wasn't aware of what he had done at the
+moment to make the charm a danger. She had
+patched it up agreeably enough the next minute by
+some odd remark about some picture, to which he
+hadn't so much as replied; it being quite independently
+of this that he had himself exclaimed on the
+dreadful closeness of the rooms. He had observed
+that they must go out again to breathe; and it was as
+if their common consciousness, while they passed
+into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely
+engaged together, had been startled and were trying
+to look natural. It was probably while they were so
+occupied&mdash;as the young man subsequently reconceived&mdash;that
+they had stumbled upon his little New
+York friend. He thought of her for some reason as
+little, though she was of about Kate's height, to which,
+any more than to any other felicity in his mistress, he
+had never applied the diminutive.
+</p><p>
+What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to
+him was the process by which he had become aware
+that Kate's acquaintance with her was greater than
+he had gathered. She had written of it in due course
+as a new and amusing one, and he had written back
+that he had met over there, and that he much liked,
+the young person; whereupon she had answered that
+he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the
+event, however, had not returned to that, and he had
+of course, with so many things to find out about, been
+otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's individual
+history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
+moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss
+Theales. They even went so far as to impose themselves
+as one of the groups of social phenomena that
+fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
+group in especial perhaps&mdash;the irrepressible, the
+supereminent young persons&mdash;his best pen was
+ready. Thus it was that there could come back to him
+in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with
+the American pair, the sense of a situation for which
+Kate hadn't wholly prepared him. Possibly indeed
+as marked as this was his recovered perception that
+preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly
+what, both yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having
+in hand. That appearance in fact, if he dwelt on it,
+so ministered to apprehension as to require some
+brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some
+extent, on their separating first from their hostesses
+and then from each other, by the aid of a long and
+rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office later,
+but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave
+himself as a pretext that he had eaten much too much.
+After Kate had asked him to put her into a cab&mdash;which,
+as an announced, a resumed policy on her
+part, he found himself deprecating&mdash;he stood a
+while by a corner and looked vaguely forth at his
+London. There was always doubtless a moment for
+the absentee recaptured&mdash;<i>the</i> moment, that of the
+reflux of the first emotion&mdash;at which it was beyond
+disproof that one was back. His full parenthesis was
+closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort,
+in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
+street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print
+that somehow managed to be crowded without being
+"fine." The grey, however, was more or less the blur
+of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
+there would be colour enough to come out. He was
+back, flatly enough, but back to possibilities and
+prospects, and the ground he now somewhat sightlessly
+covered was the act of renewed possession.
+</p><p>
+He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion,
+quite in the direction his little New York
+friend, in her restless ramble, had taken a day or two
+before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park;
+and though he moved further and faster he finally
+sat down, like Milly, from the force of thought. For
+him too in this position, be it added&mdash;and he might
+positively have occupied the same bench&mdash;various
+troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more
+yet said what he really wanted than Kate herself had
+found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple
+of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
+what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern
+them during these first hours but to hold each
+other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate
+was palpable, that there were at present more things
+rather than fewer between them. The explanation
+about the two ladies would be part of the lot, yet
+could wait with all the rest. They were not meanwhile
+certainly what most made him roam&mdash;the
+missing explanations weren't. That was what she
+had so often said before, and always with the effect of
+suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good
+cab." Their previous encounters, the times when they
+had reached in their stroll the south side of the park,
+had had a way of winding up with this special irrelevance.
+It was effectively what most divided them,
+for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been
+able to jump in with her. What did she think he
+wished to do to her?&mdash;it was a question he had had
+occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless&mdash;since,
+when it came to that, they didn't depend on
+cabs good or bad for the sense of union: its importance
+was less from the particular loss than as a kind
+of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness,
+under providence, had been great from the first, so
+far as joining him was concerned; and he was critical
+only because it had been still greater, even from the
+first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
+question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition
+of her appeal&mdash;had asked her once more what she
+supposed he wished to do. He recalled, on his bench
+in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy, funny and
+pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
+itself, while the usual hansom charged them,
+during which he felt himself, disappointed as he was,
+grimacing back at the superiority of her very "humour,"
+in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
+solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been
+at all events by that time made, and he should see
+what her choice in respect to it&mdash;a surprise as well as
+a relief&mdash;would do toward really simplifying. It
+meant either new help or new hindrance, though it
+took them at least out of the streets. And her naming
+this privilege had naturally made him ask if Mrs.
+Lowder knew of his return.
+</p><p>
+"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall
+speak to her now." And she had argued, as with
+rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be quite
+easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that
+I've margin surely for my mention of you. You'll
+come to see <i>her</i>, and she'll leave you with me; she'll
+show her good nature, and her lack of betrayed fear,
+in that. With her, you know, you've never broken,
+quite the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever.
+We're leaving town; it will be the end; just now
+therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask to-night," Kate
+had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me&mdash;my
+cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal&mdash;I'll
+make it all right."
+</p><p>
+He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering
+more about it now than he had wondered there
+in Brook Street. He repeated to himself that if it
+wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of
+muddle. This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his
+wonder for still other questions. Kate had really got
+off without meeting his little challenge about the
+terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her
+dear Milly, it was sensible, <i>was</i> somehow in the picture.
+Her dear Milly, popping up in his absence, occupied&mdash;he
+couldn't have said quite why he felt it&mdash;more
+of the foreground than one would have expected
+her in advance to find clear. She took up room, and it
+was almost as if room had been made for her. Kate
+had appeared to take for granted he would know why
+it had been made; but that was just the point. It was
+a foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion
+with Kate, scarce enjoyed a space to turn
+round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at the present
+juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened,
+if not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of
+her also that if she weren't a bore she'd be a convenience.
+It rolled over him of a sudden, after he had
+resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate
+had meant. The charming girl adored her&mdash;Densher
+had for himself made out that&mdash;and would protect,
+would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
+might take place, in other words, on her premises,
+which would remove them still better from the streets.
+<i>That</i> was an explanation which did hang together.
+It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
+their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend
+upon her. Yet this fact in turn would be accounted
+for by the need of more preliminaries. One
+of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
+at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that
+propriety.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It was extraordinary enough that he should actually
+be finding himself, when Thursday arrived, none so
+wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all the way to
+this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the
+end of a quarter of an hour. What she had begun
+with was her surprise at her appearing to have left
+him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
+parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or
+less together, and it wasn't even as if she had spent
+the interval in twisting and fitting them. She was
+bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with the
+general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough
+that if the American ladies themselves weren't to be
+squared, which was absurd, they fairly imposed the
+necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One couldn't
+say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll
+meet, please, whenever you'll let us, at your house;
+but we count on you to help us to keep it secret."
+They must in other terms inevitably speak to Aunt
+Maud&mdash;it would be of the last awkwardness to ask
+them not to: Kate had embraced all this in her choice
+of speaking first. What Kate embraced altogether
+was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
+perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her
+piece by piece than as receiving it in a steady light.
+He had always felt, however, that the more he asked
+of her the more he found her prepared, as he imaged
+it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once
+even before his absence: "You keep the key of the
+cupboard, and I foresee that when we're married
+you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
+that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar
+would be his diet, and the domestic arrangement so
+prefigured might have seemed already to prevail. The
+supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless,
+of a truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met
+in a manner his immediate requirements. If her explanations
+at any rate prompted questions the questions
+no more exhausted them than they exhausted
+her patience. And they were naturally, of the series,
+the simpler; as for instance in his taking it from her
+that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He
+frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
+possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really
+exhausted the charms of the open air and the crowd,
+some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional
+opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to
+me these two days as better than nothing. But if our
+friends are so accountable to this house of course
+there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail,
+thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was
+but too glad without more ado to point the moral.
+"Now I hope you see we can't work it anyhow."
+</p><p>
+If she laughed for this&mdash;and her spirits seemed
+really high&mdash;it was because of the opportunity that,
+at the hotel, he had most shown himself as enjoying.
+"Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that
+you hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was
+as beautifully good-humoured. "You might of course
+get used to her&mdash;you <i>will.</i> You're quite right&mdash;so
+long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
+lucidly, that the dear things couldn't <i>help</i>, simply as
+charming friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak
+to Aunt Maud, but they won't shut their doors to us:
+that would be another matter. A friend always helps&mdash;and
+she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham
+by this time out of the question; she had reduced it to
+Milly. "Besides, she particularly likes us. She particularly
+likes <i>you</i>. I say, old boy, make something of
+that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
+made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the
+best, they could work it; but there were certain of his
+remarks&mdash;those mostly of the sharper penetration&mdash;that
+it had been quite her practice from the first not
+formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the
+effect of them in ways less trite. This was what happened
+now: he didn't think in truth that she wasn't
+really minding. She took him up, none the less, on a
+minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but
+you see it's just what we do. What could be more
+lovely than this?"
+</p><p>
+It wasn't to torment him&mdash;that again he didn't
+believe; but he had to come to the house in some discomfort,
+so that he frowned a little at her calling it
+thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
+back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled
+and varnished, but he knew in his bones how little the
+very highest privileges of Lancaster Gate could ever
+be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in
+one of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged
+as a boudoir, but visibly unused&mdash;it defied
+familiarity&mdash;and furnished in the ugliest of blues.
+He had immediately looked with interest at the closed
+doors, and Kate had met his interest with the assurance
+that it was all right, that Aunt Maud did them
+justice&mdash;so far, that was, as this particular time was
+concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing
+to fear. But the fresh allusion to this that he
+had drawn from her acted on him now more directly,
+brought him closer still to the question. They <i>were</i>
+alone&mdash;it <i>was</i> all right: he took in anew the shut
+doors and the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of
+the great house. They connected themselves on the
+spot with something made doubly vivid in him by the
+whole present play of her charming strong will. What
+it amounted to was that he couldn't have her&mdash;hanged
+if he could!&mdash;evasive. He couldn't and he
+wouldn't&mdash;wouldn't have her inconvenient and
+elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself,
+fine as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted
+to keep her where their communications would be
+straight and easy and their intercourse independent.
+The effect of this was to make him say in a moment:
+"Will you take me just as I am?"
+</p><p>
+She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it&mdash;which
+qualified to his sense delightfully the strength
+of her will; and the pleasure he found in this was not
+the less for her breaking out after an instant into a
+strain that stirred him more than any she had ever
+used with him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure
+you I see my way&mdash;so don't spoil it: wait for me and
+give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only believe in
+me, and it will be beautiful."
+</p><p>
+He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing
+in her as if he didn't; but he had come back&mdash;and
+it all was upon him now&mdash;to seize her with a
+sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with
+him had made, as happily appeared, irresistible. He
+laid strong hands upon her to say, almost in anger,
+"Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she closed
+her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but
+that she could gratefully take it. Her surrender was
+her response, her response her surrender; and, though
+scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by these
+things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
+appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long
+embrace in which they held each other was the rout of
+evasion, and he took from it the certitude that what
+she had from him was real to her. It was stronger than
+an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in
+afterthought was that she had been sublimely sincere.
+<i>That</i> was all he asked&mdash;sincerity making a basis that
+would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
+and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing
+left to ask her to swear to. Oaths and vows apart,
+now they could talk. It seemed in fact only now that
+their questions were put on the table. He had taken
+up more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea
+for her own plan, and it was marked that the difference
+made by the passage just enacted was a difference
+in favour of her choice of means. Means had
+somehow suddenly become a detail&mdash;her province
+and her care; it had grown more consistently vivid
+that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
+certainly don't want," he said&mdash;and he could say it
+with a smile of indulgence&mdash;"to be all the while
+bringing it up that I don't trust you."
+</p><p>
+"I should hope not! What do you think I want to
+do?"
+</p><p>
+He had really at this to make out a little what he
+thought, and the first thing that put itself in evidence
+was of course the oddity, after all, of their game, to
+which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
+at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way,
+a thing most people would call us fools for." But his
+visit passed, all the same, without his again attempting
+to make "just as he was" serve. He had no more
+money just as he was than he had had just as he had
+been, or than he should have, probably, when it came
+to that, just as he always would be; whereas she, on
+her side, in comparison with her state of some months
+before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily
+saw how their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more
+of an accent to that quantity than their meeting at
+stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand he
+couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent
+her indifference added in a manner to what
+Kate's taking him as he was would call on her to sacrifice.
+Such in fine was her art with him that she
+seemed to put the question of their still waiting into
+quite other terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid
+Sèvres, of complicated brass, in which their boudoir
+expressed it. She said almost all in fact by saying, on
+this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more
+pressed her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably
+soon happen, he would understand. "Do you
+mean," he asked at this, "that there's any <i>definite</i>
+sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
+"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave
+duplicities. Remember, after all, that supremely
+clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
+there is going&mdash;remember that she can play with us
+quite as much as we play with her."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't want to play with <i>me</i>, my dear,"
+Kate lucidly replied; "she doesn't want to make me
+suffer a bit more than she need. She cares for me too
+much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a
+value. <i>This</i> has a value&mdash;her being as she has been
+about us to-day. I believe she's in her room, where
+she's keeping strictly to herself while you're here with
+me. But that isn't 'playing'&mdash;not a bit."
+</p><p>
+"What is it then," the young man returned&mdash;"from
+the moment it isn't her blessing and a cheque?"
+</p><p>
+Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of
+smallness. There is something in her above trifles.
+She <i>generally</i> trusts us; she doesn't propose to hunt
+us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a thing&mdash;why,"
+said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She
+has really but one fault&mdash;she's indifferent, on such
+ground as she has taken about us, to details. However,"
+the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in detail
+we fight her."
+</p><p>
+"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's
+thought of this, "that it's in detail we deceive
+her"&mdash;a speech that, as soon as he had uttered it,
+applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
+to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
+</p><p>
+Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however,
+dropped from Kate, whom, as he could see with
+sacred joy, it must take more than that to make compunctious.
+"I don't say we can do it again. I mean,"
+she explained, "meet here."
+</p><p>
+Densher indeed had been wondering where they
+could do it again. If Lancaster Gate was so limited
+that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come back at all?"
+</p><p>
+"Certainly&mdash;to see her. It's she, really," his
+companion smiled, "who's in love with you."
+</p><p>
+But it made him&mdash;a trifle more grave&mdash;look at
+her a moment. "Don't make out, you know, that
+every one's in love with me."
+</p><p>
+She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
+</p><p>
+"You said just now Miss Theale."
+</p><p>
+"I said she liked you&mdash;yes."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which,
+however, he pursued: "Of course I ought to thank
+Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for <i>this</i>&mdash;as from
+myself."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an
+ironic gaiety for the implications of his "this," besides
+wishing to insist on a general prudence. "She'll
+wonder what you're thanking her for!"
+</p><p>
+Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes,
+I can't very well tell her all."
+</p><p>
+It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that
+Kate was again in a manner amused. Yet she gave
+out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her anything,
+and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please
+her; make her see how clever you are&mdash;only without
+letting her see that you're trying. If you're charming
+to her you've nothing else to do."
+</p><p>
+But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming'
+to her, so far as I see, only by letting her suppose I
+give you up&mdash;which I'll be hanged if I do! It <i>is</i>,"
+he said with feeling, "a game."
+</p><p>
+"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose
+you give me up&mdash;or I give <i>you</i>&mdash;if you keep reminding
+her how you enjoy our interviews."
+</p><p>
+"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant,"
+Densher asked, "what good does it do?"
+</p><p>
+Kate was for a moment checked. "What good
+does what&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Does my pleasing her&mdash;does anything. I <i>can't</i>,"
+he impatiently declared, "please her."
+</p><p>
+Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at
+his want of consistency; but it appeared to determine
+in her something better than a mere complaint.
+"Then <i>I</i> can! Leave it to me." With which she came
+to him under the compulsion, again, that had united
+them shortly before, and took hold of him in her urgency
+to the same tender purpose. It was her form of
+entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all,
+as he met it, their great fact clear. And it somehow
+clarified <i>all</i> things so to possess each other. The effect
+of it was that, once more, on these terms, he could
+only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
+everything to her that she reverted in the course of a
+few moments to one of her previous&mdash;and as positively
+seemed&mdash;her most precious ideas. "You
+accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love
+with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So
+there you are. That's the good she'll do us. It makes
+a basis for her seeing you&mdash;so that she'll help us to
+go on."
+</p><p>
+Densher stared&mdash;she was wondrous all round.
+"And what sort of a basis does it make for my seeing
+<i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
+</p><p>
+"Don't mind my leading her on?"
+</p><p>
+She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading
+<i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Well, she won't&mdash;so it's nothing not to mind.
+But how can that 'help,'" he pursued, "with what
+she knows?"
+</p><p>
+"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
+</p><p>
+"Prevent her helping you. She's <i>like</i> that," Kate
+Croy explained.
+</p><p>
+It took indeed some understanding. "Making
+nothing of the fact that I love another?"
+</p><p>
+"Making everything," said Kate. "To console
+you."
+</p><p>
+"But for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For not getting your other."
+</p><p>
+He continued to stare. "But how does she
+know&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That you <i>won't</i> get her? She doesn't; but on the
+other hand she doesn't know you will. Meanwhile
+she sees you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud's
+stand. <i>That</i>"&mdash;Kate was lucid&mdash;"gives her the
+chance to be nice to you."
+</p><p>
+"And what does it give <i>me</i>," the young man none
+the less rationally asked, "the chance to be? A brute
+of a humbug to her?"
+</p><p>
+Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she
+smiled at his violence. "You'll extraordinarily like
+her. She's exquisite. And there are reasons. I mean
+others."
+</p><p>
+"What others?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give
+you," the girl added, "are enough to go on with."
+</p><p>
+"To go on to what?"
+</p><p>
+"Why, to seeing her again&mdash;say as soon as you
+can: which, moreover, on all grounds, is no more than
+decent of you."
+</p><p>
+He of course took in her reference, and he had fully
+in mind what had passed between them in New York.
+It had been no great quantity, but it had made distinctly
+at the time for his pleasure; so that anything
+in the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have
+a slight kindling consequence. "Oh I shall naturally
+call again without delay. Yes," said Densher, "her
+being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
+independently of that, make every acknowledgement
+of favours received."
+</p><p>
+It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you
+see. I shall meet you there."
+</p><p>
+"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why
+she should wish to receive you for it."
+</p><p>
+"She receives me for myself&mdash;that is for <i>her</i> self.
+She thinks no end of me. That I should have to drum
+it into you!"
+</p><p>
+Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's
+beyond me."
+</p><p>
+Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She
+regards me as already&mdash;in these few weeks&mdash;her
+dearest friend. It's quite separate. We're in, she
+and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that,
+as if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere
+at sea, she threw out at last her own real light. "She
+doesn't of course know I care for <i>you</i>. She thinks I
+care so little that it's not worth speaking of." That
+he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made
+quickly clear, and Kate hailed the effect with surprise.
+"Have you been supposing that she does know&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such
+friends as you show me&mdash;and if you haven't otherwise
+represented it to her." She uttered at this such
+a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague.
+"You <i>have</i> denied it to her?"
+</p><p>
+She threw up her arms at his being so backward.
+"'Denied it'? My dear man, we've never spoken of
+you."
+</p><p>
+"Never, never?"
+</p><p>
+"Strange as it may appear to your glory&mdash;never."
+</p><p>
+He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs.
+Lowder have spoken?"
+</p><p>
+"Very probably. But of <i>you</i>. Not of me."
+</p><p>
+This struck him as obscure. "How does she know
+me but as part and parcel of you?"
+</p><p>
+"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly
+to make nothing of it, to have nothing to do with it, to
+stick consistently to her line about it. Aunt Maud's
+line is to keep all reality out of our relation&mdash;that
+is out of my being in danger from you&mdash;by not having
+so much as suspected or heard of it. She'll get
+rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it and sinking
+it&mdash;if she only does so hard enough. Therefore <i>she</i>,
+in her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she
+knows you otherwise than as part and parcel of me.
+She won't for a moment have allowed either to Mrs.
+Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they
+say, distinguished you."
+</p><p>
+"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that
+they must have made it out for themselves?"
+</p><p>
+"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared,
+"after Milly's so funnily bumping against us on
+Tuesday."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't see from <i>that</i>&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes,
+she sees, no doubt, that you regard me with a complacent
+eye&mdash;for you show it, I think, always too
+much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I
+don't show it too much; I don't perhaps&mdash;to please
+you completely where others are concerned&mdash;show it
+enough."
+</p><p>
+"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher
+demanded.
+</p><p>
+It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent.
+"Not where <i>you</i> are concerned. Beyond seeing
+that you're rather gone," she went on, "Milly only
+sees that I'm decently good to you."
+</p><p>
+"Very good indeed she must think it!"
+</p><p>
+"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate
+smiled, "as very good indeed."
+</p><p>
+The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take
+some explaining."
+</p><p>
+"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came
+back to her essential plea for her freedom of action
+and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she added, "I
+<i>will</i> explain."
+</p><p>
+"And what will I do?"
+</p><p>
+"Recognise the difference it must make if she
+thinks." But here in truth Kate faltered. It was his
+silence alone that, for the moment, took up her apparent
+meaning; and before he again spoke she had
+returned to remembrance and prudence. They were
+now not to forget that, Aunt Maud's liberality having
+put them on their honour, they mustn't spoil their
+case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they
+should probably find it would help them. But she
+came back to Milly too. "Mind you go to see her."
+</p><p>
+Densher still, however, took up nothing of this.
+"Then I may come again?"
+</p><p>
+"For Aunt Maud&mdash;as much as you like. But we
+can't again," said Kate, "play her <i>this trick</i>. I can't
+see you here alone."
+</p><p>
+"Then where?"
+</p><p>
+"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
+</p><p>
+"And what good will that do me?"
+</p><p>
+"Try it and you'll see."
+</p><p>
+"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher
+asked. "Say you are, how will that give us privacy?"
+</p><p>
+"Try it&mdash;you'll see," the girl once more returned.
+"We must manage as we can."
+</p><p>
+"That's precisely what <i>I</i> feel. It strikes me we
+might manage better." His idea of this was a thing
+that made him an instant hesitate; yet he brought it
+out with conviction. "Why won't you come to <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell
+him he was scarce generous in expecting her definitely
+to answer, and by looking to him to wait at least she
+appealed to something that she presently made him
+feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness
+that he thus found himself thrown back; and
+while he asked of his spirit and of his flesh just what
+concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
+again on the subject of her singular remedy for their
+embarrassment. It might have been irritating had she
+ever struck him as having in her mind a stupid corner.
+"You'll see," she said, "the difference it will make."
+</p><p>
+Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent;
+it was he who was stupid&mdash;the proof of which was
+that he would do what she liked. But he made a last
+effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
+bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something
+subtle but strong even as he spoke. "Is what
+you meant a moment ago that the difference will be in
+her being made to believe you hate me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of
+putting it, one of her more marked shows of impatience;
+with which in fact she sharply closed their
+discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her,
+and she accompanied him to the top of the stairs with
+an air of having so put their possibilities before him
+that questions were idle and doubts perverse. "I
+verily believe I <i>shall</i> hate you if you spoil for me the
+beauty of what I see!"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from
+her of what she saw; and the very next occasion had
+for him still other surprises than that. He received
+from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to
+Kate the telegraphic expression of a hope that he
+might be free to dine with them that evening; and his
+freedom affected him as fortunate even though in
+some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting
+American friends whom I'm so glad to find you
+know!" His knowledge of American friends was
+clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit
+to the last bitterness. This apprehension, however,
+we hasten to add, enjoyed for him, in the immediate
+event, a certain merciful shrinkage; the immediate
+event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes
+after his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty,
+Mrs. Stringham came in alone. The long daylight,
+the postponed lamps, the habit of the hour, made
+dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as
+he was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate
+herself not yet in the field. He had thus had with her
+several bewildering moments&mdash;bewildering by reason,
+fairly, of their tacit invitation to him to be supernaturally
+simple. This was exactly, goodness knew,
+what he wanted to be; but he had never had it so
+largely and freely&mdash;<i>so</i> supernaturally simply, for
+that matter&mdash;imputed to him as of easy achievement.
+It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to
+offer herself as an example, appeared to say quite
+agreeably: "What I want of you, don't you see? is to
+be just exactly as <i>I</i> am." The quantity of the article
+required was what might especially have caused him
+to stagger&mdash;he liked so, in general, the quantities in
+which Mrs. Lowder dealt. He would have liked as
+well to ask her how feasible she supposed it for a poor
+young man to resemble her at any point; but he had
+after all soon enough perceived that he was doing as
+she wished by letting his wonder show just a little as
+silly. He was conscious moreover of a small strange
+dread of the results of discussion with her&mdash;strange,
+truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity,
+that he feared. Asperity might have made him
+angry&mdash;in which there was always a comfort; good
+nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
+ashamed&mdash;which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully,
+liking him for himself, quite struck him as having
+guessed. To spare him therefore she also avoided discussion;
+she kept him down by refusing to quarrel
+with him. This was what she now proposed to him to
+enjoy, and his secret discomfort was his sense that on
+the whole it was what would best suit him. Being
+kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was
+of being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it
+mattered but little that he was ashamed of that too.
+It was of the essence of his position that in such a
+house as this the tables could always be turned on
+him. "What do you offer, what do you offer?"&mdash;the
+place, however muffled in convenience and decorum,
+constantly hummed for him with that thick
+irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious
+bribes, and he had already seen how little aid came to
+him from denouncing the bribes as ugly in form. That
+was what the precious metals&mdash;they alone&mdash;could
+afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly
+to try to impart a gloss to his own comparative brummagem.
+The humiliation of this impotence was precisely
+what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
+keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had
+doubtless never yet been so visible he had probably
+never felt so definitely placed in the world as while he
+waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
+welcomed him genially back from the States, as to
+his view of which her few questions, though not coherent,
+were comprehensive, and he had the amusement
+of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak
+of a plan and the sudden consciousness of a
+curiosity. She became aware of America, under his
+eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the idea
+of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just
+occurred to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of
+a minute, as her favourite dream. He didn't believe
+in it, but he pretended to; this helped her as well as
+anything else to treat him as harmless and blameless.
+She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
+absence of allusions, when the highest effect was
+given her method by the beautiful entrance of Kate.
+The method therefore received support all round, for
+no young man could have been less formidable than
+the person to the relief of whose shyness her niece
+ostensibly came. The ostensible, in Kate, struck him
+altogether, on this occasion, as prodigious; while
+scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his own
+reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions&mdash;a
+relation lighted for him by the straight
+look, not exactly loving nor lingering, yet searching
+and soft, that, on the part of their hostess, the girl had
+to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from
+head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made
+poor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked so
+something with which Kate habitually and consummately
+reckoned.
+</p><p>
+That was the story&mdash;that she was always, for her
+beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour,
+but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs.
+Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate
+ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the
+social scene; so that he now recognised in it something
+like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed
+by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect
+to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As
+such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look,
+to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this
+was what Kate was to do for the character she had
+undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
+was made up, the character, of definite elements and
+touches&mdash;things all perfectly ponderable to criticism;
+and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently at
+the start to be sure her make-up had had the last
+touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual.
+Aunt Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed
+managerial, and the performer's own contribution
+fairly that of the faultless soldier on parade. Densher
+saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall
+at the play; the watchful manager was in the depths
+of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights.
+But she <i>passed</i>, the poor performer&mdash;he could
+see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
+jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and
+her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper
+round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note
+for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
+much less time than notation demands; but we may
+none the less make the point that there was, still further,
+time among them for him to feel almost too
+scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself
+as having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind&mdash;so
+that in any case he only stared in silence at the
+older woman's technical challenge and at the younger
+one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama&mdash;it
+thus came to him, for the fact of a drama there was
+no blinking&mdash;was between <i>them</i>, them quite preponderantly;
+with Merton Densher relegated to mere
+spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the
+most expensive. This was why his appreciation had
+turned for the instant to fear&mdash;had just turned, as
+we have said, to sickness; and in spite of the fact that
+the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
+as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite,
+of a special intelligence. So might a practised
+performer, even when raked by double-barrelled
+glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
+sign to the person in the house she loved best.
+</p><p>
+The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile
+went on&mdash;amplified soon enough by the advent
+of two other guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers
+in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves
+to Kate during the next moments as subjects
+for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like
+usual mercy. At opposite ends of the social course,
+they displayed, in respect to the "figure" that each,
+in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
+contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A
+scratch company of two innocuous youths and a pacified
+veteran was therefore what now offered itself to
+Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless and
+full of the compunction of having had to come alone.
+Her companion, at the last moment, had been indisposed&mdash;positively
+not well enough, and so had
+packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
+regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's
+illness was the first thing Kate took up with Densher
+on their being able after dinner, without bravado, to
+have ten minutes "naturally," as she called it&mdash;which
+wasn't what <i>he</i> did&mdash;together; but it was already
+as if the young man had, by an odd impression,
+throughout the meal, not been wholly deprived of
+Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
+dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a
+topic as familiar to the enthusiastic younger as to
+the sagacious older man. Any knowledge they might
+lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
+supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to
+as the most privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't
+it he who had in a manner invented the wonderful
+creature&mdash;through having seen her first, caught her
+in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved
+the way for her by his prompt recognition of her
+rarity, by preceding her, in a friendly spirit&mdash;as he
+had the "ear" of society&mdash;with a sharp flashlight or
+two?
+</p><p>
+He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could,
+listening with interest, yet with discomfort; wincing
+in particular, dry journalist as he was, to find it seemingly
+supposed of him that he had put his pen&mdash;oh
+his "pen!"&mdash;at the service of private distinction.
+The ear of society?&mdash;they were talking, or almost,
+as if he had publicly paragraphed a modest young
+lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he appeared to
+perceive, that fairly waked <i>him</i> up, and he settled
+himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment
+and to catch the full revelation. His embarrassment
+came naturally from the fact that if he could claim no
+credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
+gracefully insist on his not having been concerned
+with her. What touched him most nearly was that the
+occasion took on somehow the air of a commemorative
+banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
+career. There was of course more said about the
+heroine than if she hadn't been absent, and he found
+himself rather stupefied at the range of Milly's triumph.
+Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the
+two wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or
+with hypocrisy, professed in the matter an equal expertness;
+and Densher at last seemed to know himself
+in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
+obviously, whose testimony would have been
+most invoked hadn't she been, as her friend's representative,
+rather confined to the function of inhaling
+the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
+smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the
+table, appeared benevolently both to speak and to interpret
+for her. Kate spoke as if she wouldn't perhaps
+understand <i>their</i> way of appreciating Milly, but
+would let them none the less, in justice to their good
+will, express it in their coarser fashion. Densher himself
+wasn't unconscious in respect to this of a certain
+broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
+indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move
+American nerves. He had only heard of them before,
+but in his recent tour he had caught them in the remarkable
+fact, and there was now a moment or two
+when it came to him that he had perhaps&mdash;and not
+in the way of an escape&mdash;taken a lesson from them.
+They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
+they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical
+organism&mdash;this lady striking him as before all things
+excited, as, in the native phrase, keyed-up, to a perception
+of more elements in the occasion than he was
+himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of
+it, he imagined, that were as yet obscure to him; for,
+though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he
+none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
+than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion
+in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience
+to report at home. Her little dry New England
+brightness&mdash;he had "sampled" all the shades
+of the American complexity, if complexity it were&mdash;had
+its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence;
+so that before the subject was changed he perceived
+(with surprise at the others) that they had given her
+enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself
+by the time he was asked if it were true that their
+friend had really not made in her own country the
+mark she had chalked so large in London. It was
+Mrs. Lowder herself who addressed him that enquiry;
+while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed
+with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose
+or with her hope that he would allow to London the
+honour of discovery. The less expansive of the white
+waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in
+London&mdash;for all that was said&mdash;much further than
+in the States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged,
+that they had taught the Americans to appreciate
+(especially when it was funny) some native product.
+He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny&mdash;though
+she was weird, and this was precisely her
+magic; but it might very well be that New York, in
+having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck.
+There <i>were</i> plenty of people who were nothing over
+there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just
+as&mdash;to make the balance right, thank goodness&mdash;they
+sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who
+left the Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in
+truth wasn't to be calculated&mdash;a formulation of the
+matter that was not reached, however, without producing
+in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
+announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration
+of her young friend <i>had</i> seemed to fail a little
+in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her
+having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral
+that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere;
+and the good lady, as the exponent of this
+doctrine&mdash;which she set forth at a certain length&mdash;made,
+obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest approach
+to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's
+absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed
+effective for him by suddenly addressing him. "You
+know nothing, sir&mdash;but not the least little bit&mdash;about
+my friend."
+</p><p>
+He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity
+of reproach in Mrs. Stringham's face and tone, a
+purity charged apparently with solemn meanings;
+so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
+couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered
+what she did mean, but while doing so he defended
+himself. "I certainly don't know enormously much&mdash;beyond
+her having been most kind to me, in New
+York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien,
+and my having tremendously appreciated it." To
+which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
+immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham,
+that you weren't then present."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression,
+though what it expressed he failed at the
+time to make out.
+</p><p>
+"You weren't present <i>then</i>, dearest," Mrs. Lowder
+richly concurred. "You don't know," she continued
+with mellow gaiety, "how far things may have gone."
+</p><p>
+It made the little woman, he could see, really lose
+her head. She had more things in that head than any
+of them in any other; unless perhaps it were Kate,
+whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
+foolish passage, though it pleased him&mdash;and because
+of the foolishness&mdash;not to meet her eyes. He met
+Mrs. Stringham's, which affected him: with her he
+could on occasion clear it up&mdash;a sense produced by
+the mute communion between them and really the
+beginning, as the event was to show, of something
+extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect
+of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly
+faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
+precisely my point that Mr. Densher <i>can't</i> have had
+vast opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I
+wasn't away, you know, long."
+</p><p>
+It made everything, in the oddest way in the world,
+immediately right for him. "And I wasn't <i>there</i> long,
+either." He positively saw with it that nothing for
+him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
+wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy
+to know."
+</p><p>
+"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied
+the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.
+</p><p>
+He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to
+these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too&mdash;away
+off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly
+more to see."
+</p><p>
+"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed
+with almost menacing archness.
+</p><p>
+"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't
+forget such charming impressions. But I never," he
+lucidly maintained, "chattered to others about her."
+</p><p>
+"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham
+with a flushed firmness.
+</p><p>
+"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud
+blandly enquired, "very often quite prove the depth
+of the impression?"
+</p><p>
+He would have been amused, hadn't he been
+slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to
+fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as deep as
+you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he
+pursued for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by
+any consent of my own as an authority about her."
+</p><p>
+Kate came to his assistance&mdash;if assistance it was&mdash;before
+their friend had had time to meet this
+charge. "You're right about her not being easy to
+know. One <i>sees</i> her with intensity&mdash;sees her more
+than one sees almost any one; but then one discovers
+that that isn't knowing her and that one may know
+better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say, half
+so much."
+</p><p>
+The discrimination was interesting, but it brought
+them back to the fact of her success; and it was at
+that comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully
+placed before them, that Milly's anxious companion
+sat and looked&mdash;looked very much as some spectator
+in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity
+of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly,
+caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling
+not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals
+let loose as for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs.
+Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with
+Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and
+more determined by it. He wondered afterwards if
+Kate had made this out; though it was not indeed
+till much later on that he found himself, in thought,
+dividing the things she might have been conscious
+of from the things she must have missed. If she actually
+missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham's discomfort,
+that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
+own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's
+prominence as a feature of the season's end, to keep
+Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present
+and to past. "It's everything that has happened
+<i>since</i> that makes you naturally a little shy about her.
+You don't know what has happened since, but we do;
+we've seen it and followed it; we've a little been <i>of</i>
+it." The great thing for him, at this, as Kate gave it,
+<i>was</i> in fact quite irresistibly that the case was a real
+one&mdash;the kind of thing that, when one's patience
+was shorter than one's curiosity, one had vaguely
+taken for possible in London, but in which one had
+never been even to this small extent concerned. The
+little American's sudden social adventure, her happy
+and, no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been
+favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured
+above all by the simple spring-board of the
+scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless
+foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable
+as ocean-currents. The huddled herd had
+drifted to her blindly&mdash;it might as blindly have
+drifted away. There had been of course a signal, but
+the great reason was probably the absence at the moment
+of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
+and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It
+was at all events characteristic, and what was of the
+essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter
+for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention,
+played over it, the "motive," as a sign of
+the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious
+and rough-and-tumble nature of the social
+boom. The boom as in <i>itself</i> required&mdash;that would
+be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively
+minor question. Anything was boomable
+enough when nothing else was more so: the author of
+the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty,
+the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was
+for the most part saved from being inconveniently
+strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
+American whose Americanism had been long desperately
+discounted, the creature in fine as to whom
+spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited
+sort could be loudly enough predicated.
+</p><p>
+So he judged at least, within his limits, and the
+idea that what he had thus caught in the fact was the
+trick of fashion and the tone of society went so far as
+to make him take up again his sense of independence.
+He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
+civilisation&mdash;! One could smoke one's pipe outside
+when twaddle was within. He had rather avoided, as
+we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but there came a moment
+when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
+the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is <i>this</i> the
+great world?" There came another, it must be added&mdash;and
+doubtless as a result of something that, over
+the cloth, did hang between them&mdash;when she struck
+him as having quite answered: "Dear no&mdash;for what
+do you take me? Not the least little bit: only a poor
+silly, though quite harmless, imitation." What she
+might have passed for saying, however, was practically
+merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
+aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts.
+She enunciated, to relieve his bewilderment, the obvious
+truth that you couldn't leave London for three
+months at that time of the year and come back to
+find your friends just where they were. As they had
+<i>of course</i> been jigging away they might well be so red
+in the face that you wouldn't know them. She reconciled
+in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that
+honour of having discovered her which it was vain for
+him modestly to shirk. He <i>had</i> unearthed her, but it
+was they, all of them together, who had developed
+her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest
+ever seen, but she wasn't the person he had
+"backed."
+</p><p>
+Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had
+had in these pleasantries no conscious, above all no
+insolent purpose of making light of poor Susan Shepherd's
+property in their young friend&mdash;which property,
+by such remarks, was very much pushed to the
+wall; but he was also to know that Mrs. Stringham
+had secretly resented them, Mrs. Stringham holding
+the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
+glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were
+but dust for the feet of her Milly. That, it was true,
+would be what she must reveal only when driven to
+her last entrenchments and well cornered in her passion&mdash;the
+rare passion of friendship, the sole passion
+of her little life save the one other, more imperturbably
+cerebral, that she entertained for the art of Guy
+de Maupassant. She slipped in the observation that
+her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
+on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little
+difference in the drift of Kate's contention. She was
+perfectly kind to Susie: it was as if she positively
+knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
+feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being
+committed to admiration of type. Kate had occasion
+subsequently&mdash;she found it somehow&mdash;to mention
+to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
+this view on the good lady's part. She would like&mdash;Milly
+had had it from her&mdash;to put Kate Croy in a
+book and see what she could so do with her. "Chop
+me up fine or serve me whole"&mdash;it was a way of being
+got at that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be
+Mrs. Stringham's, however, she understood, because
+Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such stuff
+as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in
+spite of Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment)
+she had never known, there was none other to
+be employed. These things were of later evidence,
+yet Densher might even then have felt them in the air.
+They were practically in it already when Kate, waiving
+the question of her friend's chemical change,
+wound up with the comparatively unobjectionable
+proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
+take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully,
+a little perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham&mdash;"Oh
+as far on as you like!" This even had
+its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it
+as might be meant for herself. The nice thing about
+her was that she could measure how much; so that
+by the time dinner was over they had really covered
+ground.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared,
+was most in his element at the piano; so that
+they had coffee and comic songs upstairs&mdash;the gentlemen,
+temporarily relinquished, submitting easily
+in this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction
+not to sit too tight. Our especial young man sat
+tighter when restored to the drawing-room; he made
+it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
+foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger
+needs in this general respect than she; but she had
+better names for the scant risks to which she consented.
+It was the blessing of a big house that intervals
+were large and, of an August night, that windows
+were open; whereby, at a given moment, on the wide
+balcony, with the songs sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud
+could hold her little court more freshly. Densher and
+Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side
+a small sofa&mdash;a luxury formulated by the latter as
+the proof, under criticism, of their remarkably good
+conscience. "To seem not to know each other&mdash;once
+you're here&mdash;would be," the girl said, "to
+overdo it"; and she arranged it charmingly that they
+<i>must</i> have some passage to put Aunt Maud off the
+scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
+world they found their account in. For Densher, none
+the less, the profit of snatched moments, snatched
+contacts, was partial and poor; there were in particular
+at present more things in his mind than he could
+bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on
+the other hand, that she suddenly met most of them&mdash;and
+more than he could see on the spot&mdash;by coming
+out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
+in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit
+right, you know. I mean in health. Just see her to-night.
+I mean it looks grave. For you she would
+have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
+</p><p>
+He took this in such patience as he could muster.
+"What in the world's the matter with her?"
+</p><p>
+But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed
+your being here has been just a reason for her
+funking it."
+</p><p>
+"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher
+asked again.
+</p><p>
+"Why just what I've told you&mdash;that she likes you
+so much."
+</p><p>
+"Then why should she deny herself the joy of
+meeting me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate cast about&mdash;it would take so long to explain.
+"And perhaps it's true that she <i>is</i> bad. She easily
+may be."
+</p><p>
+"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs.
+Stringham, who's visibly preoccupied and worried."
+</p><p>
+"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be
+only for that."
+</p><p>
+"For what then?"
+</p><p>
+But this question too, on thinking, she neglected.
+"Why, if it's anything real, doesn't that poor lady
+go home? She'd be anxious, and she has done all
+she need to be civil."
+</p><p>
+"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite
+beautifully civil."
+</p><p>
+It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit
+harder; but she was already, in a manner, explaining.
+"Her preoccupation is probably on two different
+heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but
+the other makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell
+Milly all about you."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said the young man between a laugh
+and a sigh, "I'm glad I felt, downstairs, a kind of
+'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to her?"
+</p><p>
+"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's
+all," Kate declared, "as it should be."
+</p><p>
+"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically
+suggested, "that she isn't getting much good of me
+now. Will she report to Milly on <i>this?</i>" And then as
+Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On
+our present disregard for appearances."
+</p><p>
+"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her
+high way. "I'll make them all right. Aunt Maud,
+moreover," she added, "has her so engaged that she
+won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion
+had indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope
+to match&mdash;had for instance another when she still
+subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to respond
+just in order to make that impression."
+</p><p>
+"Well," Densher dropped with some humour,
+"life's very interesting! I hope it's really as much so
+for you as you make it for others; I mean judging by
+what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent
+it as thrilling for <i>ces dames</i>, and in a different way
+for each: Aunt Maud, Susan Shepherd, Milly. But
+what <i>is</i>," he wound up, "the matter? Do you mean
+she's as ill as she looks?"
+</p><p>
+Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his
+derisive speech deserved no satisfaction; then she
+appeared to yield to a need of her own&mdash;the need to
+make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
+Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she
+looked she could scarce be a question with them, for
+her end would in that case be near. She believed herself
+nevertheless&mdash;and Kate couldn't help believing
+her too&mdash;seriously menaced. There was always the
+fact that they had been on the point of leaving town,
+the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled up. "We
+bade them good-bye&mdash;or all but&mdash;Aunt Maud and
+I, the night before Milly, popping so very oddly into
+the National Gallery for a farewell look, found you
+and me together. They were then to get off a day or
+two later. But they've not got off&mdash;they're not
+getting off. When I see them&mdash;and I saw them this
+morning&mdash;they have showy reasons. They do mean
+to go, but they've postponed it." With which the
+girl brought out: "They've postponed it for <i>you</i>."
+He protested so far as a man might without fatuity,
+since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever,
+understood herself. "You've made Milly change her
+mind. She wants not to miss you&mdash;though she wants
+also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I
+hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung
+back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see
+you again&mdash;she doesn't know she ever may. She
+doesn't see the future. It has opened out before her
+in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time
+you've all been telling me she has had?"
+</p><p>
+"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
+</p><p>
+"The shadow, you consider, of some physical
+break-up?"
+</p><p>
+"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's
+scared. She has so much to lose. And she wants
+more."
+</p><p>
+"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange
+sense of discomfort, "couldn't one say to her that
+she can't have everything?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;for one wouldn't want to. She really,"
+Kate went on, "has been somebody here. Ask Aunt
+Maud&mdash;you may think me prejudiced," the girl
+oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you&mdash;the
+world's before her. It has all come since you saw
+her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it certainly
+would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
+success&mdash;I mean of course so far as possible in
+the scrap of time&mdash;and she has taken it like a perfect
+angel. If you can imagine an angel with a thumping
+bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of
+the kind of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge;
+Aunt Maud has had all the facts, or enough of them,
+in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and Susie speaks
+by book. Take them then, in the last confidence,
+from <i>me</i>. There she is." Kate expressed above all
+what it most came to. "It's open to her to make, you
+see, the very greatest marriage. I assure you we're not
+vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite plain."
+</p><p>
+Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged
+them. "But what good then on earth can I do her?"
+</p><p>
+Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
+</p><p>
+"And for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept
+away. I shouldn't care for her if she hadn't so
+much," Kate very simply said. And then as it made
+him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble
+about her if there were one thing she did have." The
+girl spoke indeed with a noble compassion. "She has
+nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Not all the young dukes?"
+</p><p>
+"Well we must see&mdash;see if anything can come of
+them. She at any rate does love life. To have met a
+person like you," Kate further explained, "is to have
+felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part
+of life. Oh she has you arranged!"
+</p><p>
+"<i>You</i> have, it strikes me, my dear"&mdash;and he
+looked both detached and rueful. "Pray what am I
+to do with the dukes?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
+</p><p>
+"Then why shan't I be?"
+</p><p>
+"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully
+smiled. "Besides, you <i>will</i> be. You'll have expected
+enough for that."
+</p><p>
+"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
+</p><p>
+"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant
+for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You're
+what I have of most precious, and you're therefore
+what I use most."
+</p><p>
+He looked at her long. "I wish I could use <i>you</i> a
+little more." After which, as she continued to smile
+at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?" he asked.
+</p><p>
+Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be.
+"Not lungs, I think. Isn't consumption, taken in
+time, now curable?"
+</p><p>
+"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered.
+"Do you mean she has something that's past
+patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
+really as if her appearance put her outside of such
+things&mdash;being, in spite of her youth, that of a person
+who has been through all it's conceivable she should
+be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as a
+creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature
+may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances,
+go to sea again with confidence. She has <i>had</i> her
+wreck&mdash;she has met her adventure."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I grant you her wreck!"&mdash;Kate was all response
+so far. "But do let her have still her adventure.
+There are wrecks that are not adventures."
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;if there be also adventures that are not
+wrecks!" Densher in short was willing, but he came
+back to his point. "What I mean is that she has
+none of the effect&mdash;on one's nerves or whatever&mdash;of
+an invalid."
+</p><p>
+Kate on her side did this justice. "No&mdash;that's
+the beauty of her."
+</p><p>
+"The beauty&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that,
+any more than your watch, when it's about to stop for
+want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice
+or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
+won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of
+drugs. She won't taste, as it were, of medicine. No
+one will know."
+</p><p>
+"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified
+now, "are we talking about? In what extraordinary
+state <i>is</i> she?"
+</p><p>
+Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a
+fashion for herself. "I believe that if she's ill at all
+she's very ill. I believe that if she's bad she's not a
+<i>little</i> bad. I can't tell you why, but that's how I see
+her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll
+have it all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think
+she'll have it all."
+</p><p>
+Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her,
+her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it
+were more impressive than lucid. "You 'think' and
+you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
+without an inkling of her complaint?"
+</p><p>
+"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in
+which I don't want knowledge. She moreover herself
+doesn't want one to want it: she has, as to what
+may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty,
+a kind of&mdash;I don't know what to call it&mdash;intensity
+of pride. And then and then&mdash;" But with
+this she faltered.
+</p><p>
+"And then what?"
+</p><p>
+"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for
+you, my dear," Kate continued, "that you're as
+sound as a bell."
+</p><p>
+"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather
+good then for yourself too that you're as strong as the
+sea."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish
+gladness of their young immunities. It was all they
+had together, but they had it at least without a flaw&mdash;each
+had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal
+virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was
+as if that very consciousness threw them back the
+next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything
+else in the world, the great genial good they,
+alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of
+this. "How we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously
+sighed. But there were the facts. "From
+illness I keep away."
+</p><p>
+"But you don't&mdash;since here you are, in spite of all
+you say, in the midst of it."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I'm only watching&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"And putting me forward in your place? Thank
+you!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it
+give you the measure of what I shall expect of you.
+One can't begin too soon."
+</p><p>
+She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on
+the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before
+possessed himself; and the warning brought him
+back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's
+a case for surgery?"
+</p><p>
+"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to
+anything it may come to that. Of course she's in the
+highest hands."
+</p><p>
+"The doctors are after her then?"
+</p><p>
+"She's after <i>them</i>&mdash;it's the same thing. I think
+I'm free to say it now&mdash;she sees Sir Luke Strett."
+</p><p>
+It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand
+knives!" Then after an instant: "One seems to
+guess."
+</p><p>
+Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only
+do as I tell you."
+</p><p>
+For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in,
+might have had it before him. "What you want of
+me then is to make up to a sick girl."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect
+you as sick. You understand moreover just how
+much&mdash;and just how little."
+</p><p>
+"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you
+think I understand."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she
+returned, "that has been your way of breaking <i>me</i> in.
+Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty
+of others will."
+</p><p>
+Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might
+have been seeing their young friend on a pile of
+cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers
+and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher
+nobility. "Others can follow their tastes. Besides,
+others are free."
+</p><p>
+"But so are you, my dear!"
+</p><p>
+She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly
+quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he
+kept his place, only looking up at her. "You're prodigious!"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I'm prodigious!"&mdash;and, as immediately
+happened, she gave a further sign of it that he
+fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby had, as
+she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who,
+immediately finding her within his view, advanced
+to greet her before the announcement of his name
+could reach her companion. Densher none the less
+felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome
+to the visitor became almost precipitately an
+appeal to her friend, who slowly rose to meet it. "I
+don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And
+then for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher&mdash;who
+has just come back from America."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said
+nothing&mdash;occupied as he mainly was on the spot with
+weighing the sound in question. He recognised it in
+a moment as less imponderable than it might have
+appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It
+wasn't, that is, he knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot,
+however great the superficial resemblance: it was that
+of the clever, the accomplished man; it was the very
+specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training
+and experience had gone to producing it. Densher
+felt somehow that, as a thing of value accidentally
+picked up, it would retain an interest of curiosity.
+The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness
+to which he was conscious of contributing his
+share; Kate failing to ask Lord Mark to be seated,
+but letting him know that he would find Mrs. Lowder,
+with some others, on the balcony.
+</p><p>
+"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?&mdash;as I seemed
+to hear outside, from below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable
+voice."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell,"
+the girl explained, "and was compelled to disappoint
+us."
+</p><p>
+"Ah 'disappoint'&mdash;rather!" And, lingering a
+little, he kept his eyes on Densher. "She isn't really
+bad, I trust?"
+</p><p>
+Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed
+him interested in Milly; but he could imagine him
+also interested in the young man with whom he had
+found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered
+without visible intelligence. That young man concluded
+in a moment that he was doing what he wanted,
+satisfying himself as to each. To this he was aided
+by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I
+think not. I've just been reassuring Mr. Densher,"
+she added&mdash;"who's as concerned as the rest of us.
+I've been calming his fears."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark again&mdash;and again it was
+just as good. That was for Densher, the latter could
+see, or think he saw. And then for the others: "<i>My</i>
+fears would want calming. We must take great care
+of her. This way?"
+</p><p>
+She went with him a few steps, and while Densher,
+hanging about, gave them frank attention, presently
+paused again for some further colloquy. What passed
+between them their observer lost, but she was presently
+with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest.
+Densher was by this time quite ready for her. "It's
+<i>he</i> who's your aunt's man?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh immensely."
+</p><p>
+"I mean for <i>you.</i>"
+</p><p>
+"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There
+he is. Now you can judge."
+</p><p>
+"Judge of what?"
+</p><p>
+"Judge of him."
+</p><p>
+"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked.
+"I've nothing to do with him."
+</p><p>
+"Then why do you ask about him?"
+</p><p>
+"To judge of you&mdash;which is different."
+</p><p>
+Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference.
+"To take the measure, do you mean, of my
+danger?"
+</p><p>
+He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare
+say, of Miss Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile
+his interest in her&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"With his interest in me?"
+</p><p>
+"With her own interest in you," Densher said
+while she reflected. "If that interest&mdash;Mrs. Lowder's&mdash;takes
+the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
+rather to look out for the forms <i>he</i> takes?"
+</p><p>
+Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh
+he takes them easily," she answered. "The beauty
+is that she doesn't trust him."
+</p><p>
+"That Milly doesn't?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud.
+Not really."
+</p><p>
+Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her
+heart and yet thinks he cheats?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," said Kate&mdash;"that's the way people are.
+What they think of their enemies, goodness knows,
+is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with what
+they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind,
+however," she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt
+Maud's security, though she doesn't yet fully recognise
+it&mdash;besides being Milly's own."
+</p><p>
+"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for
+him?"
+</p><p>
+She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation.
+"You oughtn't to make me say too much. But I'm
+glad I don't."
+</p><p>
+"Don't say too much?"
+</p><p>
+"Don't care for Lord Mark."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his
+lordship's own. To which he added: "You absolutely
+hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!"
+It had made her again impatient.
+</p><p>
+Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You
+scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes."
+</p><p>
+"Mercy, no&mdash;far from it. He's not, compared
+with other possibilities, 'in' it. Milly, it's true," she
+said, to be exact, "has no natural sense of social
+values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
+or know who's who or what's what."
+</p><p>
+"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason
+for liking <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate,
+"who at least know what I lose."
+</p><p>
+Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable
+interest. "And Aunt Maud&mdash;why shouldn't <i>she</i>
+know? I mean that your friend there isn't really
+anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
+</p><p>
+"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a
+duke. That's undeniably something. He's the best
+moreover we can get."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not
+all derisive.
+</p><p>
+"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on
+without heeding this; "because perhaps in the line of
+that alone&mdash;as he has no money&mdash;more could be
+done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts
+with the sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand
+enough, with a duke in his family and at the other
+end of the string. <i>The</i> thing's his genius."
+</p><p>
+"And do you believe in that?"
+</p><p>
+"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more
+final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a
+moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one
+would scarce have known what to expect; but she
+came out in time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
+</p><p>
+"Political?"
+</p><p>
+"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what
+else to call it when a man's able to make himself
+without effort, without violence, without machinery of
+any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect
+without his being in any traceable way a cause."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious
+superficiality, "isn't agreeable&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh but it is!"
+</p><p>
+"Not surely for every one."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you
+may have reasons&mdash;and men don't count. Women
+don't know if it's agreeable or not."
+</p><p>
+"Then there you are!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, precisely&mdash;that takes, on his part, genius."
+</p><p>
+Densher stood before her as if he wondered what
+everything she thus promptly, easily and above all
+amusingly met him with, would have been found,
+should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
+suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch,
+welled up in him and overflowed&mdash;the sense of his
+good fortune and her variety, of the future she promised,
+the interest she supplied. "All women but you
+are stupid. How can I look at another? You're
+different and different&mdash;and then you're different
+again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you&mdash;except
+that you're so much too good for what she builds
+<i>for</i>. Even 'society' won't know how good for it you
+are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond it. You'd
+have to pull it uphill&mdash;it's you yourself who are at the
+top. The women one meets&mdash;what are they but
+books one has already read? You're a whole library
+of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
+ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my
+word I've a subscription!"
+</p><p>
+She took it from him with her face again giving out
+all it had in answer, and they remained once more
+confronted and united in their essential wealth of life.
+"It's you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in
+others."
+</p><p>
+It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association
+itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the
+sharp spring of fear. "See here, you know: don't,
+<i>don't</i>&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Don't what?"
+</p><p>
+"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him a minute with no response but
+her eyes. "So you think you'll kill <i>me</i> in time to
+prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the next
+instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after
+this she had got, in respect to the particular point,
+quite off. She had come back to another, which was
+one of her own; her own were so closely connected
+that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still
+she had a distance to go. "You do then see your
+way?" She put it to him before they joined&mdash;as was
+high time&mdash;the others. And she made him understand
+she meant his way with Milly.
+</p><p>
+He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation;
+then she had brought him up to a sort of recognition.
+He could make out by this light something
+of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
+undispelled since his return. "There's something
+you must definitely tell me. If our friend knows that
+all the while&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+She came straight to his aid, formulating for him
+his anxiety, though quite to smooth it down. "All the
+while she and I here were growing intimate, you and
+I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
+yes, she knows our relation must have involved your
+writing to me."
+</p><p>
+"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't suppose it."
+</p><p>
+"How then can she imagine you never named
+her?"
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her.
+I've told her everything. She's in possession of
+reasons that will perfectly do."
+</p><p>
+Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you
+exactly as I take them?"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly as you take them."
+</p><p>
+"She's just such another victim?"
+</p><p>
+"Just such another. You're a pair."
+</p><p>
+"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we
+can console each other?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah something <i>may</i> indeed happen," she returned,
+"if you'll only go straight!"
+</p><p>
+He watched the others an instant through the window.
+"What do you mean by going straight?"
+</p><p>
+"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've
+told you before, and you'll see. You'll have me perfectly,
+always, to refer to."
+</p><p>
+"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
+</p><p>
+It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her
+back. There you are. You won't be able to say I
+haven't made it smooth for you."
+</p><p>
+He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it
+wasn't the queerness that after another minute was
+uppermost. He was in a wondrous silken web, and it
+was amusing. "You spoil me!"
+</p><p>
+He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture
+reappeared, had caught his word as it dropped
+from him; probably not, he thought, her attention
+being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came
+through and who was now, none too soon, taking
+leave of her. They were followed by Lord Mark and
+by the other men, but two or three things happened
+before any dispersal of the company began. One of
+these was that Kate found time to say to him with
+furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another was
+that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord
+Mark, drew near to him with an almost reproachful
+"Come and talk to <i>me!</i>"&mdash;a challenge resulting after
+a minute for Densher in a consciousness of their installation
+together in an out-of-the-way corner, though
+not the same he himself had just occupied with her.
+Still another was that Mrs. Stringham, in the random
+intensity of her farewells, affected him as looking at
+him with a small grave intimation, something into
+which he afterwards read the meaning that if he had
+happened to desire a few words with her after dinner
+he would have found her ready. This impression was
+naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
+something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated.
+It gathered perhaps a slightly sharper shade from the
+mild formality of her "Good-night, sir!" as she passed
+him; a matter as to which there was now nothing more
+to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man
+he by this time had appraised as even more harmless
+than himself. This personage had forestalled him in
+opening the door for her and was evidently&mdash;with a
+view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs
+on Milly&mdash;proposing to attend her to her carriage.
+What further occurred was that Aunt Maud, having
+released her, immediately had a word for himself. It
+was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she
+both detained and dismissed him; she was particular
+about her minute, but he hadn't yet given her, as
+happened, a sign of withdrawal.
+</p><p>
+"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really
+interesting."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly
+not forget her. But you must remember that, so
+far as her 'interest' is concerned, I myself discovered,
+I&mdash;as was said at dinner&mdash;invented her."
+</p><p>
+"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't
+taken out the patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press
+of other things, too much neglect her."
+</p><p>
+Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal
+with Kate's, he asked himself quickly if it mightn't
+help him with her. He at any rate could but try.
+"You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
+you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to
+me. <i>She</i> keeps me up&mdash;she has had so much to say
+about them."
+</p><p>
+He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess
+an account of his passage with Kate that, while quite
+veracious, might be reassuring to herself. But Aunt
+Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
+if her confidence were supplied with other props. If
+she saw his intention in it she yet blinked neither with
+doubt nor with acceptance; she only said imperturbably:
+"Yes, she'll herself do anything for her friend;
+so that she but preaches what she practises."
+</p><p>
+Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew
+how far Kate's devotion went. He was moreover a
+little puzzled by this special harmony; in face of which
+he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought
+herself of the American girl as a distraction
+for him, and if Kate's mastery of the subject were
+therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
+What might really <i>become</i> in all this of the American
+girl was therefore a question that, on the latter contingency,
+would lose none of its sharpness. However,
+questions could wait, and it was easy, so far as he
+understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all
+the same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale
+charming."
+</p><p>
+Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a
+chance."
+</p><p>
+"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's&mdash;naturally
+now&mdash;leaving town and, as I take it, going
+abroad."
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself
+had been dealing with this difficulty. "She won't
+go," she smiled in spite of it, "till she has seen you.
+Moreover, when she does go&mdash;" She paused, leaving
+him uncertain. But the next minute he was still more
+at sea. "We shall go too."
+</p><p>
+He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly
+strange. "And what good will that do <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll
+come out to us."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
+</p><p>
+"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
+</p><p>
+"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher
+laughed. She was indeed putting him on his honour,
+and his honour winced a little at the use he rather
+helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she
+could make of it. "There are all sorts of things," he
+vaguely remarked, "to consider."
+</p><p>
+"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
+</p><p>
+"And pray what's that?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion
+of your life. I'm treating you handsomely, I'm
+looking after it for you. I <i>can</i>&mdash;I can smooth your
+path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good.
+And her fortune's a real fortune."
+</p><p>
+Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together
+for him as he felt her thus buying him off, and
+buying him&mdash;it would have been funny if it hadn't
+been so grave&mdash;with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
+derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm
+much obliged to you for the handsome offer&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't
+abashed. "I don't say it does&mdash;but there's no reason
+it shouldn't to <i>you</i>. Mind you, moreover"&mdash;she
+kept it up&mdash;"I'm not one who talks in the air.
+And you owe me something&mdash;if you want to know
+why."
+</p><p>
+Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis,
+her consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately
+to receive an odd confirmation, her truth.
+Her truth, for that matter, was that she believed him
+bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
+while they stood there, lighted up the impossible.
+What then in this light did Kate believe him? But
+that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of course I know
+I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
+inviting me for instance to-night&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But
+you don't know," she added, "how far I've gone for
+you."
+</p><p>
+He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring
+up; but he laughed again as he could. "I see
+how far you're going."
+</p><p>
+"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've
+nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And
+then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him
+stare: "To start you it <i>was</i> necessary. From <i>me</i> it has
+the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met
+his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand
+me? I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only
+showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of
+which, speaking with force and as if he must with a
+minute's reflexion see what she meant, she turned
+away from him. "I depend upon you now to make
+me right!"
+</p><p>
+The minute's reflexion he was of course more free
+to take after he had left the house. He walked up the
+Bayswater Road, but he stopped short, under the
+murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle
+of the square that, going eastward, opened out on
+his left. He had had his brief stupidity, but now he
+understood. She had guaranteed to Milly Theale
+through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for
+him. She had affirmed through the same source that
+the attachment was only his. He made it out, he made
+it out, and he could see what she meant by its starting
+him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate,
+so that Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper"
+indeed it was, her lie&mdash;the very properest possible
+and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So Milly
+was successfully deceived.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">V</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less
+promptly felt, was to see her after all very much on
+the old basis, the basis of his three visits in New York;
+the new element, when once he was again face to face
+with her, not really amounting to much more than a
+recognition, with a little surprise, of the positive extent
+of the old basis. Everything but that, everything
+embarrassing fell away after he had been present five
+minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their excellent,
+their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
+American relation&mdash;the legitimacy of which he
+could thus scarce express in names enough&mdash;should
+seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had both
+since then had great adventures&mdash;such an adventure
+for him was his mental annexation of her country;
+and it was now, for the moment, as if the greatest of
+them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
+other than those that had already served. Densher
+had asked for her, at her hotel, the day after Aunt
+Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with a highly
+troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played
+for him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's
+and Mrs. Lowder's so oddly conjoined and so really
+superfluous attempts to make her interesting. She
+had been interesting enough without them&mdash;that appeared
+to-day to come back to him; and, admirable
+and beautiful as was the charitable zeal of the two
+ladies, it might easily have nipped in the bud the
+germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly
+open to him. What had happily averted the
+need of his breaking off, what would as happily continue
+to avert it, was his own good sense and good
+humour, a certain spring of mind in him which ministered,
+imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances
+and which he had positively never felt such
+ground as just now to rejoice in the possession of.
+Many men&mdash;he practically made the reflexion&mdash;wouldn't
+have taken the matter that way, would have
+lost patience, finding the appeal in question irrational,
+exorbitant; and, thereby making short work with it,
+would have let it render any further acquaintance
+with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with
+Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and
+that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned,
+to sacrifice her. Such, however, had not been
+the tune to which his at first bewildered view had,
+since the night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so
+much that he failed of being the kind of man who
+"chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of man
+wise enough to mark the case in which chucking
+might be the minor evil and the least cruelty. It was
+that he liked too much every one concerned willingly
+to show himself merely impracticable. He liked Kate,
+goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked
+Mrs. Lowder. He liked in particular Milly herself;
+and hadn't it come up for him the evening before
+that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had
+never known himself so generally merciful. It was a
+footing, at all events, whatever accounted for it, on
+which he should surely be rather a muff not to manage
+by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should
+he find he couldn't work it there would still be time
+enough. The idea of working it crystallised before
+him in such guise as not only to promise much interest&mdash;fairly,
+in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
+positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
+</p><p>
+Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best
+intentions and with a margin consciously left for
+some primary awkwardness, he found his burden, to
+his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
+involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously
+traced for him turned round on the spot to present
+him another face. This was simply the face of his
+old impression, which he now fully recovered&mdash;the
+impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
+had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest
+people in the world. Had what had happened been
+that this specimen of the class was from the first so
+committed to ease that nothing subsequent <i>could</i> ever
+make her difficult? That affected him now as still
+more probable than on the occasion of the hour or two
+lately passed with her in Kate's society. Milly Theale
+had recognised no complication, to Densher's view,
+while bringing him, with his companion, from the
+National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon;
+it was therefore scarce supposable that complications
+had become so soon too much for her. His pretext for
+presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
+simplest; the least he could decently do, given their
+happy acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after
+learning that she had been prevented by illness from
+meeting him at dinner. And then there was the beautiful
+accident of her other demonstration; he must at
+any rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality
+he had shared with Kate. Well, he was giving one
+now&mdash;such as it was; he was finding her, to begin
+with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad
+to see him. He had come, after luncheon, early,
+though not so early but that she might already be out
+if she were well enough; and she was well enough and
+yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with
+this, of the comment Kate would have made on it;
+it wasn't absent from his thought that Milly would
+have been at home by <i>her</i> account because expecting,
+after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
+might turn up. He even&mdash;so pleasantly did things
+go&mdash;enjoyed freedom of mind to welcome, on that
+supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful hypocrisy of
+women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
+<i>might</i> have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy
+her behaving as if she hadn't. She expressed, that is,
+exactly the right degree of surprise; she didn't a bit
+overdo it: the lesson of which was, perceptibly, that,
+so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
+want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust
+her to take care of it for him as well as for herself.
+She had begun this, admirably, on his entrance,
+with her turning away from the table at which she
+had apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was
+the very possibility of his betraying a concern for her
+as one of the afflicted that she had within the first
+minute conjured away. She was never, never&mdash;did
+he understand?&mdash;to be one of the afflicted for him;
+and the manner in which he understood it, something
+of the answering pleasure that he couldn't help knowing
+he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
+acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy.
+When things like that could pass people had in truth
+to be equally conscious of a relation. It soon made
+one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She
+had let him ask&mdash;there had been time for that, his
+allusion to her friend's explanatory arrival at Lancaster
+Gate without her being inevitable; but she had
+blown away, and quite as much with the look in her
+eyes as with the smile on her lips, every ground for
+anxiety and every chance for insistence. How was
+she?&mdash;why she was as he thus saw her and as she
+had reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for
+desiring to appear. Kate's account of her as too proud
+for pity, as fiercely shy about so personal a secret,
+came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take a
+hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the
+girl had quickly disposed of&mdash;"Oh it was nothing:
+I'm all right, thank you!"&mdash;was one he was glad
+enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite
+of the appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair;
+for his interest had been invoked in the name of compassion,
+and the name of compassion was exactly
+what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden
+so much as to whisper. He had been sent to
+see her in order to be sorry for her, and how sorry he
+might be, quite privately, he was yet to make out.
+Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?&mdash;inasmuch
+as, whatever his upshot, he was never to
+give her a glimpse of it. Thus the ground was unexpectedly
+cleared; though it was not till a slightly
+longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with
+amusement and then with a strange shade of respect,
+what had most operated. Extraordinarily, quite
+amazingly, he began to see that if his pity hadn't had
+to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
+quite definitely to her own. That was the way the
+case had turned round: he had made his visit to be
+sorry for her, but he would repeat it&mdash;if he did repeat
+it&mdash;in order that she might be sorry for him.
+His situation made him, she judged&mdash;when once one
+liked him&mdash;a subject for that degree of tenderness:
+he felt this judgement in her, and felt it as something
+he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
+honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
+</p><p>
+Odd enough was it certainly that the question
+originally before him, the question placed there by
+Kate, should so of a sudden find itself quite dislodged
+by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
+straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and
+her wasted charity; the whole thing preparing for him
+as pretty a case of conscience as he could have desired,
+and one at the prospect of which he was already
+wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
+unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his
+passion for Kate had spent itself in vain; and if Kate
+was indifferent, inexorable, it was because she had
+left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
+came up for him&mdash;how clear an impression of this
+attitude, how definite an account of his own failure,
+Kate must have given her friend. His immediate
+quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for
+him almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as
+if the other party to their remarkable understanding
+had been with them as they talked, had been hovering
+about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
+value of the work affected him as different from the
+moment he saw it so expressed in poor Milly. Since it
+was false that he wasn't loved, so his right was quite
+quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
+if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating
+in a way quite at odds with straightness the
+good faith of Milly's benevolence. <i>There</i> was the
+place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
+what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to
+enjoy consideration on a perfectly false footing, where
+was the guarantee that, if he kept on, he mightn't
+soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not
+to miss the sweet? Consideration&mdash;from a charming
+girl&mdash;was soothing on whatever theory; and it
+didn't take him far to remember that he had himself
+as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description
+of him, his defeated state, it was none of his own;
+his responsibility would begin, as he might say, only
+with acting it out. The sharp point was, however, in
+the difference between acting and not acting: this
+difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience.
+He saw it with a certain alarm rise before
+him that everything was acting that was not speaking
+the particular word. "If you like me because you
+think <i>she</i> doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she <i>does</i> like me
+awfully!"&mdash;that would have been the particular
+word; which there were at the same time but too palpably
+such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't
+it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to
+leave her deluded?&mdash;and this quite apart from the
+exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would
+constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was
+something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he
+felt himself shrink from the complications involved
+in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved,
+but to back her up in her mistakes&mdash;once they had
+gone a certain length&mdash;that was perhaps chief
+among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love.
+Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence
+of any design on her part, however roundabout,
+to do one nothing but good.
+</p><p>
+Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck
+at the immensity of the good his own friend
+must on all this evidence have wanted to do him.
+Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
+Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of
+intervention. She would absolutely never say to him:
+"<i>Is</i> it so impossible she shall ever care for you seriously?"&mdash;without
+which nothing could well be less
+delicate than for him aggressively to set her right.
+Kate would be free to do that if Kate, in some prudence,
+some contrition, for some better reason in fine,
+should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
+failing this, <i>he</i> could do that wouldn't be after all
+more gross than doing nothing. This brought him
+round again to the acceptance of the fact that the poor
+girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own, on
+a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already
+supplied her with the pretext she required. The
+ground was there, that is, in the impression she had
+received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
+above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she
+now believed as she did made her sure at last that she
+might act; so that what Densher therefore would have
+struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a pure
+pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this
+pure pleasure, while the young man now sat with her,
+and there were things she seemed to say that took the
+words out of his mouth. These were not all the things
+she did say; they were rather what such things meant
+in the light of what he knew. Her warning him for
+instance off the question of how she was, the quick
+brave little art with which she did that, represented to
+his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for <i>you</i>&mdash;that's
+all you have to do with or need trouble
+about: I shall never be anything so horrid as ill for
+you. So there you are; worry about me, spare me,
+please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in short,
+to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see,
+even now while you sit here, that there aren't lots of
+others. Only do <i>them</i> justice and we shall get on
+beautifully." This was what was folded finely up in
+her talk&mdash;all quite ostensibly about her impressions
+and her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on
+his American doings, but he wouldn't have that to-day.
+As he thought of the way in which, the other
+afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently
+"jawing," he accused himself of excess, of having
+overdone it, having made&mdash;at least apparently&mdash;more
+of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
+events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing
+her out about London, about her vision of life there,
+and only too glad to treat her as a person with whom
+he could easily have other topics than her aches and
+pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence
+offered him at Lancaster Gate that she had come but
+to conquer; and when she had met this with full and
+gay assent&mdash;"How could I help being the feature
+of the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of
+every tongue?"&mdash;they fraternised freely over all that
+had come and gone for each since their interrupted
+encounter in New York.
+</p><p>
+At the same time, while many things in quick succession
+came up for them, came up in particular for
+Densher, nothing perhaps was just so sharp as the
+odd influence of their present conditions on their view
+of their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known
+how "thick" they had originally become, as if, in a
+manner, they had really fallen to remembrance of
+more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at
+the time quite been room for. They were in a relation
+now so complicated, whether by what they said or by
+what they didn't say, that it might have been seeking
+to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one of
+those fabulous periods in which prosperous states
+place their beginnings. He recalled what had been
+said at Mrs. Lowder's about the steps and stages, in
+people's careers, that absence caused one to miss, and
+about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them
+further on; which, with some other matters also recalled,
+he took occasion to communicate to Milly.
+The matters he couldn't mention mingled themselves
+with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been
+hard to say which of the two groups now played most
+of a part. He was kept face to face with this young
+lady by a force absolutely resident in their situation
+and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of the
+forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as
+beyond their control. The current thus determined
+had positively become for him, by the time he had
+been ten minutes in the room, something that, but
+for the absurdity of comparing the very small with
+the very great, he would freely have likened to the
+rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised acquaintance between
+a clever young man and a responsive young
+woman could do nothing more, at the most, than go,
+and his actual experiment went and went and went.
+Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as the
+marked circumstance that they had spoken all the
+while not a word about Kate; and this in spite of the
+fact that, if it were a question for them of what had
+occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
+comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had
+but the night before appealed to her for instruction as
+to what he must do about her, but he fairly winced to
+find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
+course how little; but it was a truth that looked different
+when shown him by Milly. It proved to him that
+the latter had in fact been dealt with, but it produced
+in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
+conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to
+speak to her before going further&mdash;to make sure she
+really meant him to succeed quite so much. With all
+the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it
+came up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit
+brief and never renew it; yet the strangest thing of
+all was that the argument against that issue would
+have sprung precisely from the beautiful little eloquence
+involved in Milly's avoidances.
+</p><p>
+Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised
+the fact that she was proceeding in the sense
+of the assurances she had taken. Over the latter she
+had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the
+merit of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her,
+felt her take it; the chance, neither more nor less, of
+help rendered him according to her freedom. It was
+what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, <i>I?</i>
+Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was
+to do, it thus appeared, as she was doing: our young
+man's glimpse of which was just what would have
+been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar brutality
+of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy
+fragrance of heroism, for it was not aided by any
+question of parting with Kate. She would be charming
+to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would
+incur whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight&mdash;should
+she continue to be exposed to the sight&mdash;of
+the adorer thrown with the adored. It wouldn't
+really have taken much more to make him wonder if
+he hadn't before him one of those rare cases of exaltation&mdash;food
+for fiction, food for poetry&mdash;in which a
+man's fortune with the woman who doesn't care for
+him is positively promoted by the woman who does.
+It was as if Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can
+at least meet her in my society, if that's anything to
+him; so that my line can only be to make my society
+attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a
+different impression if she <i>had</i> so reasoned. All of
+which, none the less, didn't prevent his soon enough
+saying to her, quite as if she were to be whirled into
+space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do
+you begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
+</p><p>
+She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put
+on what face she would, couldn't help betraying to
+him something of her suppressed view of the possibility&mdash;ever,
+ever perhaps&mdash;of any such proceedings.
+They weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no.
+We go abroad for a few weeks somewhere of high
+air. That has been before us for many days; we've
+only been kept on by last necessities here. However,
+everything's done and the wind's in our sails."
+</p><p>
+"May you scud then happily before it! But when,"
+he asked, "do you come back?"
+</p><p>
+She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it:
+"Oh when the wind turns. And what do you do with
+your summer?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary
+ink. My work in your country counts for play
+as well. You see what's thought of the pleasure your
+country can give. My holiday's over."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at
+such a different time from ours. If you could but
+have worked while we've been working&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction
+isn't so great with me. There's a little of
+each for me, of work and of play, in either. But you
+and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder&mdash;you
+all," he went on, "have been given up,
+like navvies or niggers, to real physical toil. Your
+rest is something you've earned and you need. My
+labour's comparatively light."
+</p><p>
+"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like
+mine."
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
+</p><p>
+"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested.
+Oh I could go far."
+</p><p>
+He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?&mdash;since
+you've got here, as I learn, the whole place in
+your pocket."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's a kind of economy&mdash;I'm saving things
+up. I've enjoyed so what you speak of&mdash;though
+your account of it's fantastic&mdash;that I'm watching
+over its future, that I can't help being anxious and
+careful. I want&mdash;in the interest itself of what I've
+had and may still have&mdash;not to make stupid mistakes.
+The way not to make them is to get off again
+to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall
+keep it fresh," she wound up as if herself rather
+pleased with the ingenuity of her statement&mdash;"I
+shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then you <i>will</i> return? Can you promise one
+that?"
+</p><p>
+Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise;
+but she made as if bargaining a little. "Isn't London
+rather awful in winter?"
+</p><p>
+He had been going to ask her if she meant for the
+invalid; but he checked the infelicity of this and took
+the enquiry as referring to social life. "No&mdash;I like it,
+with one thing and another; it's less of a mob than
+later on; and it would have for <i>us</i> the merit&mdash;should
+you come here then&mdash;that we should probably see
+more of you. So do reappear for us&mdash;if it isn't a
+question of climate."
+</p><p>
+She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't
+a question&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the determination of your movements. You
+spoke just now of going somewhere for that."
+</p><p>
+"For better air?"&mdash;she remembered. "Oh yes,
+one certainly wants to get out of London in August."
+</p><p>
+"Rather, of course!"&mdash;he fully understood.
+"Though I'm glad you've hung on long enough for
+me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
+"once more."
+</p><p>
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently
+asked.
+</p><p>
+It pulled him up an instant&mdash;representing, as he
+saw it might have seemed, an allusion to himself as
+conjoined with Kate, whom he was proposing not to
+mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
+was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll
+find ready to surround you with sympathy."
+</p><p>
+It made her, none the less, in her odd charming
+way, challenge him afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we <i>shall</i>
+feel for you will be much nearer worship."
+</p><p>
+"As near then as you like!" With which at last
+Kate's name was sounded. "The people I'd most
+come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
+for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind
+to me."
+</p><p>
+"So she has to <i>me</i>," said Densher. "I feel," he
+added as she at first answered nothing, "that, quite
+contrary to anything I originally expected, I've made
+a good friend of her."
+</p><p>
+"I didn't expect it either&mdash;its turning out as it
+has. But I did," said Milly, "with Kate. I shall
+come back for her too. I'd do anything"&mdash;she kept
+it up&mdash;"for Kate."
+</p><p>
+Looking at him as with conscious clearness while
+she spoke, she might for the moment have effectively
+laid a trap for whatever remains of the ideal straightness
+in him were still able to pull themselves together
+and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that
+something had at that moment hung for him by a
+hair. "Oh I know what one would do for Kate!"&mdash;it
+had hung for him by a hair to break out with that,
+which he felt he had really been kept from by an element
+in his consciousness stronger still. The proof
+of the truth in question was precisely in his silence;
+resisting the impulse to break out was what he was
+doing for Kate. This at the time moreover came and
+went quickly enough; he was trying the next minute
+but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself. "Of
+course I know what friends you are&mdash;and of course
+I understand," he permitted himself to add, "any
+amount of devotion to a person so charming. That's
+the good turn then she'll do us all&mdash;I mean her
+working for your return."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm
+really on her hands."
+</p><p>
+He could but accept the appearance of wondering
+how much he might show he knew. "Ah she's very
+masterful."
+</p><p>
+"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;that's not the way. At any rate it isn't
+hers," he smiled. He remembered, however, then
+that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways was
+just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject
+no further than to remark with a good intention
+that had the further merit of representing a truth:
+"I don't feel as if I knew her&mdash;really to call know."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she
+laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were
+uttered, a sense of responsibility for his own; though
+during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
+to recognise that his own contained after all no element
+of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that
+he could go too far&mdash;if it <i>was</i> too far&mdash;without being
+false. His observation was one he would perfectly
+have made to Kate herself. And before he again
+spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more
+still&mdash;for feeling how just here it was that he must
+break short off if his mind was really made up not to
+go further. It was as if he had been at a corner&mdash;and
+fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended
+on him whether or no to turn it. The silence, if prolonged
+but an instant, might even have given him a
+sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was
+filled for them the next thing by the sound, rather
+voluminous for the August afternoon, of the approach,
+in the street below them, of heavy carriage-wheels and
+of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great shake,
+a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently
+succeeded by a pause at the door of the hotel, which
+was in turn accompanied by a due display of diminished
+prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
+Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
+</p><p>
+"It's only my own carriage; it does that&mdash;isn't it
+wonderful?&mdash;every day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham
+and I, in the innocence of our hearts, very amusing."
+She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
+of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they
+were together on the balcony and looking down at her
+waiting chariot, which made indeed a brave show.
+"Is it very awful?"
+</p><p>
+It was to Densher's eyes&mdash;save for its absurd
+heaviness&mdash;only pleasantly pompous. "It seems to
+me delightfully rococo. But how do I know? You're
+mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
+wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to
+which your carriage&mdash;well, by this time, in the eye of
+London, also occupies one." But she was going out,
+and he mustn't stand in her way. What had happened
+the next minute was first that she had denied she was
+going out, so that he might prolong his stay; and
+second that she had said she would go out with pleasure
+if he would like to drive&mdash;that in fact there were
+always things to do, that there had been a question
+for her to-day of several in particular, and that this in
+short was why the carriage had been ordered so early.
+They perceived, as she said these things, that an enquirer
+had presented himself, and, coming back, they
+found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and
+prepared to accompany her. This appeared to have
+for her the effect of settling the matter&mdash;on the basis,
+that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
+happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the
+process we have described in him operating by this
+time with extreme intensity. The system of not pulling
+up, not breaking off, had already brought him
+headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually
+stood; and just now it was, with a vengeance, that he
+must do either one thing or the other. He had been
+waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
+him longer than they were; this was because he was
+anxiously watching himself wait. He couldn't keep
+that up for ever; and since one thing or the other was
+what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
+became conscious of having decided. If he had been
+drifting it settled itself in the manner of a bump, of
+considerable violence, against a firm object in the
+stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure. It's
+a charming idea."
+</p><p>
+She gave no look to thank him&mdash;she rather looked
+away; she only said at once to her servant, "In ten
+minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the man went
+out, "We'll go somewhere&mdash;I shall like that. But
+I must ask of you time&mdash;as little as possible&mdash;to get
+ready." She looked over the room to provide for him,
+keep him there. "There are books and things&mdash;plenty;
+and I dress very quickly." He caught her
+eyes only as she went, on which he thought them
+pretty and touching.
+</p><p>
+Why especially touching at that instant he could
+certainly scarce have said; it was involved, it was lost
+in the sense of her wishing to oblige him. Clearly
+what had occurred was her having wished it so that
+she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement,
+to oblige <i>her;</i> which he had now fully done by
+turning his corner. He was quite round it, his corner,
+by the time the door had closed upon her and he stood
+there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes
+more&mdash;remained with several very living little matters
+to think about. One of these was the phenomenon&mdash;typical,
+highly American, he would have said&mdash;of
+Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather
+as if he had sought refuge&mdash;refuge from another
+question&mdash;in the almost exclusive contemplation of
+this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even to
+a sound generalisation about American girls. It was
+spontaneous for his young friend to have asked him to
+drive with her alone&mdash;since she hadn't mentioned
+her companion; but she struck him after all as no
+more advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who
+wasn't an American girl, might have struck him in
+not doing it. Besides, Kate <i>would</i> have done it,
+though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
+spontaneous. And then in addition Kate <i>had</i> done it&mdash;or
+things very like it. Furthermore he was engaged
+to Kate&mdash;even if his ostensibly not being put
+her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds,
+at any rate, the relation between Kate and freedom,
+between freedom and Kate, was a different one from
+any he could associate or cultivate, as to anything,
+with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
+herself up to him. It had never struck him before,
+and he moved about the room while he thought of it,
+touching none of the books placed at his disposal.
+Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
+whereas Kate was backward&mdash;backward still,
+comparatively, as an English girl&mdash;and yet advanced
+in a high degree. However&mdash;though this
+didn't straighten it out&mdash;Kate was of course two or
+three years older; which at their time of life considerably
+counted.
+</p><p>
+Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued
+slowly to wander; yet without keeping at bay for
+long the sense of having rounded his corner. He
+had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even
+the option of taking advantage of Milly's absence to
+retrace his steps. If he might have turned tail, vulgarly
+speaking, five minutes before, he couldn't turn
+tail now; he must simply wait there with his consciousness
+charged to the brim. Quickly enough
+moreover that issue was closed from without; in the
+course of three minutes more Miss Theale's servant
+had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had
+met, obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom,
+throwing open the door, he loudly announced as Miss
+Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped short at
+sight of Densher&mdash;only, after an instant, as the
+young man saw with free amusement, not from surprise
+and still less from discomfiture. Densher immediately
+gave his explanation&mdash;Miss Theale had gone
+to prepare to drive&mdash;on receipt of which the servant
+effaced himself.
+</p><p>
+"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;with your approval; which I've taken, as
+you see, for granted."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!"
+She was thoroughly consistent and handsome about
+it.
+</p><p>
+"What I mean is of course," he went on&mdash;for he
+was sensibly affected by her gaiety&mdash;"at your so
+lively instigation."
+</p><p>
+She had looked about the room&mdash;she might have
+been vaguely looking for signs of the duration, of the
+character of his visit, a momentary aid in taking a
+decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you
+like." She treated it as pleasant, the success of her
+plea with him; she made a fresh joke of this direct
+impression of it. "So much so as that? Do you know
+I think I won't wait?"
+</p><p>
+"Not to see her&mdash;after coming?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, with you in the field&mdash;! I came for news of
+her, but she must be all right. If she <i>is</i>&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?"
+He was moved to say more. "It's not I who am responsible
+for her, my dear. It seems to me it's you."
+She struck him as making light of a matter that had
+been costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't
+both be quite just. Either she was too easy or he had
+been too anxious. He didn't want at all events to feel
+a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing&mdash;and shall not,
+I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
+</p><p>
+Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis
+he had given his words; and he had taken it
+from her the next moment that he really needn't get
+into a state. What in the world was the matter? She
+asked it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she
+better&mdash;if she's able to see you?"
+</p><p>
+"She assures me she's in perfect health."
+</p><p>
+Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On
+which she added: "It won't have been really for illness
+that she stayed away last night."
+</p><p>
+"For what then?"
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;for nervousness."
+</p><p>
+"Nervousness about what?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience,
+smiling however the next moment. "I've
+told you that."
+</p><p>
+He looked at her to recover in her face what she
+had told him; then it was as if what he saw there
+prompted him to say: "What have you told <i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as
+if they remembered where they were, liable to surprise,
+talking with softened voices, even stretching
+their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
+feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and
+yet they were saying things&mdash;! For a moment, none
+the less, they kept it up. "Ask <i>her</i>, if you like; you're
+free&mdash;she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
+trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have
+told. I'm all right with her," said Kate. "So there
+you are."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean <i>here</i> I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable.
+If you also mean that her believing in
+you is all I have to do with you're so far right as that
+she certainly does believe in you."
+</p><p>
+"Well then take example by her."
+</p><p>
+"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued.
+"She's driving me out for you."
+</p><p>
+"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity,
+"you can do it a little for <i>her</i>. I'm not afraid,"
+she smiled.
+</p><p>
+He stood before her a moment, taking in again the
+face she put on it and affected again, as he had already
+so often been, by more things in this face and
+in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
+relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under
+such impressions, a question of words. "I do nothing
+for any one in the world but you. But for you I'll do
+anything."
+</p><p>
+"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
+</p><p>
+He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to
+it?"
+</p><p>
+"To 'it'? To what?"
+</p><p>
+"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that,
+you know, that I'm letting you do&mdash;well, God knows
+what with me."
+</p><p>
+She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture&mdash;the
+sense of which she immediately further expressed.
+"If you don't believe in me then, after all,
+hadn't you better break off before you've gone
+further?"
+</p><p>
+"Break off with you?"
+</p><p>
+"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she
+said, "and I'll stay and explain to her why it is."
+</p><p>
+He wondered&mdash;as if it struck him. "What would
+you say?"
+</p><p>
+"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that
+there's nothing for me but to bear with you as I best
+may."
+</p><p>
+He considered of this. "How much do you abuse
+me to her?"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
+</p><p>
+Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought
+to mind her attitude."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my
+best for you."
+</p><p>
+He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a
+chance; and that of itself made things clearer. The
+feeling of how far he had gone came back to him not
+in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
+and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate
+offered, that he now weighed the consequence.
+"Won't it make her&mdash;her not finding me here&mdash;be
+rather more sure there's something between us?"
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course
+greatly upset her. But you needn't trouble about
+that. She won't die of it."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean she <i>will?</i>" Densher presently asked.
+</p><p>
+"Don't put me questions when you don't believe
+what I say. You make too many conditions."
+</p><p>
+She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness
+that made the want of pliancy, the failure to oblige
+her, look poor and ugly; so that what it suddenly
+came back to for him was his deficiency in the things
+a man of any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would
+have liked to make sure of being able to show&mdash;imagination,
+tact, positively even humour. The circumstance
+is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the
+less that the speculation uppermost with him at this
+juncture was: "What if I should begin to bore this
+creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
+translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love
+me&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+She looked about, at door and window, as if he
+were asking for more than he said. "Here? There's
+nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
+</p><p>
+"Oh <i>isn't</i> there?" Her smile itself, with this, had
+so settled something for him that he had come to her
+pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately
+seized with her own as if both to check him
+and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a
+minute that she did check him; she held him long
+enough, while, with their eyes deeply meeting, they
+waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew
+his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the
+sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely
+one of her usual victories, which immediately took
+further form. By the time he had dropped her hands
+he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It was
+not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all
+you wish," he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance
+of his condition that he had practically,
+after all, drawn from her&mdash;a declaration on which
+she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
+</p><p>
+"If you <i>are</i> as good as that I go. You'll tell her
+that, finding you with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that,
+you know, from yourself. She'll understand."
+</p><p>
+She had reached the door with it&mdash;she was full of
+decision; but he had before she left him one more
+doubt. "I don't see how she can understand enough,
+you know, without understanding too much."
+</p><p>
+"You don't need to see."
+</p><p>
+He required then a last injunction. "I must simply
+go it blind?"
+</p><p>
+"You must simply be kind to her."
+</p><p>
+"And leave the rest to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Leave the rest to <i>her</i>," said Kate disappearing.
+</p><p>
+It came back then afresh to that, as it had come
+before. Milly, three minutes after Kate had gone,
+returned in her array&mdash;her big black hat, so little
+superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
+throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher
+vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of
+priceless lace, and which, its folded fabric kept in
+place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
+like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once
+of their friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known
+she'd find me," he said&mdash;and said at present without
+difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it
+wasn't a question of a word more or less.
+</p><p>
+She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient;
+she glossed over whatever might be awkward.
+"I'm sorry&mdash;but I of course often see <i>her</i>." He felt
+the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
+Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was
+left to her. Well, it should now be wholly left.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK SEVENTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs.
+Stringham on the day of her meeting them together
+and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to face
+with that companion, had had one of those moments
+in which the warned, the anxious fighter of the battle
+of life, as if once again feeling for the sword at his
+side, carries his hand straight to the quarter of his
+courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the
+two women stood there showing each other a strange
+front. Susan Shepherd had received their great doctor's
+visit, which had been clearly no small affair for
+her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
+in place, against communication and betrayal, as she
+now practically confessed, the barrier of their invited
+guests. "You've been too dear. With what I see
+you're full of you treated them beautifully. <i>Isn't</i>
+Kate charming when she wants to be?"
+</p><p>
+Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in
+a high fine spasm, with different dangers, had now
+quite let itself go. She had to make an effort to reach
+a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh
+she was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham
+added. "She knew."
+</p><p>
+Milly braced herself&mdash;but conscious above all, at
+the moment, of a high compassion for her mate. She
+made her out as struggling&mdash;struggling in all her
+nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself,
+given her nature, could only be a torment. Milly
+gathered from the struggle how much there was of
+the pity, and how therefore it was both in her tenderness
+and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
+Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression
+instantly steadied the girl. Ruefully asking
+herself on what basis of ease, with the drop of their
+barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt
+the question met with a relief that was almost joy.
+The basis, the inevitable basis, was that she was going
+to be sorry for Susie, who, to all appearance, had been
+condemned in so much more uncomfortable a manner
+to be sorry for <i>her</i>. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow
+would hurt Mrs. Stringham, but how could her own
+ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at all events, on the
+spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
+the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture
+of an energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate
+knew," she asked, "that you were full of Sir Luke
+Strett?"
+</p><p>
+"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice;
+she seemed to want to help me through." Which the
+good lady had no sooner said, however, than she almost
+tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly
+with a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she
+saw one had been taken up with something. When I
+say she knows I should say she's a person who
+guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side,
+heroic. "But <i>she</i> doesn't matter, Milly."
+</p><p>
+The girl felt she by this time could face anything.
+"Nobody matters, Susie. Nobody." Which her next
+words, however, rather contradicted. "Did he take it
+ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
+just what he wanted&mdash;to have it out, so much more
+simply, with <i>you</i>?"
+</p><p>
+"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs.
+Stringham delicately quavered.
+</p><p>
+"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on,
+"and didn't he think you the most charming person
+I could possibly have referred him to for an account
+of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together
+and in fact fall quite in love, so that it will really be
+a great advantage for you to have me as a common
+ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end of
+a good thing of me."
+</p><p>
+"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham
+pleadingly murmured; yet showing as she did so that
+she feared the effect even of deprecation.
+</p><p>
+"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?&mdash;altogether,
+whatever he may say, a lovely acquaintance
+to have made? You're just the right people for me&mdash;I
+see it now; and do you know what, between you,
+you must do?" Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck
+and holding herself: "You must simply
+see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out
+together. I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and
+we'll be&mdash;the three of us, with whatever others, oh
+as many as the case requires, any one you like!&mdash;a
+sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying
+a feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence
+that her young friend almost saw her&mdash;and scarcely
+withheld the observation&mdash;as taking it for "a part of
+the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
+she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate
+awfully interesting, isn't he?&mdash;which is so much to
+the good. We haven't at least&mdash;as we might have,
+with the way we tumbled into it&mdash;got hold of one of
+the dreary."
+</p><p>
+"Interesting, dearest?"&mdash;Mrs. Stringham felt
+her feet firmer. "I don't know if he's interesting or
+not; but I do know, my own," she continued to
+quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you
+could possibly desire."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly&mdash;that's it. Like all the world."
+</p><p>
+"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very
+much more deeply and intelligently."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the
+way, Susie, I want you. So 'buck' up, my dear.
+We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't worry."
+</p><p>
+"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face
+registered the sublimity of her lie.
+</p><p>
+It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her
+companion went to her, met by her with an embrace
+in which things were said that exceeded speech. Each
+held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
+unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning
+the torment of helplessness, the woe for Milly
+of having <i>her</i>, at such a time, to think of. Milly's
+assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
+friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without
+bringing it more to the proof than tenderness and
+vagueness could permit. Nothing in fact came to the
+proof between them but that they could thus cling
+together&mdash;except indeed that, as we have indicated,
+the pledge of protection and support was all the
+younger woman's own. "I don't ask you," she presently
+said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what
+he told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that
+I had left him to you, nor what passed between you
+about me in any way. It wasn't to get that out of you
+that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
+freely&mdash;for there are things I don't want to know. I
+shall see him again and again and shall know more
+than enough. All I do want is that you shall see me
+through on <i>his</i> basis, whatever it is; which it's enough&mdash;for
+the purpose&mdash;that you yourself should know:
+that is with him to show you how. I'll make it charming
+for you&mdash;that's what I mean; I'll keep you up
+to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
+you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me.
+There. It's understood. We keep each other going,
+and you may absolutely feel of me that I shan't break
+down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a
+dig of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
+</p><p>
+"He told me I <i>can</i> help you&mdash;of course he told
+me that," Susie, on her side, eagerly contended.
+"Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I come
+out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful&mdash;nothing,
+nothing, nothing," the poor lady passionately
+protested. "Only that you must do as you like
+and as he tells you&mdash;which <i>is</i> just simply to do as
+you like."
+</p><p>
+"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to
+time go to him. But that's of course doing as I like.
+It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I like going to him."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave
+a clutch at the account of their situation that most
+showed it as workable. "That's what <i>will</i> be charming
+for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me&mdash;to
+help you to do as you like."
+</p><p>
+"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed,
+"to save me from the consequences? Of course,"
+she added, "there must first <i>be</i> things I like."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham
+more bravely said. "I think there <i>are</i> some&mdash;as for
+instance just this one. I mean," she explained,
+"really having us so."
+</p><p>
+Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable
+about <i>him</i>, and him the same about you? Yes&mdash;I
+shall get the good of it."
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this
+into a slight confusion. "Which of them are you talking
+of?"
+</p><p>
+Milly wondered an instant&mdash;then had a light.
+"I'm not talking of Mr. Densher." With which
+moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you
+can be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much
+the better."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's
+a fine type. Do you know," Susie continued, "whom
+he reminds me of? Of <i>our</i> great man&mdash;Dr. Buttrick
+of Boston."
+</p><p>
+Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she
+dropped him after a tributary pause. "What do you
+think, now that you've seen him, of Mr. Densher?"
+</p><p>
+It was not till after consideration, with her eyes
+fixed on her friend's, that Susie produced her answer.
+"I think he's very handsome."
+</p><p>
+Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on
+a little the manner of a teacher with a pupil. "Well,
+that will do for the first time. I <i>have</i> done," she went
+on, "what I wanted."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's all <i>we</i> want. You see there are plenty
+of things."
+</p><p>
+Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best
+is not to know&mdash;that includes them all. I don't&mdash;I
+don't know. Nothing about anything&mdash;except that
+you're <i>with</i> me. Remember that, please. There
+won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall
+forget. So it's all right."
+</p><p>
+The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended,
+to sustain Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into
+the reassuring. "Most certainly it's all right. I think
+you ought to understand that he sees no reason&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly
+had taken it straight up, as to understand it and for
+a moment consider it. But she disposed of it otherwise.
+"Oh of course I know <i>that</i>." She spoke as if
+her friend's point were small.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what
+I mean is that he didn't say to me anything that he
+hasn't said to yourself."
+</p><p>
+"Really?&mdash;I would in his place!" She might
+have been disappointed, but she had her good humour.
+"He tells me to <i>live</i>"&mdash;and she oddly limited
+the word.
+</p><p>
+It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you
+want more?"
+</p><p>
+"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,'
+as I assure you, anything. Still," she added, "I <i>am</i>
+living. Oh yes, I'm living."
+</p><p>
+It put them again face to face, but it had wound
+Mrs. Stringham up. "So am I then, you'll see!"&mdash;she
+spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet it was
+her wisdom now&mdash;meaning by it as much as she did&mdash;not
+to say more than that. She had risen by Milly's
+aid to a certain command of what was before them;
+the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made her
+more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of
+a new idea. It was really perhaps an old idea with a
+new value; it had at all events begun during the last
+hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special
+light. That was because in the morning darkness
+had so suddenly descended&mdash;a sufficient shade of
+night to bring out the power of a star. The dusk
+might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
+cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time
+on continued to twinkle for her. It was for the moment,
+after her passage with Milly, the one spark
+left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued
+to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir
+Luke Strett's visit and that the impressions immediately
+following had done no more than fix it. Milly's
+reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels&mdash;or, so
+oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being
+at Milly's&mdash;had contributed to this effect, though it
+was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that
+Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned during
+the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed
+while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable
+advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and
+the young man were conjoined in the other. If it
+hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which
+it was capable, this was because the poor lady still sat
+in her primary gloom, the gloom the great benignant
+doctor had practically left behind him.
+</p><p>
+The intensity the circumstance in question <i>might</i>
+wear to the informed imagination would have been
+sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt&mdash;and with other
+things to our purpose&mdash;in two or three of those confidential
+passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now
+permitted herself. She hadn't yet been so glad that
+she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't had,
+at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she
+should certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion
+had ceased to consist of silence; silence was gross
+and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however
+tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster
+Gate the morning after the colloquy just noted;
+and there, in Maud Manningham's own sanctum,
+she gradually found relief in giving an account of
+herself. An account of herself was one of the things
+that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself
+regularly to give&mdash;the regularity depending of
+course much on such tests of merit as might, by laws
+beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
+herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of
+how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she
+for the most part found herself able to make. What
+had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt,
+was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
+inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of
+herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first
+instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please
+let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation,
+at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for
+that purpose; and the power happily came to her with
+the good opportunity. She cried and cried at first&mdash;she
+confined herself to that; it was for the time the
+best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
+intelligently took it as such, though knocking off
+a note or two more, as she said, while Susie sat near
+her table. She could resist the contagion of tears, but
+her patience did justice to her visitor's most vivid
+plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry
+again&mdash;at least not ever with <i>her;</i> so I must take it
+out when I can. Even if she does herself it won't be
+for me to give away; for what would that be but a
+confession of despair? I'm not with her for that&mdash;I'm
+with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly
+won't cry herself."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she
+won't have occasion to."
+</p><p>
+"She won't even if she does have occasion. She
+won't shed a tear. There's something that will prevent
+her."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in
+spite of her friend's doubt, and it was with this that
+her communication took consistent form. It had
+never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted,
+that kept <i>her</i> from crying when other things made for
+it; it had only been that these same things, at such
+times, made still more for business, arrangements,
+correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling
+of servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying
+now," she said, "if I weren't writing letters"&mdash;and
+this quite without harshness for her anxious companion,
+to whom she allowed just the administrative
+margin for difference. She had interrupted her no
+more than she would have interrupted the piano-tuner.
+It gave poor Susie time; and when Mrs. Lowder,
+to save appearances and catch the post, had,
+with her addressed and stamped notes, met at the
+door of the room the footman summoned by the pressure
+of a knob, the facts of the case were sufficiently
+ready for her. It took but two or three, however,
+given their importance, to lay the ground for the great
+one&mdash;Mrs. Stringham's interview of the day before
+with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her about
+Milly.
+</p><p>
+"He had wished it himself?"
+</p><p>
+"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was.
+He stayed a quarter of an hour. I could see that for
+<i>him</i> it was long. He's interested," said Mrs. Stringham.
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean in her case?"
+</p><p>
+"He says it <i>isn't</i> a case."
+</p><p>
+"What then is it?"
+</p><p>
+"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained,
+"the case she believed it to be&mdash;thought it at any
+rate <i>might</i> be&mdash;when, without my knowledge, she
+went to see him. She went because there was something
+she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly&mdash;he
+has made sure. She's wrong&mdash;she
+hasn't what she thought."
+</p><p>
+"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
+</p><p>
+"He didn't tell me."
+</p><p>
+"And you didn't ask?"
+</p><p>
+"I asked nothing," said poor Susie&mdash;"I only took
+what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had
+to&mdash;he was beautiful," she went on. "He <i>is</i>, thank
+God, interested."
+</p><p>
+"He must have been interested in <i>you</i>, dear,"
+Maud Manningham observed with kindness.
+</p><p>
+Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I
+think he <i>is</i>. I mean that he sees what he can do with
+me."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For <i>her</i>."
+</p><p>
+"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must.
+He can use me to the last bone, and he likes at least
+that. He says the great thing for her is to be happy."
+</p><p>
+"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why,
+therefore," Mrs. Lowder handsomely asked, "should
+we cry so hard about it?"
+</p><p>
+"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange,
+so beyond us. I mean if she can't be."
+</p><p>
+"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles.
+"She <i>shall</i> be."
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we
+<i>can</i> help."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way,
+what Sir Luke Strett thought. She sat back there,
+her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed
+matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
+dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the
+matter one by one, into her capacious apron. "But is
+that all he came to you for&mdash;to tell you she must
+be happy?"
+</p><p>
+"That she must be <i>made</i> so&mdash;that's the point. It
+seemed enough, as he told me," Mrs. Stringham went
+on; "he makes it somehow such a grand possible
+affair."
+</p><p>
+"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
+</p><p>
+"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it
+to me, that is, as <i>my</i> part. The rest's his own."
+</p><p>
+"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. <i>His</i> business. He means to keep
+hold of her."
+</p><p>
+"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must
+be very much of one."
+</p><p>
+Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the
+extent of it. "It's only that it isn't <i>the</i> case she herself
+supposed."
+</p><p>
+"It's another?"
+</p><p>
+"It's another."
+</p><p>
+"Examining her for what she supposed he finds
+something else?"
+</p><p>
+"Something else."
+</p><p>
+"And what does he find?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from
+knowing!"
+</p><p>
+"He didn't tell you that?"
+</p><p>
+But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I
+mean is that if it's there I shall know in time. He's
+considering, but I can trust him for it&mdash;because he
+does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
+</p><p>
+"He's in other words not sure?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he
+means. She's to get away now, but to come back to
+him in three months."
+</p><p>
+"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he
+oughtn't meanwhile to scare us."
+</p><p>
+It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled
+in the great doctor's cause. This came out at
+least in her glimmer of reproach. "Does it scare us
+to enlist us for her happiness?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it
+scares <i>me</i>. I'm always scared&mdash;I may call it so&mdash;till
+I understand. What happiness is he talking
+about?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you
+know!"
+</p><p>
+She had really said it so that her friend had to take
+it; which the latter in fact after a moment showed
+herself as having done. A strange light humour in
+the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
+with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems
+to see. The point is&mdash;!" But, fairly too full now of
+her question, she dropped.
+</p><p>
+"The point is will it <i>cure?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy&mdash;the specific?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs.
+Stringham delicately declared.
+</p><p>
+"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
+</p><p>
+"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan
+Shepherd enquired.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
+</p><p>
+Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a
+break into momentary mirth, which operated&mdash;and
+happily too&mdash;as a challenge to her visitor's spirit.
+"Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But
+it's something to know he thinks it good for us."
+</p><p>
+"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes
+me we know it without him. So that when <i>that's</i>
+all he has to tell us&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.'
+I feel Sir Luke will have more; he won't have put
+me off with anything inadequate. I'm to see him
+again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So
+it won't be for nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has
+somebody of his own to propose? Do you mean you
+told him nothing?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I
+showed him I understood him. That was all I could
+do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit; but I felt,
+even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what
+I had from you night before last."
+</p><p>
+"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we
+had left her with Kate?"
+</p><p>
+"You had <i>seen</i>, apparently, in three minutes. And
+now that he's here, now that I've met him and had
+my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs. Stringham,
+"that you've been magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked
+Maud Manningham, "was I anything else? But
+Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
+Densher."
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man
+one loves. But we're going fast!" Mrs. Stringham
+woefully smiled.
+</p><p>
+"The thing <i>is</i> to go fast if I see the case right. What
+had I after all but my instinct of that on coming back
+with you, night before last, to pick up Kate? I felt
+what I felt&mdash;I knew in my bones the man had returned."
+</p><p>
+"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent.
+But wait," said Mrs. Stringham, "till you've seen
+him."
+</p><p>
+"I shall see him immediately"&mdash;Mrs. Lowder
+took it up with decision. "What is then," she asked,
+"your impression?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her
+doubts. "How can he ever care for her?"
+</p><p>
+Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner,
+sat on it. "By being put in the way of it."
+</p><p>
+"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed,
+"<i>put</i> him in the way! You have him, one feels, in
+your hand."
+</p><p>
+Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's.
+"Is that your impression of him?"
+</p><p>
+"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle
+every one."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd
+now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing
+that she pleased her. But there was a great limitation.
+"I don't handle Kate."
+</p><p>
+It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet
+had from her&mdash;something the sense of which made
+Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you mean Kate cares
+for <i>him?</i>"
+</p><p>
+That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to
+this moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend's
+quick question had produced a change in her face.
+She blinked&mdash;then looked at the question hard;
+after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed
+herself or had only reached a decision and then been
+affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's surprise,
+she accepted all results. What took place in her for
+Susan Shepherd was not simply that she made the
+best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them
+to her purpose than she could have imagined. A
+certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition:
+she had been keeping back, very hard, an important
+truth, and wouldn't have liked to hear that
+she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
+felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her
+for not having thought of it. What Susie indeed,
+however, most thought of at present, in the quick,
+new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
+She had time for that view while she waited for
+an answer to her cry. "Kate thinks she cares. But
+she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These things,
+distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort.
+Yet they weren't all of it. "<i>You</i> don't know it&mdash;that
+must be your line. Or rather your line must be
+that you deny it utterly."
+</p><p>
+"Deny that she cares for him?"
+</p><p>
+"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does.
+Positively and absolutely. Deny that you've so much
+as heard of it."
+</p><p>
+Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean&mdash;if
+she asks?"
+</p><p>
+"To Milly, naturally. No one else <i>will</i> ask."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment,
+"Milly won't."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for <i>me</i>.
+I lie badly."
+</p><p>
+"<i>I</i> lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost
+snorted, "when, as sometimes will happen, there's
+nothing else so good. One must always do the best.
+But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we
+can work it out." Her interest had risen; her friend
+saw her, as within some minutes, more enrolled and
+inflamed&mdash;presently felt in her what had made the
+difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried
+this at the time but dimly; she only made out at first
+that Maud had found a reason for helping her. The
+reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud too,
+for which she now desired to profess herself ready
+even to lying. What really perhaps most came out
+for her was that her hostess was a little disappointed
+at her doubt of the social solidity of this appliance;
+and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The
+truth about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented
+it, the delusion about the state of her affections, which
+might be removed&mdash;this was apparently the ground
+on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs.
+Stringham saw herself recruited for the removal of
+Kate's delusion&mdash;by arts, however, in truth, that she
+as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it perhaps to be
+only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?&mdash;success in
+which indeed might entail other successes. Before that
+job, unfortunately, her heart had already failed. She
+felt that she believed in her bones what Milly believed,
+and what would now make working for Milly such
+a dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly
+present&mdash;a cloud of questions out of which
+Maud Manningham's large seated self loomed, however,
+as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact
+for the consultative relation something of the form of
+an oracle. From the oracle the sound did come&mdash;or
+at any rate the sense did, a sense all accordant with
+the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
+sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that
+comes off I shall be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"&mdash;a
+view into which Mrs. Stringham could now sufficiently
+enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange
+to say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at
+least to Kate's good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble
+anxiety measured it. She found herself in short not
+caring what became of Kate&mdash;only convinced at
+bottom of the predominance of Kate's star. Kate
+wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't pathetic; Kate Croy,
+whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
+She saw moreover by this time that her friend was
+travelling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder
+had already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action,
+a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You
+must stay on a few days, and you must immediately,
+both of you, meet him at dinner." In addition to
+which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct
+of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights
+before, to prepare that ground. "The poor child,
+when I was with her there while you were getting
+your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me.
+Though it was nothing more," Susie did herself the
+justice to observe, "than what I too had quite felt."
+</p><p>
+But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she
+wondered what she had said. "I suppose I ought
+to be edified at what you can so beautifully give up."
+</p><p>
+"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I
+give up nothing&mdash;I cling."
+</p><p>
+Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with
+some stiffness to her great brass-bound cylinder-desk
+and giving a push to an object or two disposed there.
+"I give up then. You know how little such a person
+as Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know
+what I've been thinking perfectly possible."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you've been great"&mdash;Susie was perfectly
+fair. "A duke, a duchess, a princess, a palace: you've
+made me believe in them too. But where we break
+down is that <i>she</i> doesn't believe in them. Luckily
+for her&mdash;as it seems to be turning out&mdash;she doesn't
+want them. So what's one to do? I assure you
+I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream
+now."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so
+fully her meaning that Mrs. Lowder could but show
+herself as taking it in. They sat a moment longer
+confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
+</p><p>
+"If it <i>will</i> do anything for her."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do;
+but she spoke for the instant of something else. "It
+does provoke me a bit, you know&mdash;for of course I'm
+a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things.
+Yet it doesn't prevent the fact that we must be
+decent."
+</p><p>
+"We must take her"&mdash;Mrs. Stringham carried
+that out&mdash;"as she is."
+</p><p>
+"And we must take Mr. Densher as <i>he</i> is." With
+which Mrs. Lowder gave a sombre laugh. "It's a
+pity he isn't better!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined,
+"you'd have liked him for your niece; and in that
+case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie added,
+"interfere with <i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"She interferes with me as it is&mdash;not that it matters
+now. But I saw Kate and her&mdash;really as soon as
+you came to me&mdash;set up side by side. I saw your
+girl&mdash;I don't mind telling&mdash;you helping my girl;
+and when I say that," Mrs. Lowder continued,
+"you'll probably put in for yourself that it was part
+of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what
+I give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line,"
+she further set forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye
+to it all. Good-day to Mrs. Densher! Heavens!"
+she growled.
+</p><p>
+Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher
+my girl will be somebody."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs.
+Lowder, "we're talking in the air."
+</p><p>
+Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving
+everything out."
+</p><p>
+"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder
+had another thought. "<i>He's</i> not quite nobody
+either." It brought her back to the question she had
+already put and which her friend hadn't at the time
+dealt with. "What in fact do you make of him?"
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even
+to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained
+general. "He's charming."
+</p><p>
+She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme
+pointedness in her own to which people resort
+when they are not quite candid&mdash;a circumstance that
+had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
+</p><p>
+The effect of the words, however, was equally
+marked; they almost determined in Mrs. Stringham
+a return of amusement. "I thought you didn't like
+him!"
+</p><p>
+"I don't like him for Kate."
+</p><p>
+"But you don't like him for Milly either."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend
+also got up. "I like him, my dear, for myself."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's the best way of all."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for
+my niece, and he's not good enough for you. One's
+an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
+</p><p>
+"Oh <i>I'm</i> not&mdash;not either," Susie declared.
+</p><p>
+But her companion kept on. "One lives for others.
+<i>You</i> do that. If I were living for myself I shouldn't
+at all mind him."
+</p><p>
+But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find
+him charming it's however I'm living."
+</p><p>
+Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire
+but an instant, giving herself away with a laugh.
+"Of course he's all right in himself."
+</p><p>
+"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve;
+and the note in question&mdash;what Merton Densher
+was "in himself"&mdash;closed practically, with
+some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It had at least made the difference for them, they
+could feel, of an informed state in respect to the great
+doctor, whom they were now to take as watching,
+waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to himself
+some such process before he should make up his
+mind. Mrs. Stringham understood him as considering
+the matter meanwhile in a spirit that, on this
+same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come back
+to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed
+the course of his reckoning. If what they had talked
+of <i>could</i> happen&mdash;if Milly, that is, could have her
+thoughts taken off herself&mdash;it wouldn't do any
+harm and might conceivably do much good. If it
+couldn't happen&mdash;if, anxiously, though tactfully
+working, they themselves, conjoined, could do nothing
+to contribute to it&mdash;they would be in no worse
+a box than before. Only in this latter case the girl
+would have had her free range for the summer, for the
+autumn; she would have done her best in the sense
+enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her
+eminent man, would&mdash;besides having more to show
+him&mdash;find him more ready to go on with her. It
+was visible further to Susan Shepherd&mdash;as well as
+being ground for a second report to her old friend&mdash;that
+Milly did her part for a working view of the
+general case, inasmuch as she mentioned frankly and
+promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir
+Luke Strett and thank him. She even specified what
+she was to thank him for, his having been so easy
+about her behaviour.
+</p><p>
+"You see I didn't know that&mdash;for the liberty I
+took&mdash;I shouldn't afterwards get a stiff note from
+him."
+</p><p>
+So much Milly had said to her, and it had made
+her a trifle rash. "Oh you'll never get a stiff note
+from him in your life."
+</p><p>
+She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her
+young friend's question. "Why not, as well as any
+one else who has played him a trick?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick.
+He could understand your action. It's all right, you
+see."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;I do see. It <i>is</i> all right. He's easier with
+me than with any one else, because that's the way
+to let me down. He's only making believe, and I'm
+not worth hauling up."
+</p><p>
+Rueful at having provoked again this ominous
+flare, poor Susie grasped at her only advantage.
+"Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
+of trifling with you?"
+</p><p>
+She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion
+gave her&mdash;a strange half-amused perception
+of what she made of it. "Well, so far as it's
+trifling with me to pity me so much."
+</p><p>
+"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned.
+"He just&mdash;the same as any one else&mdash;likes you."
+</p><p>
+"He has no business then to like me. He's not
+the same as any one else."
+</p><p>
+"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
+</p><p>
+Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful
+smile. "Ah there you are!" Mrs. Stringham
+coloured, for there indeed she was again. But Milly
+let her off. "Work for me, all the same&mdash;work for
+me! It's of course what I want." Then as usual she
+embraced her friend. "I'm not going to be as nasty
+as this to <i>him</i>."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I hope not!"&mdash;and Mrs. Stringham
+laughed for the kiss. "I've no doubt, however, he'd
+take it from you! It's <i>you</i>, my dear, who are not the
+same as any one else."
+</p><p>
+Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her
+the last word. "No, so that people can take anything
+from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did indeed
+resignedly take after this was the absence on
+her part of any account of the visit then paid. It was
+the beginning in fact between them of an odd independence&mdash;an
+independence positively of action
+and custom&mdash;on the subject of Milly's future. They
+went their separate ways with the girl's intense assent;
+this being really nothing but what she had so wonderfully
+put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
+encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the
+idea that Susie had or was to have other encounters&mdash;private
+pointed personal; she favoured every idea,
+but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on
+as if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be
+worked for that would be her way; and though her
+companions learned from herself nothing of it this
+was in the event her way with her medical adviser.
+She put her visit to him on the simplest ground; she
+had come just to tell him how touched she had been
+by his good nature. That required little explaining,
+for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood
+he could but reply that it was all right.
+</p><p>
+"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that
+clever lady. You've got good friends."
+</p><p>
+"So each one of them thinks of all the others.
+But so I also think," Milly went on, "of all of them
+together. You're excellent for each other. And it's
+in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
+</p><p>
+There came to her on this occasion one of the
+strangest of her impressions, which was at the same
+time one of the finest of her alarms&mdash;the glimmer of
+a vision that if she should go, as it were, too far, she
+might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not
+of value. Going too far was failing to try at least to
+remain simple. He would be quite ready to hate her
+if she did, by heading him off at every point, embarrass
+his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt, rather
+constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't
+hate her, since Susie positively wanted to suffer for
+her; Susie had a noble idea that she might somehow
+so do her good. Such, however, was not the way in
+which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected
+to wish to do it. He wouldn't have time even
+should he wish; whereby, in a word, Milly felt herself
+intimately warned. Face to face there with her
+smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment
+quite such another lift of feeling as she had
+known in her crucial talk with Susie. It came round
+to the same thing; him too she would help to help
+her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't
+possibly be she would assist also to make this right.
+</p><p>
+It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the
+basis in question, almost to reverse for her their characters
+of patient and physician. What <i>was</i> he in fact
+but patient, what was she but physician, from the
+moment she embraced once for all the necessity,
+adopted once for all the policy, of saving him alarms
+about her subtlety? She would leave the subtlety to
+him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
+doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went
+so far as to imagine that the inward success of these
+reflexions flushed her for the minute, to his eyes, with
+a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
+and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour
+to the presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"&mdash;he
+noticed good-humouredly her harmless sally.
+"But, help or no help, you're looking, you know,
+remarkably well."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was
+as if already she saw his line. Only she wondered
+what he would have guessed. If he had guessed anything
+at all it would be rather remarkable of him.
+As for what there <i>was</i> to guess, he couldn't&mdash;if this
+was present to him&mdash;have arrived at it save by his
+own acuteness. That acuteness was therefore immense;
+and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
+leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad.
+Neither, for that matter, would hers be&mdash;which she
+was even actually enjoying. She wondered if really
+then there mightn't be something for her. She
+hadn't been sure in coming to him that she was
+"better," and he hadn't used, he would be awfully
+careful not to use, that compromising term about her;
+in spite of all of which she would have been ready to
+say, for the amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I <i>must</i>
+be," for he had this unaided sense of something that
+had happened to her. It was a sense unaided, because
+who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was
+certain, hadn't yet seen him again, and there were
+things it was impossible she could have told him the
+first time. Since such was his penetration, therefore,
+why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it,
+accept the new circumstance, the one he was clearly
+wanting to congratulate her on, as a sufficient cause?
+If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it might produce
+an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a
+way of nursing. "You gave me the other day," she
+went on, "plenty to think over, and I've been doing
+that&mdash;thinking it over&mdash;quite as you'll have probably
+wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to
+treat," she smiled, "since you've already done me so
+much good."
+</p><p>
+The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that
+he looked in advance so closely related to all one's
+possibilities that one missed the pleasure of really
+improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
+treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my
+wit."
+</p><p>
+"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile
+a bit believed in his answer, convinced as she
+was that if she <i>had</i> been difficult it would be the last
+thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said,
+"as I like."
+</p><p>
+"Then it's as <i>I</i> like. But you must really, though
+we're having such a decent month, get straight
+away." In pursuance of which, when she had replied
+with promptitude that her departure&mdash;for the Tyrol
+and then for Venice&mdash;was quite fixed for the fourteenth,
+he took her up with alacrity. "For Venice?
+That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a dream
+of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks
+off; three weeks during which, if I can get them clear,
+my niece, a young person who has quite the whip
+hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I heard
+from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer
+Venice."
+</p><p>
+"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And
+anything that, in advance or in any way, I can do for
+you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for
+me. But it will be capital to find you there."
+</p><p>
+"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after
+a moment, "that I <i>am</i> easy to treat."
+</p><p>
+But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it.
+"You've not come to that <i>yet</i>."
+</p><p>
+"One has to be so bad for it?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it&mdash;to
+'ease' of treatment. I doubt if it's possible. I've not,
+if it is, found any one bad enough. The ease, you see,
+is for <i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"I see&mdash;I see."
+</p><p>
+They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the
+least bit awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke
+asked: "And that clever lady&mdash;she goes with
+you?"
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with
+me, I hope, to the end."
+</p><p>
+He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of
+what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;of everything."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end
+of everything is far off. This, you know, I'm hoping,"
+said Sir Luke, "is only the beginning." And
+the next question he risked might have been a part of
+his hope. "Just you and she together?"
+</p><p>
+"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've
+seen more here than of any one and who are just the
+right people for us."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment. "You'll be four women
+together then?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans.
+But I think," she added as if to say what she saw
+would reassure him, "that we shall not be unattractive,
+as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of
+'life' I suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
+</p><p>
+"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a
+moment during which he might have been appreciating
+her raciness&mdash;"when I talk of life I think I
+mean more than anything else the beautiful show of
+it, in its freshness, made by young persons of your age.
+So go on as you are. I see more and more <i>how</i> you are.
+You can't," he went so far as to say for pleasantness,
+"better it."
+</p><p>
+She took it from him with a great show of peace.
+"One of our companions will be Miss Croy, who came
+with me here first. It's in <i>her</i> that life is splendid;
+and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me.
+But she's above all magnificent in herself. So that
+if you'd like," she freely threw out, "to see <i>her</i>&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to
+you, for clearly it will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that
+if she's to be at Venice I <i>shall</i> see her?"
+</p><p>
+"We must arrange it&mdash;I shan't fail. She moreover
+has a friend who may also be there"&mdash;Milly
+found herself going on to this. "He's likely to come,
+I believe, for he always follows her."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
+</p><p>
+"<i>He</i> is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't
+care for him."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter
+with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
+</p><p>
+"And he's to be in Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll
+be constantly about with her."
+</p><p>
+"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
+</p><p>
+"As we're great friends&mdash;yes."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four
+women alone."
+</p><p>
+"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen.
+But he won't," Milly pursued in the same
+wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I see. But can't you help him?"
+</p><p>
+"Can't <i>you?</i>" Milly after a moment quaintly
+asked. Then for the joke of it she explained. "I'm
+putting you, you see, in relation with my entourage."
+</p><p>
+It might have been for the joke of it too, by this
+time, that her eminent friend fell in. "But if this
+gentleman <i>isn't</i> of your 'entourage '? I mean if he's
+of&mdash;what do you call her?&mdash;Miss Croy's. Unless
+indeed you also take an interest in him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
+</p><p>
+"You think there may be then some chance for
+him?"
+</p><p>
+"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke
+next asked, "have I to do with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to
+be there, so may he be. And also that we shan't in
+that case be simply four dreary women."
+</p><p>
+He considered her as if at this point she a little
+tried his patience. "<i>You're</i> the least 'dreary' woman
+I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you know? There's no
+reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
+</p><p>
+"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
+</p><p>
+"The conviction&mdash;strong already when I had seen
+you once&mdash;is strengthened in me by having seen
+your friend. There's no doubt about it. The world's
+before you."
+</p><p>
+"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
+</p><p>
+"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure.
+We talked about you&mdash;and freely. I don't deny that.
+But it shows me I don't require of you the impossible."
+</p><p>
+She was now on her feet. "I think I know what
+you require of me."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing, for you," he went on, "<i>is</i> impossible.
+So go on." He repeated it again&mdash;wanting her so
+to feel that to-day he saw it. "You're all right."
+</p><p>
+"Well," she smiled&mdash;"keep me so."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you'll get away from me."
+</p><p>
+"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with
+her gentle eyes on him.
+</p><p>
+She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he
+thus for a moment did keep her. Something then,
+while he seemed to think if there were anything more,
+came back to him; though something of which there
+wasn't too much to be made. "Of course if there's
+anything I <i>can</i> do for your friend: I mean the gentleman
+you speak of&mdash;?" He gave out in short that he
+was ready.
+</p><p>
+"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
+</p><p>
+"Mr. Densher&mdash;is that his name?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;but his case isn't so dreadful." She had
+within a minute got away from that.
+</p><p>
+"No doubt&mdash;if <i>you</i> take an interest." She had
+got away, but it was as if he made out in her eyes&mdash;though
+they also had rather got away&mdash;a reason for
+calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can
+do&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+She looked at him while she thought, while she
+smiled. "I'm afraid there's really nothing one can
+do."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself
+sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth
+of the Southern summer was still in the high florid
+rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool pavements
+took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the
+sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through
+open windows, played over the painted "subjects"
+in the splendid ceilings&mdash;medallions of purple and
+brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as
+of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all
+toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and
+gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured
+concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures
+of the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second
+tier of smaller lights, straight openings to the front,
+which did everything, even with the Baedekers and
+photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
+eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This
+at last only, though she had enjoyed the palace for
+three weeks, seemed to count as effective occupation;
+perhaps because it was the first time she had been
+alone&mdash;really to call alone&mdash;since she had left
+London, it ministered to her first full and unembarrassed
+sense of what the great Eugenio had done for
+her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
+and Americans, had entered her service during
+the last hours of all&mdash;had crossed from Paris, after
+multiplied <i>pourparlers</i> with Mrs. Stringham, to whom
+she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on purpose
+to escort her to the Continent and encompass her
+there, and had dedicated to her, from the moment of
+their meeting, all the treasures of his experience. She
+had judged him in advance&mdash;polyglot and universal,
+very dear and very deep&mdash;as probably but a swindler
+finished to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying
+one well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging
+the other straight into her pocket, which, as she had
+instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
+glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements
+of their common consciousness had rapidly gathered
+into an indestructible link, formed the ground of a
+happy relation; being by this time, strangely, grotesquely,
+delightfully, what most kept up confidence
+between them and what most expressed it.
+</p><p>
+She had seen quickly enough what was happening&mdash;the
+usual thing again, yet once again. Eugenio
+had, in an interview of five minutes, understood her,
+had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so much
+of the care with which she must be taken up as of the
+care with which she must be let down. All the world
+understood her, all the world had got hold; but for
+nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
+close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender.
+Gracefully, respectfully, consummately enough&mdash;always
+with hands in position and the look, in his
+thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black professional,
+almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous
+tenor grown too old to make love, but with an art still
+to make money&mdash;did he on occasion convey to her
+that she was, of all the clients of his glorious career,
+the one in whom his interest was most personal and
+paternal. The others had come in the way of business,
+but for her his sentiment was special. Confidence
+rested thus on her completely believing that:
+there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It
+passed between them every time they conversed; he
+was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on the surface.
+He had taken his place already for her among those who
+were to see her through, and meditation ranked him,
+in the constant perspective, for the final function, side
+by side with poor Susie&mdash;whom she was now pitying
+more than ever for having to be herself so sorry and to
+say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact
+of a residuary legatee&mdash;which was a character that
+could be definitely worn; whereas she could see Susie,
+in the event of her death, in no character at all, Susie
+being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
+makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter,
+Milly at present, with a renewed flare of fancy, felt
+she should herself have liked to believe in. Eugenio
+had really done for her more than he probably knew&mdash;he
+didn't after all know everything&mdash;in having,
+for the wind-up of the autumn, on a weak word from
+her, so admirably, so perfectly established her. Her
+weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At Venice,
+please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but,
+if it can be at all managed&mdash;you know what I mean&mdash;some
+fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a
+series of months. Plenty of them too, and the more
+interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
+picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall
+be to ourselves, with a cook, don't you know?&mdash;with
+servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the
+thorough make-believe of a settlement."
+</p><p>
+The proof of how he better and better understood
+her was in all the place; as to his masterly acquisition
+of which she had from the first asked no questions.
+She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
+and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the
+transaction that mainly concerned her she would soon
+enough become acquainted, and his connexion with
+such values as she would then find noted could scarce
+help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming
+people, conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had
+given up their house to her, and had fled to a distance,
+to other countries, to hide their blushes alike
+over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and
+over what they had, however durably, gained. They
+had preserved and consecrated, and she now&mdash;her
+part of it was shameless&mdash;appropriated and enjoyed.
+Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap,
+even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about
+with decorations. Hung about with pictures and
+relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character,
+was here the presence revered and served: which
+brings us back to our truth of a moment ago&mdash;the
+fact that, more than ever, this October morning,
+awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved
+slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly
+it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught
+again and cherished for the hour; always a need of
+her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
+penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to
+her best; amid voices she lost the sense. Voices had
+surrounded her for weeks, and she had tried to listen,
+had cultivated them and had answered back; these
+had been weeks in which there were other things they
+might well prevent her from hearing. More than the
+prospect had at first promised or threatened she had
+felt herself going on in a crowd and with a multiplied
+escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke
+Strett as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached
+had in fact proved a rolling snowball, condemned
+from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
+Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion
+to the Empress Catherine's famous progress
+across the steppes of Russia; improvised settlements
+appeared at each turn of the road, villagers waiting
+with addresses drawn up in the language of London.
+Old friends in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's,
+Kate Croy's, her own; when the addresses weren't
+in the language of London they were in the more insistent
+idioms of American centres. The current was
+swollen even by Susie's social connexions; so that
+there were days, at hotels, at Dolomite picnics, on
+lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
+Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by
+the London "success" to which they had opened the
+door.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock
+of Milly's and Mrs. Stringham's compatriots, failed
+but little, really, of the concert-pitch; it had gone
+almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of the last
+great native novel. Those ladies were "so different"&mdash;different,
+observably enough, from the ladies so
+appraising them; it being throughout a case mainly
+of ladies, of a dozen at once sometimes, in Milly's
+apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
+many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed
+not only as perfectly fascinating in themselves, the
+nicest people yet known to the acclaimers, but as obvious
+helping hands, socially speaking, for the eccentric
+young woman, evident initiators and smoothers
+of her path, possible subduers of her eccentricity.
+Short intervals, to her own sense, stood now for great
+differences, and this renewed inhalation of her native
+air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that
+she mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated.
+She moved such a critic, it would appear,
+as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence induced
+by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her
+in the light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed
+for a thorough good time, and yet too rich and too
+befriended&mdash;an intuitive cunning within her managing
+this last&mdash;for a thorough bad one. The compatriots,
+in short, by what she made out, approved
+her friends for their expert wisdom with her; in spite
+of which judicial sagacity it was the compatriots who
+recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
+things in these days that she had never seen before,
+and she couldn't have said why save on a principle
+too terrible to name; whereby she saw that neither
+Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor
+New York what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in
+coquetting with the plan of a series of American visits.
+The plan might have been, humorously, on Mrs.
+Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social
+position&mdash;and it had verily in that direction lights
+that were perhaps but half a century too prompt; at
+all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool controlled
+facility that went so well, as the others said,
+with her particular kind of good looks, the kind that
+led you to expect the person enjoying them <i>would</i>
+dispose of disputations, speculations, aspirations, in
+a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so simplified
+in sense, however, that they sounded, even
+when guiltless, like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't
+that Kate hadn't pretended too that <i>she</i> should like
+to go to America; it was only that with this young
+woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more
+than ever of late, on the theory of intimate confessions,
+private frank ironies that made up for their
+public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they
+wearily put off the mask.
+</p><p>
+These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite
+become the form taken by their moments together,
+moments indeed not increasingly frequent and not
+prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue
+on Milly's side whenever, as she herself expressed it,
+she got out of harness. They flourished their masks,
+the independent pair, as they might have flourished
+Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing
+them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely
+enough, might have been suspected the greatest reality
+in the business. Strangely enough, we say, for the
+volume of effusion in general would have been found
+by either on measurement to be scarce proportional
+to the paraphernalia of relief. It was when they called
+each other's attention to their ceasing to pretend, it
+was then that what they were keeping back was most
+in the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and
+mainly to Kate's advantage: Milly didn't quite see
+what her friend could keep back, was possessed of, in
+fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas it
+was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor
+Milly had a treasure to hide. This was not the treasure
+of a shy, an abject affection&mdash;concealment, on
+that head, belonging to quite another phase of such
+states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively
+bold and hard, a principle that played up like
+a fine steel spring at the lightest pressure of too near
+a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was the truth
+about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus
+was a wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully
+to look at her from the far side of the moat she had
+dug round her tower. Certain aspects of the connexion
+of these young women show for us, such is the
+twilight that gathers about them, in the likeness of
+some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play; we have positively
+the image, in the delicate dusk, of the figures
+so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
+that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed,
+black-robed, hung about with amulets, reminders,
+relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and that of the upright
+restless slow-circling lady of her court who exchanges
+with her, across the black water streaked
+with evening gleams, fitful questions and answers.
+The upright lady, with thick dark braids down her
+back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered
+train, makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and
+the broken talk, brief and sparingly allusive, seems
+more to cover than to free their sense. This is because,
+when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
+they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to
+wait for their words. Such an impression as that was
+in fact grave, and might be tragic; so that, plainly
+enough, systematically at last, they settled to a care
+of what they said.
+</p><p>
+There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular,
+of the probability that if she wasn't so proud
+she might be pitied with more comfort&mdash;more to the
+person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
+sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate
+attitude, that this marvellous mixture of her
+weakness and of her strength, her peril, if such it were,
+and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly interesting.
+Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all,
+very much Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd
+herself indeed, in our Maeterlinck picture, might well
+have hovered in the gloaming by the moat. It may be
+declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
+about her friend, through this time, was deep, her
+compassionate imagination strong; and that these
+things gave her a virtue, a good conscience, a credibility
+for herself, so to speak, that were later to be
+precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence
+the logic of their common duplicity, went unassisted
+through the same ordeal as Milly's other
+hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be explicit
+was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses
+of the felt contrast between her fortune and her fear&mdash;all
+of which would have contradicted her systematic
+bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly
+saw: to recognise was to bring down the avalanche&mdash;the
+avalanche Milly lived so in watch for and that
+might be started by the lightest of breaths; though
+less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than
+that of the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping
+inference of others. With so many suppressions as
+these, therefore, between them, their withdrawal together
+to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted,
+on a nominal motive&mdash;which was decently represented
+by a joy at the drop of chatter. Chatter had in
+truth all along attended their steps, but they took the
+despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when
+face to face, some view or other of something. The
+relief of getting out of harness&mdash;that was the moral
+of their meetings; but the moral of this, in turn, was
+that they couldn't so much as ask each other why
+harness need be worn. Milly wore it as a general
+armour.
+</p><p>
+She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she
+hadn't been for weeks; she was always out of it, that
+is, when alone, and her companions had never yet so
+much as just now affected her as dispersed and suppressed.
+It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
+wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it
+from her without a word and just bravely and brilliantly
+in the name, for instance, of the beautiful day:
+"Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off&mdash;I don't
+care where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown
+them, kill them if you will: so that I may just a little,
+all by myself, see where I am." She was conscious of
+the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
+as the others to him&mdash;Susie who would have drowned
+her very self for her; gave her up to a mercenary
+monster through whom she thus purchased respites.
+Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
+strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of
+hope; yet lawful, all the same&mdash;weren't they?&mdash;those
+experiments tried with the truth that consisted,
+at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was
+now playing with the thought that Eugenio might
+<i>inclusively</i> assist her: he had brought home to her,
+and always by remarks that were really quite soundless,
+the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some
+complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as
+a counter-move to fate. It had passed between them
+as preposterous that with so much money she should
+just stupidly and awkwardly <i>want</i>&mdash;any more want
+a life, a career, a consciousness, than want a house, a
+carriage or a cook. It was as if she had had from him
+a kind of expert professional measure of what he was
+in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
+thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could
+closely compare with a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's
+part that&mdash;at least in Palazzo Leporelli when mornings
+were fine&mdash;showed as almost amateurish. Sir
+Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and
+leave the rest to <i>me</i>"&mdash;which was distinctly what
+Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared indeed to
+speak of purchase and payment, but in reference
+to a different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to
+be named nor reckoned, and such moreover as she
+wasn't sure of having at her command. Eugenio&mdash;this
+was the difference&mdash;could name, could reckon,
+and prices of <i>his</i> kind were things she had never suffered
+to scare her. She had been willing, goodness
+knew, to pay enough for anything, for everything, and
+here was simply a new view of the sufficient quantity.
+She amused herself&mdash;for it came to that, since Eugenio
+was there to sign the receipt&mdash;with possibilities
+of meeting the bill. She was more prepared than
+ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to pay
+too much. What else&mdash;if such were points at which
+your most trusted servant failed&mdash;was the use of
+being, as the dear Susies of earth called you, a princess
+in a palace?
+</p><p>
+She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place,
+noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring
+here and there a curtain or an outer blind, breathed
+into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
+it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was <i>in</i> it,
+as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness
+for it that why shouldn't this, in common
+mercy, be warrant enough? She would never, never
+leave it&mdash;she would engage to that; would ask nothing
+more than to sit tight in it and float on and on.
+The beauty and intensity, the real momentary relief
+of this conceit, reached their climax in the positive
+purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return
+as she had not yet put it; though the design, it must be
+added, dropped a little when, coming back to the great
+saloon from which she had started on her pensive
+progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
+Venice she had been unaware, and who had now&mdash;while
+a servant was following her through empty
+rooms&mdash;been asked, in her absence, to wait. He had
+waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting&mdash;oh unmistakeably;
+never before had he so much struck her
+as the man to do that on occasion with patience, to do
+it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
+though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness.
+The odd thing, as she was afterwards to recall,
+was that her wonder for what had brought him was
+not immediate, but had come at the end of five minutes;
+and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost
+as glad to see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption
+of her solitude, as if he had already been in
+her thought or acting at her suggestion. He was some-how,
+at the best, the end of a respite; one might like
+him very much and yet feel that his presence tempered
+precious solitude more than any other known to
+one: in spite of all of which, as he was neither dear
+Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even,
+for the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him
+did no damage to her sense of the dispersal of her
+friends. She hadn't been so thoroughly alone with
+him since those moments of his showing her the great
+portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly
+made the high-water-mark of her security, the moments
+during which her tears themselves, those she
+had been ashamed of, were the sign of her consciously
+rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue
+gulf of comparative ignorance and reaching her view
+of the troubled sea. His presence now referred itself
+to his presence then, reminding her how kind he had
+been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her, unexpectedly,
+at a time when she could particularly feel
+it, that, for such kindness and for the beauty of what
+they remembered together, she hadn't lost him&mdash;quite
+the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
+receive him there, to see him interested and charmed,
+as well, clearly, as delighted to have found her without
+some other person to spoil it&mdash;these things were
+so pleasant for the first minutes that they might have
+represented on her part some happy foreknowledge.
+She gave an account of her companions while he on
+his side failed to press her about them, even though
+describing his appearance, so unheralded, as the
+result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been
+shivering at Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when
+taken by it; so that, knowing where they all were, he
+had simply caught the first train. He explained how
+he had known where they were; he had heard&mdash;what
+more natural?&mdash;from their friends, Milly's and his.
+He mentioned this betimes, but it was with his mention,
+singularly, that the girl became conscious of her
+inner question about his reason. She noticed his
+plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to
+Kate; but she presently noticed also that it didn't
+affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had written to
+him, Kate apparently&mdash;and this was interesting&mdash;had
+written to him; but their design presumably
+hadn't been that he should come and sit there as if
+rather relieved, so far as <i>they</i> were concerned, at postponements.
+He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!"
+when she sketched their probable morning for him,
+under Eugenio's care and Mrs. Stringham's&mdash;sounding
+it quite as if any suggestion that he should
+overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs
+would leave him temporarily cold. This precisely it
+was that, after a little, operated for Milly as an obscure
+but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
+had known where they all were from the others, but
+it was not for the others that, in his actual dispositions,
+he had come. That, strange to say, was a pity; for,
+stranger still to say, she could have shown him more
+confidence if he himself had had less intention. His
+intention so chilled her, from the moment she found
+herself divining it, that, just for the pleasure of going
+on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of their remembrance
+together of Matcham and the Bronzino,
+the climax of her fortune, she could have fallen to
+pleading with him and to reasoning, to undeceiving
+him in time. There had been, for ten minutes, with
+the directness of her welcome to him and the way this
+clearly pleased him, something of the grace of amends
+made, even though he couldn't know it&mdash;amends
+for her not having been originally sure, for instance at
+that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
+human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's
+added itself to the hour at Matcham, added itself to
+other things, to consolidate, for her present benevolence,
+the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
+that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed,
+as he looked about, on the charm of the place: "What
+a temple to taste and an expression of the pride of life,
+yet, with all that, what a jolly <i>home!</i>"&mdash;so that, for
+his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about
+though she mentioned that she had just been, for her
+own purposes, in a general prowl, taking everything
+in more susceptibly than before. He embraced her
+offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he
+was to find her susceptible.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions,
+that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the
+end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen
+upon them, as before something poignant in which her
+visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but
+the perfection of the charm&mdash;or nothing rather but
+their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it.
+The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its
+beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs,
+that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but
+forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: "Oh
+the impossible romance&mdash;!" The romance for
+her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever,
+through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea
+became an image of never going down, of remaining
+aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would
+hear but the plash of the water against stone. The
+great floor on which they moved was at an altitude,
+and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not to go
+down&mdash;never, never to go down!" she strangely
+sighed to her friend.
+</p><p>
+"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that
+tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought
+of course always to be people at top and bottom, in
+Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
+</p><p>
+She shook her head both lightly and mournfully
+enough at his not understanding. "Not even for
+people in Veronese costumes. I mean that the positive
+beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't
+move in fact," she added&mdash;"now. I've not been out,
+you know. I stay up. That's how you happily found
+me."
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark wondered&mdash;he was, oh yes, adequately
+human. "You don't go about?"
+</p><p>
+She looked over the place, the storey above the
+apartments in which she had received him, the sala
+corresponding to the sala below and fronting the
+great canal with its gothic arches. The casements
+between the arches were open, the ledge of the balcony
+broad, the sweep of the canal, so overhung,
+admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
+white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have
+said what. But there was no mystery after a moment;
+she had never felt so invited to anything as to
+make that, and that only, just where she was, her
+adventure. It would be&mdash;to this it kept coming
+back&mdash;the adventure of not stirring. "I go about
+just here."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked,
+"that you're really not well?"
+</p><p>
+They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with
+the fine old faded palaces opposite and the slow
+Adriatic tide beneath; but after a minute, and before
+she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
+saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms,
+which rested on the coping. She had fallen to her
+knees on the cushion of the window-place, and she
+leaned there, in a long silence, with her forehead down.
+She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
+answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she
+saw her way. She would have made the question
+itself impossible to others&mdash;impossible for example
+to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could
+wonder even on the spot what it was a sign of in her
+feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips it almost
+tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really
+because she cared for him so little; to let herself go
+with him thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow,
+would be the relief&mdash;since it was actually, for
+her nerves, a question of relief&mdash;that would cost her
+least. If he had come to her moreover with the intention
+she believed, or even if this intention had but
+been determined in him by the spell of their situation,
+he mustn't be mistaken about her value&mdash;for what
+value did she now have? It throbbed within her as
+she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
+herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the
+act, to recover what might be possible of it. With
+that there came to her a light: wouldn't her value,
+for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the
+ravage of her disease? <i>She</i> mightn't last, but her
+money would. For a man in whom the vision of her
+money should be intense, in whom it should be most
+of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective
+failure on her part to be long for this world might
+easily count as a positive attraction. Such a man,
+proposing to please, persuade, secure her, appropriate
+her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature
+and the doctors should allow, would make the
+best of her, ill, damaged, disagreeable though she
+might be, for the sake of eventual benefits: she being
+clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do
+the handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing
+husband.
+</p><p>
+She had said to herself betimes, in a general way,
+that whatever habits her youth might form, that of
+seeing an interested suitor in every bush should certainly
+never grow to be one of them&mdash;an attitude
+she had early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She
+had had accordingly in fact as little to do with it
+as possible and she scarce knew why at the present
+moment she should have had to catch herself in the
+act of imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the
+ugly motive, in Lord Mark's cool English eyes; the
+darker side of it at any rate showed, to her imagination,
+but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this,
+simplified itself: there was a beautiful reason&mdash;indeed
+there were two&mdash;why her companion's motive
+shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
+her without a penny she wouldn't marry him
+for the world; the other was that she felt him, after
+all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and humanly,
+concerned for her. They were also two things, his
+wishing to be well, to be very well, with her, and his
+beginning to feel her as threatened, haunted, blighted;
+but they were melting together for him, making him,
+by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
+probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was
+presently what remained with her&mdash;his really doing
+it; and with the natural and proper incident of being
+conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
+had him&mdash;she could ask herself that&mdash;disconcerted
+or disgusted by it? If he could only be touched
+enough to do what she preferred, not to raise, not to
+press any question, he might render her a much better
+service than by merely enabling her to refuse him.
+Again, again it was strange, but he figured to her for
+the moment as the one safe sympathiser. It would
+have made her worse to talk to others, but she wasn't
+afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale.
+She would keep him, that is, her one easy relation&mdash;in
+the sense of easy for himself. Their actual outlook
+had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded them
+within and without did so much toward making appreciative
+stillness as natural as at the opera, that
+she could consider she hadn't made him hang on
+her lips when at last, instead of saying if she were
+well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't
+get tired of it. I never should&mdash;it suits me so. I
+adore the place," she went on, "and I don't want in
+the least to give it up."
+</p><p>
+"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with
+that luck, for one's <i>all</i>&mdash;! Should you positively like
+to live here?"
+</p><p>
+"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an
+instant, "to die here."
+</p><p>
+Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what
+she wanted&mdash;when a person did care: it was the
+pleasant human way, without depths of darkness.
+"Oh it's not good enough for <i>that!</i> That requires
+picking. But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the
+sort of place to see you in; you carry out the note,
+fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and you might do
+much worse&mdash;I mean for your friends&mdash;than show
+yourself here a while, three or four months, every
+year. But it's not my notion for the rest of the time.
+One has quite other uses for you."
+</p><p>
+"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly
+enquired, "to kill me?"
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too
+much for me&mdash;too many. England bristles with questions.
+This is more, as you say there, my form."
+</p><p>
+"Oho, oho!"&mdash;he laughed again as if to humour
+her. "Can't you then buy it&mdash;for a price? Depend
+upon it they'll treat for money. That is for money
+enough."
+</p><p>
+"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they
+won't. I think I shall try. But if I get it I shall cling
+to it." They were talking sincerely. "It will be my
+life&mdash;paid for as that. It will become my great
+gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must
+come and hunt me up."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then you <i>will</i> be alive," said Lord Mark.
+</p><p>
+"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken,
+wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried
+kernel of a nut."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you
+mistrust us, can do better for you than that."
+</p><p>
+"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really
+to have it over?"
+</p><p>
+He let her see now that she worried him, and after
+a look at her, of some duration, without his glasses&mdash;which
+always altered the expression of his eyes&mdash;he
+re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back
+to the view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released
+him. "Do you remember something I said to
+you that day at Matcham&mdash;or at least fully meant
+to?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham.
+It's another life."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly it will be&mdash;I mean the kind of thing:
+what I then wanted it to represent for you. Matcham,
+you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I think I
+tried to rub that into you a little."
+</p><p>
+She met him with the full memory of what he had
+tried&mdash;not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost
+to her. "What I meant is that it seems a hundred
+years ago."
+</p><p>
+"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of
+what makes me remember it," he pursued, "is that
+I was quite aware of what might have been said about
+what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me
+that I should perhaps be able to look after you&mdash;well,
+rather better. Rather better, of course, than
+certain other persons in particular."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely&mdash;than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy,
+even than Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark
+promptly amended.
+</p><p>
+It amused her even with what she had else to think
+of; and she could show him at all events how little,
+in spite of the hundred years, she had lost what he
+alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
+made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to
+start again the tears it had started at the time. "You
+could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood
+you."
+</p><p>
+"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained,
+"to <i>fix</i> your confidence. I mean, you know, in the
+right place."
+</p><p>
+"Well, Lord Mark, you did&mdash;it's just exactly
+now, my confidence, where you put it then. The only
+difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now to have
+no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do
+seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would
+undermine it a little."
+</p><p>
+He took no more notice of these last words than if
+she hadn't said them, only watching her at present
+as with a gradual new light. "Are you <i>really</i> in any
+trouble?"
+</p><p>
+To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making
+out his light was a little a light for herself. "Don't
+say, don't try to say, anything that's impossible.
+There are much better things you can do."
+</p><p>
+He looked straight at it and then straight over it.
+"It's too monstrous that one can't ask you as a friend
+what one wants so to know."
+</p><p>
+"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as
+by a sudden turn, with a slight hardness. "Do you
+want to know if I'm badly ill?"
+</p><p>
+The sound of it in truth, though from no raising
+of her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror,
+but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and
+flushed&mdash;clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his
+attitude together and spoke even with unwonted
+vivacity. "Do you imagine I can see you suffer and
+not say a word?"
+</p><p>
+"You won't see me suffer&mdash;don't be afraid. I
+shan't be a public nuisance. That's why I should
+have liked <i>this:</i> it's so beautiful in itself and yet it's
+out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
+anything," she added; and then as if to make with
+decision an end: "And you <i>don't!</i> No, not even you."
+He faced her through it with the remains of his expression,
+and she saw him as clearly&mdash;for <i>him</i>&mdash;bewildered;
+which made her wish to be sure not to
+have been unkind. She would be kind once for all;
+that would be the end. "I'm very badly ill."
+</p><p>
+"And you don't do anything?"
+</p><p>
+"I do everything. Everything's <i>this</i>," she smiled.
+"I'm doing it now. One can't do more than live."
+</p><p>
+"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that
+what you do? Why haven't you advice?"
+</p><p>
+He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if
+there were fifty things it didn't give her, so that he
+suggested with urgency the most absent. But she
+met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice
+in the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon
+it in receiving you, in talking with you thus. One
+can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
+</p><p>
+"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's immense for <i>me</i>." She finally spoke
+as if for amusement; now that she had uttered her
+truth, that he had learnt it from herself as no one
+had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up.
+There she was; but it was as if she would never speak
+again. "I shan't," she added, "have missed everything."
+</p><p>
+"Why should you have missed <i>anything?</i>" She
+felt, as he sounded this, to what, within the minute,
+he had made up his mind. "You're the person in
+the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom
+one would call it in fact most impossible; for whom
+'missing' at all will surely require an extraordinary
+amount of misplaced good will. Since you believe
+in advice, for God's sake take <i>mine</i>. I know what
+you want."
+</p><p>
+Oh she knew he would know it. But she had
+brought it on herself&mdash;or almost. Yet she spoke with
+kindness. "I think I want not to be too much worried."
+</p><p>
+"You want to be adored." It came at last straight.
+"Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do
+it. It <i>is</i> so"&mdash;he firmly kept it up. "You're not
+loved enough."
+</p><p>
+"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
+</p><p>
+"Why to get the full good of it."
+</p><p>
+Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see
+what you mean. That full good of it which consists
+in finding one's self forced to love in return." She
+had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is
+that I might find myself forced to love <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh 'forced'&mdash;!" He was so fine and so expert,
+so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a
+type with which the preaching of passion somehow so
+ill consorted&mdash;he was so much all these things that
+he had absolutely to take account of them himself.
+And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully.
+Milly liked him again, liked him for such shades as
+that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling
+it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among
+those minor charms of existence that she gasped at
+moments to remember she must give up. "Is it inconceivable
+to you that you might try?"
+</p><p>
+"To be so favourably affected by you&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark
+repeated.
+</p><p>
+Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your
+trying?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared.
+The prompt neat accent, however, his manner of
+disposing of her question, failed of real expression,
+as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
+almost comically saw&mdash;a failure pointed
+moreover by the laugh into which Milly was immediately
+startled. As a suggestion to her of a healing
+and uplifting passion it <i>was</i> in truth deficient; it
+wouldn't do as the communication of a force that
+should sweep them both away. And the beauty of
+him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
+of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could
+thereby show but the better as fitting into the pleasant
+commerce of prosperity. The way she let him
+see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him
+out, of itself, from services of danger, a thing that
+made a discrimination against him never yet made&mdash;made
+at least to any consciousness of his own. Born
+to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first encounter
+with a judgement formed in the sinister light
+of tragedy. The gathering dusk of <i>her</i> personal world
+presented itself to him, in her eyes, as an element in
+which it was vain for him to pretend he could find
+himself at home, since it was charged with depressions
+and with dooms, with the chill of the losing game.
+Almost without her needing to speak, and simply by
+the fact that there could be, in such a case, no decent
+substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from
+her that practically he was afraid&mdash;whether afraid to
+protest falsely enough, or only afraid of what might be
+eventually disagreeable in a compromised alliance,
+being a minor question. She believed she made out
+besides, wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected
+to have to protest about anything beyond his
+natural convenience&mdash;more, in fine, than his disposition
+and habits, his education as well, his personal
+<i>moyens</i>, in short, permitted. His predicament
+was therefore one he couldn't like, and also one she
+willingly would have spared him hadn't he brought
+it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could
+enjoy thus having it from her that he wasn't good
+for what she would have called her reality. It wouldn't
+have taken much more to enable her positively to
+make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting&mdash;had
+his innermost feeling spoken&mdash;at the propriety
+rather, in his interest, of some cutting down,
+some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would meet
+that halfway, but the real must also meet <i>him</i>. Milly's
+sense of it for herself, which was so conspicuously,
+so financially supported, couldn't, or wouldn't, so
+accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly
+showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a
+blow. It had marked the one minute during which he
+could again be touching to her. By the time he had
+tried once more, after all, to insist, he had quite ceased
+to be so.
+</p><p>
+By this time she had turned from their window to
+make a diversion, had walked him through other
+rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of the
+place, going even so far for that purpose as to point
+afresh her independent moral, to repeat that if one
+only had such a house for one's own and loved it and
+cherished it enough, it would pay one back in kind,
+would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for
+the quarter of an hour the perch she held out to him&mdash;grasped
+it with one hand, that is, while she felt him
+attached to his own clue with the other; he was by
+no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all
+justice, as not to be able to behave more or less as if
+nothing had happened. It was one of his merits, to
+which she did justice too, that both his native and his
+acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
+assumption that nothing&mdash;nothing to make a deadly
+difference for him&mdash;ever <i>could</i> happen. It was, socially,
+a working view like another, and it saw them
+easily enough through the greater part of the rest of
+their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the
+limit of his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting,
+when all was said, reappeared for her&mdash;breaking out
+moreover, with an effect of strangeness, in another
+quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of health.
+He might for that matter have been seeing what he
+could do in the way of making it a grievance that she
+should snub him for a charity, on his own part, exquisitely
+roused. "It's true, you know, all the same,
+and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one
+up." He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how
+little he cared. "Everybody knows affection often
+makes things out when indifference doesn't notice.
+And that's why I know that <i>I</i> notice."
+</p><p>
+"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled.
+"I thought rather that affection was supposed to be
+blind."
+</p><p>
+"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark
+promptly returned.
+</p><p>
+"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely
+domestic complications, which I'm ashamed
+to have given you a glimpse of&mdash;are they beauties?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, for those who care for you&mdash;as every one
+does. Everything about you is a beauty. Besides
+which I don't believe," he declared, "in the seriousness
+of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should
+have <i>any</i> trouble about which something can't be
+done. If you can't get the right thing, who can, in all
+the world, I should like to know? You're the first
+young woman of your time. I mean what I say."
+He looked, to do him justice, quite as if he did; not
+ardent, but clear&mdash;simply so competent, in such a
+position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
+the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a
+warrant. "We're all in love with you. I'll put it that
+way, dropping any claim of my own, if you can bear
+it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
+simply to torment us&mdash;you were born to make us
+happy. Therefore you must listen to us."
+</p><p>
+She shook her head with her slowness, but this
+time with all her mildness. "No, I mustn't listen
+to you&mdash;that's just what I mustn't do. The reason
+is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
+to you as you will, since you give that lovely
+account of yourselves. I give you in return the
+fullest possible belief of what it would be&mdash;" And
+she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give&mdash;there
+you are; stick to me as close as you like and see
+if I don't. Only I can't listen or receive or accept&mdash;I
+can't <i>agree</i>. I can't make a bargain. I can't
+really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've
+wanted to say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
+</p><p>
+He let her question fall&mdash;though clearly, it might
+have seemed, because, for reasons or for none, there
+was so much that <i>was</i> spoiled. "You want somebody
+of your own." He came back, whether in good
+faith or in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her
+headshake. He kept it up as if his faith were of
+the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
+</p><p>
+She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been
+at this juncture on the point of saying something
+emphatic and vulgar&mdash;"Well, I don't at all events
+want <i>you!</i>" What somehow happened, nevertheless,
+the pity of it being greater than the irritation&mdash;the
+sadness, to her vivid sense, of his being so painfully
+astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
+nothing to nourish him&mdash;was that his error amounted
+to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted
+with quite another sphere of usefulness
+for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
+convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped
+him off with her first impression of his purpose?
+She could do so now only by the allusion she had been
+wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
+you're doing very right?&mdash;and as a thing quite apart,
+I mean, from my listening to you. That's not right
+either&mdash;except that I'm <i>not</i> listening. You oughtn't
+to have come to Venice to see <i>me</i>&mdash;and in fact you've
+not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had.
+You've much older friends than I, and ever so much
+better. Really, if you've come at all, you can only
+have come&mdash;properly, and if I may say so honourably&mdash;for
+the best friend, as I believe her to be, that
+you have in the world."
+</p><p>
+When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough,
+as if he had been more or less expecting it. Still, he
+looked at her very hard, and they had a moment of
+this during which neither pronounced a name, each
+apparently determined that the other should. It was
+Milly's fine coercion, in the event, that was the
+stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark asked.
+</p><p>
+It might have been difficult to make out that she
+smiled. "Mrs. Lowder." He did make out something,
+and then fairly coloured for its attestation of
+his comparative simplicity. "I call <i>her</i> on the whole
+the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
+</p><p>
+Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do
+you want me to marry Mrs. Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+At which it seemed to her that it was he who was
+almost vulgar! But she wouldn't in any way have
+that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
+isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world.
+There's no cold world for you at all, I think," she
+went on; "nothing but a very warm and watchful
+and expectant world that's waiting for you at any
+moment you choose to take it up."
+</p><p>
+He never budged, but they were standing on the
+polished concrete and he had within a few minutes
+possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you want me
+to marry Kate Croy?"
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Lowder wants it&mdash;I do no wrong, I think,
+in saying that; and she understands moreover that
+you know she does."
+</p><p>
+Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it;
+and it wasn't obscure to her, on her side, that it was
+a comfort to deal with a gentleman. "It's ever so
+kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But
+what's the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
+</p><p>
+Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point
+out. "Because she's the handsomest and cleverest
+and most charming creature I ever saw, and because
+if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact
+I do as it is." It was a luxury of response.
+</p><p>
+"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her.
+But that can't further the case of <i>all.</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If
+the case of one's bad, the case of another's good.
+I don't see what you have to fear from any one else,"
+she said, "save through your being foolish, this way,
+about <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+So she said, but she was aware the next moment
+of what he was making of what she didn't see. "Is
+it your idea&mdash;since we're talking of these things in
+these ways&mdash;that the young lady you describe in
+such superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person.
+But don't be humble." She was almost gay.
+</p><p>
+It was this apparently, at last, that was too much
+for him. "But don't you really <i>know?</i>"
+</p><p>
+As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence
+she could pretend to, it made her of course
+wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that a particular person's
+very much in love with her."
+</p><p>
+"Then you must know by the same token that she's
+very much in love with a particular person."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I beg your pardon!"&mdash;and Milly quite
+flushed at having so crude a blunder imputed to her.
+"You're wholly mistaken."
+</p><p>
+"It's not true?"
+</p><p>
+"It's not true."
+</p><p>
+His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very
+sure?"
+</p><p>
+"As sure as one can be"&mdash;and Milly's manner
+could match it&mdash;"when one has every assurance.
+I speak on the best authority."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
+</p><p>
+"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he
+laughed, "that everything about her's so good."
+</p><p>
+"Good for you"&mdash;she was perfectly clear. "For
+you," she went on, "let her authority be the best.
+She doesn't believe what you mention, and you must
+know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can
+take it from her. <i>I</i> take it&mdash;" But Milly, with the
+positive tremor of her emphasis, pulled up.
+</p><p>
+"You take it from Kate?"
+</p><p>
+"From Kate herself."
+</p><p>
+"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
+</p><p>
+"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she
+went on. "She has given me her word for it."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added:
+"And what do you call her word?"
+</p><p>
+It made Milly, on her side, stare&mdash;though perhaps
+partly but with the instinct of gaining time for the
+consciousness that she was already a little further
+"in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark,
+what should <i>you</i> call her word?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her.
+You apparently have."
+</p><p>
+Well, it threw her on her defence&mdash;a defence that
+she felt, however, especially as of Kate. "We're very
+intimate," she said in a moment; "so that, without
+prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
+things."
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You
+mean then she made you of her own movement the
+declaration you quote?"
+</p><p>
+Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather
+than help in her sense of the way their eyes now met&mdash;met
+as for their each seeing in the other more than
+either said. What she most felt that she herself saw
+was the strange disposition on her companion's part
+to disparage Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned
+to "stand up" for that.
+</p><p>
+"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her
+having no private interest&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
+</p><p>
+Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise
+her; but she met it again for Kate. "She left me in no
+doubt whatever of her being free."
+</p><p>
+At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued
+to smile. "And thereby in no doubt of <i>your</i>
+being too?" It was as if as soon as he had said it,
+however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
+couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him
+she had instantly signified that. He at any rate gave
+her glare no time to act further; he fell back on the
+spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
+rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world,
+dear lady, should she be swearing to you?"
+</p><p>
+She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to
+herself; which disconcerted her when he might now
+so gracefully have used it for the aspersed Kate.
+Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
+part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you,
+we're such tremendous friends."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked
+as if that might have stood rather for an absence of
+such rigours. He was going, however, as if he had in
+a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
+Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to
+leave-taking, that she had given rather more than she
+intended or than she should be able, when once more
+getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
+Strange enough in fact that he had had from her,
+about herself&mdash;and, under the searching spell of the
+place, infinitely straight&mdash;what no one else had had:
+neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher,
+nor Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a
+minute, in particular, she was aware, lose her presence
+of mind, and she now wished he would take himself
+off, so that she might either recover it or bear the
+loss better in solitude. If he paused, however, she
+almost at the same time saw, it was because of his
+watching the approach, from the end of the sala, of
+one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were
+appointed for the party with the attendance of the
+others, always, as the most decorative, most sashed
+and starched, remained at the palace on the theory
+that she might whimsically want him&mdash;which she
+never, in her caged freedom, had yet done. Brown
+Pasquale, slipping in white shoes over the marble and
+suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
+could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too
+noiseless almost for her nerves, or simply a barefooted
+seaman on the deck of a ship&mdash;Pasquale
+offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
+held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card.
+Lord Mark&mdash;and as if also for admiration of him&mdash;delayed
+his departure to let her receive it; on which
+she read it with the instant effect of another blow to
+her presence of mind. This precarious quantity was
+indeed now so gone that even for dealing with Pasquale
+she had to do her best to conceal its disappearance.
+The effort was made, none the less, by the time
+she had asked if the gentleman were below and had
+taken in the fact that he had come up. He had followed
+the gondolier and was waiting at the top of the
+staircase.
+</p><p>
+"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added
+for her companion, while Pasquale went off: "Mr.
+Merton Densher."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark&mdash;in a manner that, making
+it resound through the great cool hall, might have
+carried it even to Densher's ear as a judgement of his
+identity heard and noted once before
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK EIGHTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his
+hotel&mdash;and all the more promptly that he had had
+occasion of old to make the same discrimination. The
+establishment, choked at that season with the polyglot
+herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German,
+mainly American, mainly English, it appeared as the
+corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded
+loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
+but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a
+dialect, he knew; yet it was pure Attic beside some of
+the dialects at the bustling inn. It made, "abroad,"
+both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
+at almost any point how he had been through every thing
+before. He had been three or four times, in Venice,
+during other visits, through this pleasant irritation of
+paddling away&mdash;away from the concert of false
+notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable
+American families and overfed German porters.
+He had in each case made terms for a lodging more
+private and not more costly, and he recalled with tenderness
+these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows
+of which he should easily know again in passing
+on canal or through campo. The shabbiest now failed
+of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the end
+of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a
+small independent <i>quartiere</i>, far down the Grand
+Canal, which he had once occupied for a month with
+a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also with
+a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian
+mysteries. The humour of those days came back to
+him for an hour, and what further befell in this interval,
+to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto in
+sight of the recognised house, he made out on the
+green shutters of his old, of his young windows the
+strips of white pasted paper that figure in Venice as an
+invitation to tenants. This was in the course of his
+very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions
+to which he responded with force. He had been almost
+without cessation, since his arrival, at Palazzo
+Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad weather
+on the second day had kept the whole party continuously
+at home. The episode had passed for him like
+a series of hours in a museum, though without the
+fatigue of that; and it had also resembled something
+that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a
+name for. He might have been looking for the name
+while he gave himself up, subsequently, to the ramble&mdash;he
+saw that even after years he couldn't lose his
+way&mdash;crowned with his stare across the water at the
+little white papers.
+</p><p>
+He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and
+he had lunched there, at an early luncheon, that morning.
+He had then been out with the three ladies, the
+three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
+and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient
+Venetian spell, until Aunt Maud had directed him to
+leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of two circumstances
+connected with this disposition of his
+person he was even now not unmindful; the first being
+that the lady of Lancaster Gate had addressed him
+with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
+sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but
+who might have been taken&mdash;yes, Susan Shepherd
+quite equally with Kate&mdash;for inscrutable parties to
+her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget
+was that he had, before the two others, as it struck
+him&mdash;that was to say especially before Kate&mdash;done
+exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself up without
+a protest and retraced his way to the palace.
+Present with him still was the question of whether he
+looked a fool for it, of whether the awkwardness he
+felt as the gondola rocked with the business of his
+leaving it&mdash;they could but make, in submission, for a
+landing-place that was none of the best&mdash;had furnished
+his friends with such entertainment as was to
+cause them, behind his back, to exchange intelligent
+smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes
+later alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned
+to tea. The strange part of this was that it had
+been very easy, extraordinarily easy. He knew it for
+strange only when he was away from her, because
+when he was away from her he was in contact with
+particular things that made it so. At the time, in her
+presence, it was as simple as sitting with his sister
+might have been, and not, if the point were urged,
+very much more thrilling. He continued to see her as
+he had first seen her&mdash;that remained ineffaceably
+behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd, his own
+Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess,
+as an angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she
+hadn't as yet complications to any point of discomfort:
+the princess, the angel, the star, were muffled
+over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little American
+girl who had been kind to him in New York and
+to whom certainly&mdash;though without making too
+much of it for either of them&mdash;he was perfectly willing
+to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming in
+on purpose, but there was nothing in that&mdash;from the
+moment she was always at home&mdash;that they couldn't
+easily keep up. The only note the least bit high that
+had even yet sounded between them was this admission
+on her part that she found it best to remain
+within. She wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet,
+for she insisted that her palace&mdash;with all its romance
+and art and history&mdash;had set up round her a whirlwind
+of suggestion that never dropped for an hour.
+It wasn't therefore, within such walls, confinement,
+it was the freedom of all the centuries: in respect to
+which Densher granted good-humouredly that they
+were then blown together, she and he, as much as she
+liked, through space.
+</p><p>
+Kate had found on the present occasion a moment
+to say to him that he suggested a clever cousin calling
+on a cousin afflicted, and bored for his pains; and
+though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so
+far see it as an impression he might make that he
+wondered if the same image wouldn't have occurred
+to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again the difference
+came up&mdash;the oddity, as he then instantly felt
+it, of his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because
+it was all doing what Kate had conceived for him; it
+wasn't in the least doing&mdash;and that had been his
+notion of his life&mdash;anything he himself had conceived.
+The difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp,
+sore, was the irritant under which he had quitted the
+palace and under which he was to make the best of
+the business of again dining there. He said to himself
+that he must make the best of everything; that was in
+his mind, at the traghetto, even while, with his preoccupation
+about changing quarters, he studied,
+across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had
+done for the past, would it do for the present? would
+it play in any manner into the general necessity of
+which he was conscious? That necessity of making
+the best was the instinct&mdash;as he indeed himself knew&mdash;of
+a man somehow aware that if he let go at one
+place he should let go everywhere. If he took off his
+hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
+the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall
+away in a minute and admit the light. It was really a
+matter of nerves; it was exactly because he was nervous
+that he <i>could</i> go straight; yet if that condition
+should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking
+in short on a high ridge, steep down on either side,
+where the proprieties&mdash;once he could face at all remaining
+there&mdash;reduced themselves to his keeping
+his head. It was Kate who had so perched him, and
+there came up for him at moments, as he found himself
+planting one foot exactly before another, a sensible
+sharpness of irony as to her management of him.
+It wasn't that she had put him in danger&mdash;to be in
+real danger with her would have had another quality.
+There glowed for him in fact a kind of rage at what
+he wasn't having; an exasperation, a resentment, begotten
+truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
+to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated
+state. It was beautifully done of her, but
+what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually
+bent to her will? His idea from the first,
+from the very first of his knowing her, had been to be,
+as the French called it, <i>bon prince</i> with her, mindful
+of the good humour and generosity, the contempt, in
+the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
+savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally
+afraid. There were things enough, goodness knew&mdash;for
+it was the moral of his plight&mdash;that he couldn't
+afford; but what had had a charm for him if not
+the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in
+another way? of not at all events reading the romance
+of his existence in a cheap edition. All he had originally
+felt in her came back to him, was indeed actually
+as present as ever&mdash;how he had admired and
+envied what he called to himself her pure talent for
+life, as distinguished from his own, a poor weak thing
+of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only it
+irritated him the more that this was exactly what was
+now, ever so characteristically, standing out in her.
+</p><p>
+It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily,
+that he was just where he was and that he was above
+all just <i>how</i> he was. The proof of a decent reaction
+in him against so much passivity was, with no great
+richness, that he at least knew&mdash;knew, that is, how
+he was, and how little he liked it as a thing accepted
+in mere helplessness. He was, for the moment, wistful&mdash;that
+above all described it; that was so large a part
+of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in,
+kept him, on his traghetto, positively throbbing with
+his question. His question connected itself, even while
+he stood, with his special smothered soreness, his sense
+almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame were
+less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions
+about him, regard it as serious. It was born, for that
+matter, partly of the conditions, those conditions that
+Kate had so almost insolently braved, had been willing,
+without a pang, to see him ridiculously&mdash;ridiculously
+so far as just complacently&mdash;exposed to. How
+little it <i>could</i> be complacently he was to feel with the
+last thoroughness before he had moved from his point
+of vantage. His question, as we have called it, was the
+interesting question of whether he had really no will
+left. How could he know&mdash;that was the point&mdash;without
+putting the matter to the test? It had been
+right to be <i>bon prince,</i> and the joy, something of the
+pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even
+now compatible with the impulse to look into their
+account; but he held his breath a little as it came
+home to him with supreme sharpness that, whereas
+he had done absolutely everything that Kate had
+wanted, she had done nothing whatever that he had.
+So it was in fine that his idea of the test by which he
+must try that possibility kept referring itself, in the
+warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern night&mdash;"conditions"
+these, such as we just spoke of&mdash;to
+the glimmer, more and more ghostly as the light failed,
+of the little white papers on his old green shutters.
+By the time he looked at his watch he had been for a
+quarter of an hour at this post of observation and reflexion;
+but by the time he walked away again he had
+found his answer to the idea that had grown so importunate.
+Since a proof of his will was wanted it was
+indeed very exactly in wait for him&mdash;it lurked there
+on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little
+pier had from time to time accosted him; but it was
+a part of the play of his nervousness to turn his back
+on that facility. He would go over, but he walked,
+very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the
+Rialto. The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the
+ancient padrona was there with her smile all a radiance
+but her recognition all a fable; the ancient rickety
+objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in their
+decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were
+tenderly veracious; so that before he took his way again
+he had arranged to come in on the morrow.
+</p><p>
+He was amusing about it that evening at dinner&mdash;in
+spite of an odd first impulse, which at the palace
+quite melted away, to treat it merely as matter for his
+own satisfaction. This need, this propriety, he had
+taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly
+perceiving, in the course of talk, that the incident
+would minister to innocent gaiety. Such was quite its
+effect, with the aid of his picture&mdash;an evocation of the
+quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
+in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess
+that her own high chambers, though they were a thousand
+grand things, weren't really this; made it in fact
+with such success that she presently declared it his
+plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She
+had expressed as yet&mdash;he could feel it as felt among
+them all&mdash;no such clear wish to go anywhere, not even
+to make an effort for a parish feast, or an autumn
+sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or
+Gianbellini. It was constantly Densher's view that,
+as between himself and Kate, things were understood
+without saying, so that he could catch in her, as she
+but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it,
+the whole soft breath of consciousness meeting and
+promoting consciousness. This view was so far justified
+to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her company
+was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her
+doing nothing to show it. It fell in so perfectly with
+what she had desired and foretold that she was&mdash;and
+this was what most struck him&mdash;sufficiently gratified
+and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality
+of his response, from his tone and his very look, which
+for an instant instinctively sought her own, that he
+had answered inevitably, almost shamelessly, in a mere
+time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her failure
+of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage
+he had been planning for&mdash;that is at least if she too
+were not darkly dishonest. She might, he was not unaware,
+have made out, from some deep part of her,
+the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
+announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable
+of guessing and yet of simultaneously hiding her
+guess. It wound him up a turn or two further, none
+the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision by
+which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever
+apprehension of his motive in shifting his abode might
+have brushed her with its wings, she at all events certainly
+didn't guess that he was giving their friend a hollow
+promise. That was what she had herself imposed
+on him; there had been in the prospect from the first
+a definite particular point at which hollowness, to call
+it by its least compromising name, would have to begin.
+Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
+Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms
+for, he had not recovered them to receive Milly
+Theale: which made no more difference in his expression
+of happy readiness than if he had been&mdash;just
+what he was trying not to be&mdash;fully hardened
+and fully base. So rapid in fact was the rhythm of his
+inward drama that the quick vision of impossibility
+produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
+appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively
+scaring him. It gave him a measure of the intensity,
+the reality of his now mature motive. It
+prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these
+things, but it made them as vivid as if they already
+flushed with success. It was before the flush of success
+that his heart beat almost to dread. The dread was
+but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only
+that was in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly
+should, in this projection of necessities, strike him as
+of the last incongruity, quite as a hateful idea, and
+above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
+game&mdash;the adoption of such a view might of course
+have an identity with one of those numerous ways of
+being a fool that seemed so to abound for him. It
+would remain none the less the way to which he should
+be in advance most reconciled. His mature motive,
+as to which he allowed himself no grain of illusion,
+had thus in an hour taken imaginative possession of
+the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated
+there, already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence,
+for Milly's beauty, no matter how short a time,
+to be housed with. There were things she would
+never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air; but
+this made no difference in the fact that her brushing
+against them would do nobody any good. The discrimination
+and the scruple were for <i>him</i>. So he felt
+all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
+admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however&mdash;when
+hadn't it to be his last word?&mdash;Kate
+was always sublime.
+</p><p>
+That came up in all connexions during the rest of
+these first days; came up in especial under pressure
+of the fact that each time our plighted pair snatched,
+in its passage, at the good fortune of half an hour together,
+they were doomed&mdash;though Densher felt it as
+all by <i>his</i> act&mdash;to spend a part of the rare occasion in
+wonder at their luck and in study of its queer character.
+This was the case after he might be supposed to
+have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
+the girl&mdash;ready always, as we say, with the last word&mdash;had
+given him the benefit of her righting of every
+wrong appearance, a support familiar to him now in
+reference to other phases. It was still the case after he
+possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
+insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the
+crisis, what idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined
+it. Such as the idea was&mdash;and that it suited
+Kate's own book she openly professed&mdash;he had only
+to see how things were turning out to feel it strikingly
+justified. Densher's reply to all this vividness was that
+of course Aunt Maud's intervention hadn't been occult,
+even for <i>his</i> vividness, from the moment she had
+written him, with characteristic concentration, that if
+he should see his way to come to Venice for a fortnight
+she should engage he would find it no blunder. It took
+Aunt Maud really to do such things in such ways; just
+as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such
+others as he must now strike them all&mdash;didn't he?&mdash;as
+committed to. Mrs. Lowder's admonition had been
+of course a direct reference to what she had said to him
+at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night
+Milly had failed them through illness; only it had at
+least matched that remarkable outbreak in respect to
+the quantity of good nature it attributed to him. The
+young man's discussions of his situation&mdash;which
+were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud
+herself&mdash;suffered a little, it may be divined, by the
+sense that he couldn't put everything off, as he privately
+expressed it, on other people. His ears, in solitude,
+were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder
+had simply tested him, seen him as he was and
+made out what could be done with him. She had had
+but to whistle for him and he had come. If she had
+taken for granted his good nature she was as justified
+as Kate declared. This awkwardness of his conscience,
+both in respect to his general plasticity, the
+fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits, to be a
+mode of life like another&mdash;certainly better than some,
+and particularly in respect to such confusion as might
+reign about what he had really come for&mdash;this inward
+ache was not wholly dispelled by the style,
+charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even
+the high wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him
+right with himself when there was something quite
+distinct from these things that kept him wrong.
+</p><p>
+In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile,
+for one thing, the interest of seeing&mdash;and quite
+for the first time in his life&mdash;whether, on a given occasion,
+that might be quite so necessary to happiness as
+was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment
+never doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an
+adventure&mdash;he who had never thought himself cut
+out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able
+at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below
+it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of
+the few late strolls he was finding time to take through
+dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty <i>campi</i>, overhung
+with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
+at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep
+on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded
+dancer in a banquet-hall deserted&mdash;during
+these interludes he entertained cold views, even to the
+point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest
+follies are the best, of thinking of immediate departure
+as not only possible but as indicated. He had however
+only to cross again the threshold of Palazzo Leporelli
+to see all the elements of the business compose,
+as painters called it, differently. It began to strike
+him then that departure wouldn't curtail, but would
+signally coarsen his folly, and that above all, as he
+hadn't really "begun" anything, had only submitted,
+consented, but too generously indulged and condoned
+the beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself
+with superstitious rigour. The single thing that
+was clear in complications was that, whatever happened,
+one was to behave as a gentleman&mdash;to which
+was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining
+truth that complications might sometimes have their
+tedium beguiled by a study of the question of how a
+gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten to
+add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest
+worry. Three women were looking to him at once,
+and, though such a predicament could never be, from
+the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet had,
+thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The
+law was not to be a brute&mdash;in return for amiabilities.
+He hadn't come all the way out from England to be a
+brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
+to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate
+in Venice, to be a brute. He hadn't treated Mrs.
+Lowder as if in responding to her suggestion he had
+understood her&mdash;he hadn't done that either to be a
+brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such
+an anti-climax was the prompt and inevitable, the
+achieved surrender&mdash;<i>as</i> a gentleman, oh that indubitably!&mdash;to
+the unexpected impression made by
+poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand
+old palace and the dispenser of an hospitality more
+irresistible, thanks to all the conditions, than any ever
+known to him.
+</p><p>
+This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority,
+a felicity&mdash;he scarce knew by what strange
+name to call it&mdash;for which he said to himself that
+he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome,
+her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her
+disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments
+to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole
+setting and by the perception at the same time, on
+the observer's part, that this element gained from
+her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as
+it gave&mdash;her whole attitude had, to his imagination,
+meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
+dropping and quavering forth again, like vague
+faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned
+melancholy music. It was positively well for him, he
+had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it off
+on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously
+wouldn't, that&mdash;well, that he had been
+rather taken in by not having known in advance!
+There had been now five days of it all without his
+risking even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought
+to have known and of what in particular therefore
+had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that really,
+when it came to any free handling and naming of
+things, they were living together, the five of them,
+in an air in which an ugly effect of "blurting out"
+might easily be produced. He came back with his
+friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
+propinquity, which had a double virtue in that
+favouring air. He breathed on it as if he could
+scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite
+of this privilege, without his quite committing himself,
+for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's
+high style and state as would have corresponded with
+the amount of recognition it had produced in him.
+Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
+which had fairly become a habit, that he had
+been the first to know her. This was what they had all
+insisted on, in her absence, that day at Mrs. Lowder's;
+and this was in especial what had made him feel its
+influence on his immediately paying her a second
+visit. Its influence had been all there, been in the
+high-hung, rumbling carriage with them, from the
+moment she took him to drive, covering them in together
+as if it had been a rug of softest silk. It had
+worked as a clear connexion with something lodged
+in the past, something already their own. He had
+more than once recalled how he had said to himself
+even at that moment, at some point in the drive, that
+he was not <i>there</i>, not just as he was in so doing it,
+through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
+Milly's own, and through himself and <i>his</i> own, unmistakeably&mdash;as
+well as through the little facts,
+whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New
+York.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+There was at last, with everything that made for it,
+an occasion when he got from Kate, on what she now
+spoke of as his eternal refrain, an answer of which
+he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
+His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the
+riddle of Mrs. Lowder's view of her profit&mdash;a view
+so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them
+to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the
+chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony
+that smote him rather straight, whether he felt their
+opportunities as anything so grand. He looked at her
+deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note; it
+was the least he could let her off with for having made
+him visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the
+sharpness dropped out of her tone, which became sweet
+and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she expressively
+echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
+very much out of our meetings?"
+</p><p>
+"On the contrary&mdash;they're starvation diet. All
+I mean is&mdash;and it's all I've meant from the day I
+came&mdash;that we at least get more than Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand
+what Aunt Maud gets."
+</p><p>
+"Exactly so&mdash;and it's what I don't understand
+that keeps me so fascinated with the question. <i>She</i>
+gives me no light; she's prodigious. She takes everything
+as of a natural&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate
+I shall be making my reflexions about you. There's
+every appearance for her," Kate went on, "that what
+she had made her mind up to as possible is possible;
+that what she had thought more likely than not to
+happen is happening. The very essence of her, as
+you surely by this time have made out for yourself,
+is that when she adopts a view she&mdash;well, to her
+own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes
+with her view any other, any opposite view, and
+those, not less, who represent that. I've often thought
+success comes to her"&mdash;Kate continued to study the
+phenomenon&mdash;"by the spirit in her that dares and
+defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has
+seen it so again and again, in the face of everything,
+become the right one."
+</p><p>
+Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the
+largest response. "Ah my dear child, if you can explain
+I of course needn't not 'understand.' I'm condemned
+to that," he on his side presently explained,
+"only when understanding fails." He took a moment;
+then he pursued: "Does she think she terrorises
+<i>us?</i>" To which he added while, without immediate
+speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
+believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed
+about me?" He knew now that he was probing the
+girl deep&mdash;something told him so; but that was a
+reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that
+you dislike me?"
+</p><p>
+To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong.
+"You could yourself easily put it there!"
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "By telling her so?"
+</p><p>
+"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity;
+"I don't ask that of you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask,
+you know, so little&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+There was a full irony in this, on his own part,
+that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. "I'm
+perfectly justified in what I've asked," she quietly
+returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their
+eyes again intimately met, and the effect was to make
+her proceed. "You're not a bit unhappy."
+</p><p>
+"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't practically show&mdash;which is enough
+for Aunt Maud. You're wonderful, you're beautiful,"
+Kate said; "and if you really want to know
+whether I believe you're doing it you may take from
+me perfectly that I see it coming." With which, by
+a quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she
+asked him the hour.
+</p><p>
+"Oh only twelve-ten"&mdash;he had looked at his
+watch. "We've taken but thirteen minutes; we've
+time yet."
+</p><p>
+"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
+</p><p>
+Densher, from where they had been standing,
+measured the long reach of the Square. "They're
+still in their shop. They're safe for half an hour."
+</p><p>
+"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+This colloquy had taken place in the middle of
+Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon,
+a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity,
+favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
+middle, but at the point where our pair had paused
+by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like
+church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but
+a little way behind them, and they had in front the
+vast empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at
+that hour movement and traffic were mostly confined.
+Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the
+visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except
+for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the
+crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear
+and they could see their companions hadn't yet been,
+and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
+by the lace-shop, in one of the <i>loggie</i>, where, shortly
+before, they had left them for a look-in&mdash;the expression
+was artfully Densher's&mdash;at Saint Mark's.
+Their morning had happened to take such a turn as
+brought this chance to the surface; yet his allusion,
+just made to Kate, hadn't been an overstatement of
+their general opportunity. The worst that could be
+said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
+in presence&mdash;in presence of every one; every
+one consisting at this juncture, in a peopled world,
+of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly. But the
+proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could
+become special was furnished precisely by this view
+of the compatibility of their comfort with a certain
+amount of lingering. The others had assented to
+their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the
+least the others could do. What had really helped
+them this morning was the fact that, on his turning
+up, as he always called it, at the palace, Milly had
+not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom
+and use had hitherto seemed fairly established;
+on his coming round, day after day&mdash;eight days had
+been now so conveniently marked&mdash;their friends,
+Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him
+to sit with her till luncheon. Such was the perfect
+operation of the scheme on which he had been, as
+he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly
+there was that amount of justification for Kate's
+vision of success. He <i>had</i>, for Mrs. Lowder&mdash;he
+couldn't help it while sitting there&mdash;the air, which
+was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
+sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their
+young hostess each morning as little as she had failed
+him; it was only to-day that she hadn't been well
+enough to see him.
+</p><p>
+That had made a mark, all round; the mark was
+in the way in which, gathered in the room of state,
+with the place, from the right time, all bright and
+cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
+they&mdash;the rest of them&mdash;simply looked at each
+other. It was lurid&mdash;lurid, in all probability, for
+each of them privately&mdash;that they had uttered no
+common regrets. It was strange for our young man
+above all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to <i>that</i>
+degree, the hush of gravity, of apprehension, of significance
+of some sort, should be the most the case&mdash;that
+of the guests&mdash;could permit itself. The hush,
+for that matter, continued after the party of four had
+gone down to the gondola and taken their places in it.
+Milly had sent them word that she hoped they would
+go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had produced
+a second remarkable look, a look as of their
+knowing, one quite as well as the other, what such
+a message meant as provision for the alternative beguilement
+of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
+his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take
+it as pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had
+helped the affair out, Mrs. Stringham who, when it
+came to that, knew their friend better than any of
+them. She knew her so well that she knew herself
+as acting in exquisite compliance with conditions
+comparatively obscure, approximately awful to them,
+by not thinking it necessary to stay at home. She had
+corrected that element of the perfunctory which was
+the slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she
+had invented a preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself;
+she had remembered the fond dreams of the visitation
+of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
+away by accidents, and it had come up as well for
+her that Kate had, the day before, spoken of the
+part played by fatality in her own failure of real
+acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
+sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention
+had by this time a corner of his mind all to itself;
+something that had begun for them at Lancaster
+Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape;
+her action, ineffably discreet, had at all events a way
+of affecting him as for the most part subtly, even
+when not superficially, in his own interest. They
+were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there
+were too many persons, at least three, and too many
+things, between them; but meanwhile something was
+preparing that would draw them closer. He scarce
+knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some
+hour when it would be a service to do so, that she had
+all the while understood him. He even had a presentiment
+of a juncture at which the understanding
+of every one else would fail and this deep little person's
+alone survive.
+</p><p>
+Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as
+we may say, that hung about our young friends;
+these had been the small accidents and quiet forces
+to which they owed the advantage we have seen them
+in some sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to
+deepen for them as they stayed their course again;
+the splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all
+the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any
+equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness
+from earshot, with solitude and security.
+It was as if, being in possession, they could say what
+they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence of
+that, each had an apprehension of what the other
+wanted to say. It was most of all for them, moreover,
+as if this very quantity, seated on their lips in
+the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
+ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart
+of each a fear. There might have been a betrayal of
+that in the way Densher broke the silence resting
+on her last words. "What did you mean just now
+that I can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For
+myself, stupidly, if you will, I don't see, from the
+moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
+lying."
+</p><p>
+Well, she could tell him. "You can say something
+both handsome and sincere to her about Milly&mdash;whom
+you honestly like so much. That wouldn't
+be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an
+effect. You don't, you know, say much about her."
+</p><p>
+And Kate put before him the fruit of observation.
+"You don't, you know, speak of her at all."
+</p><p>
+"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told
+you so?" Then as the girl, for answer, only seemed
+to bethink herself, "You must have extraordinary
+conversations!" he exclaimed.
+</p><p>
+Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary
+conversations."
+</p><p>
+His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed
+to hear more about them; but there was something
+in her own, apparently, that defeated the
+opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a
+different matter, which had been in his mind a week,
+yet in respect to which he had had no chance so good
+as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such wonderful
+things pass between you, what she makes
+of the incident, the other day, of Lord Mark's so very
+superficial visit?&mdash;his having spent here, as I gather,
+but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
+friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off
+by the same night's train, for seeing any one else.
+What can she make of his not having waited to see
+<i>you</i>, or to see herself&mdash;with all he owes her?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He
+came to make Milly his offer of marriage&mdash;he came
+for nothing but that. As Milly wholly declined it his
+business was for the time at an end. He couldn't
+quite on the spot turn round to make up to <i>us</i>."
+</p><p>
+Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of
+taste on such an adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't
+see it. But Densher was lost in another thought. "Do
+you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
+leaving her, that was what had been taking place between
+them?"
+</p><p>
+"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
+</p><p>
+"What sort of a blundering weathercock then <i>is</i>
+he?" the young man went on in his wonder.
+</p><p>
+"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled.
+"Do you pretend that Milly didn't tell you?"
+</p><p>
+"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
+</p><p>
+Kate continued to smile. "You <i>are</i> in love with
+her, you know."
+</p><p>
+He gave her another long look. "Why, since she
+has refused him, should my opinion of Lord Mark
+show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think well of
+him for such treatment of the other persons I've
+mentioned, and I feel I don't understand from you
+why Mrs. Lowder should."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't&mdash;but she doesn't care," Kate explained.
+"You know perfectly the terms on which
+lots of London people live together even when they're
+supposed to live very well. He's not committed
+to us&mdash;he was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied
+man," she asked, "always have his try?"
+</p><p>
+"And come back afterwards, with confidence in
+a welcome, to the victim of his inconstancy?"
+</p><p>
+Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of
+as a victim. "Oh but he has <i>had</i> his try at <i>me</i>. So
+it's all right."
+</p><p>
+"Through your also having, you mean, refused
+him?"
+</p><p>
+She balanced an instant during which Densher
+might have just wondered if pure historic truth were
+to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped on the right
+side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
+discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on&mdash;now as
+lucid as ever&mdash;"considers, no doubt, that she has
+a pledge from him in respect to me; a pledge that
+would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
+As the case stands that makes no difference."
+</p><p>
+Densher laughed out. "It isn't <i>his</i> merit that he
+has failed."
+</p><p>
+"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark.
+He's just what he was, and what he knew he was. It's
+not for me either to reflect on him after I've so treated
+him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated
+him beautifully."
+</p><p>
+"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be
+jealous." But before he could take it up she had more
+to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle you that Milly's
+so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
+else can displease her. What does she see but
+that Milly herself recognises her situation with you
+as too precious to be spoiled? Such a recognition as
+that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
+your own recognition. Out of which she therefore
+gets it that the more you have for Milly the less you
+have for me."
+</p><p>
+There were moments again&mdash;we know that from
+the first they had been numerous&mdash;when he felt with
+a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way
+of putting things. There was something in it that
+bent him at once to conviction and to reaction. And
+this effect, however it be named, now broke into his
+tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have for
+you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it.
+"Luckily for us we may really consider she doesn't.
+So successful have we been."
+</p><p>
+"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what
+you give me, and I suppose that, to be consistent&mdash;to
+stand on my feet where I do stand at all&mdash;I ought
+to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me
+seems to me, more than anything else, the larger and
+larger size of my job. It seems to me more than anything
+else what you expect of me. It never seems to
+me somehow what I may expect of <i>you</i>. There's so
+much you <i>don't</i> give me."
+</p><p>
+She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I
+don't&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me
+none."
+</p><p>
+"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment
+ventured to ask.
+</p><p>
+"Your doing something for me."
+</p><p>
+She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing
+<i>this</i> for you? Do you call this nothing?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing at all."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
+</p><p>
+They had strolled slowly further, but he was
+brought up short. "I thought you exactly contend
+that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing!"
+</p><p>
+It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful
+idea that he had seen her at a loss. He judged
+the next instant moreover that she didn't like it&mdash;either
+the being so or the being seen, for she soon
+spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded;
+an appearance that produced in himself, he no less
+quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence. "What
+then do you wish me to risk?"
+</p><p>
+The appeal from danger touched him, but all to
+make him, as he would have said, worse. "What
+I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this rate
+that I <i>am</i>?" Oh she understood him, for all she
+might so bravely disguise it, and that made him feel
+straighter than if she hadn't. Deep, always, was
+his sense of life with her&mdash;deep as it had been from
+the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky
+London of two winters ago they had originally exchanged.
+He had never taken her for unguarded,
+ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
+intenser faith between them this was because he believed
+it could reach her and she could meet it. "I
+can go on perhaps," he said, "with help. But I can't
+go on without."
+</p><p>
+She looked away from him now, and it showed
+him how she understood. "We ought to be there&mdash;I
+mean when they come out."
+</p><p>
+"They <i>won't</i> come out&mdash;not yet. And I don't
+care if they do." To which he straightway added, as
+if to deal with the charge of selfishness that his
+words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling
+her to make: "Why not have done with it all
+and face the music as we are?" It broke from him
+in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only <i>take</i>
+me!"
+</p><p>
+It brought her eyes round to him again, and he
+could see how, after all, somewhere deep within, she
+felt his rebellion more sweet than bitter. Its effect
+on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her an
+instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less
+pulled herself together to reply. "Do you want to
+kill her?"
+</p><p>
+He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill,
+you mean, Aunt Maud?"
+</p><p>
+"You know whom I mean. We've told too many
+lies."
+</p><p>
+Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have
+told none!"
+</p><p>
+He had brought it out with a sharpness that did
+him good, but he had naturally, none the less, to take
+the look it made her give him. "Thank you very
+much."
+</p><p>
+Her expression, however, failed to check the words
+that had already risen to his lips. "Rather than lay
+myself open to the least appearance of it I'll go this
+very night."
+</p><p>
+"Then go," said Kate Croy.
+</p><p>
+He knew after a little, while they walked on again
+together, that what was in the air for him, and disconcertingly,
+was not the violence, but much rather
+the cold quietness, of the way this had come from
+her. They walked on together, and it was for a minute
+as if their difference had become of a sudden, in
+all truth, a split&mdash;as if the basis of his departure had
+been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
+recklessly moreover, since they now might
+easily, from under the arcades, be observed, he passed
+his hand into her arm with a force that produced for
+them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any
+your idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
+</p><p>
+"Come to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Come to me."
+</p><p>
+"How? Where?"
+</p><p>
+She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his
+uncertainty, a wonder in her being so equal to him.
+"To my rooms, which are perfectly possible, and in
+taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must
+have felt, in view. We can arrange it&mdash;with two
+grains of courage. People in our case always arrange
+it." She listened as for the good information, and
+there was support for him&mdash;since it was a question
+of his going step by step&mdash;in the way she took no
+refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth
+not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the
+absence of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason
+to his sense of possibilities. For the knowledge of
+what she was he had absolutely to <i>see</i> her now, incapable
+of refuge, stand there for him in all the light of
+the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her
+mere listening in fact made him even understand
+himself as he hadn't yet done. Idea for idea, his
+own was thus already, and in the germ, beautiful.
+"There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm
+not a fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know
+what it means. <i>With</i> you I can do it&mdash;I'll go as far
+as you demand or as you will yourself. Without you&mdash;I'll
+be hanged! And I must be sure."
+</p><p>
+She listened so well that she was really listening
+after he had ceased to speak. He had kept his grasp
+of her, drawing her close, and though they had again,
+for the time, stopped walking, his talk&mdash;for others
+at a distance&mdash;might have been, in the matchless
+place, that of any impressed tourist to any slightly
+more detached companion. On possessing himself
+of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
+afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of
+which his eyes moved while she twiddled her parasol.
+She now, however, made a motion that confronted them
+finally with the opposite end. Then only she spoke&mdash;"Please
+take your hand out of my arm." He understood
+at once: she had made out in the shade of
+the gallery the issue of the others from their place of
+purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
+was all right. The others had seen them as well and
+waited for them, complacent enough, under one
+of the arches. They themselves too&mdash;he argued
+that Kate would argue&mdash;looked perfectly ready,
+decently patient, properly accommodating. They
+themselves suggested nothing worse&mdash;always by
+Kate's system&mdash;than a pair of the children of a supercivilised
+age making the best of an awkwardness.
+They didn't nevertheless hurry&mdash;that would overdo
+it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
+felt, ever so distinctly&mdash;it was with this he faced
+Mrs. Lowder&mdash;that he was already in a sense possessed
+of what he wanted. There was more to come&mdash;everything;
+he had by no means, with his companion,
+had it all out. Yet what he was possessed of
+was real&mdash;the fact that she hadn't thrown over his
+lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
+this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled
+was in itself of the nature of bliss. The danger
+had dropped&mdash;it was behind him there in the great
+sunny space. So far she was good for what he
+wanted.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put
+to her that evening, and with further ground for it,
+the next sharpest question that had been on his lips
+in the morning&mdash;which his other preoccupation had
+then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity
+was again made, as befell, by his learning from
+Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as usual, with the close
+of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them again
+at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come
+down later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in
+the great saloon, where even more candles than their
+friend's large common allowance&mdash;she grew daily
+more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed
+her about it&mdash;lighted up the pervasive mystery of
+Style. He had thus five minutes with the good lady
+before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared&mdash;minutes
+illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number
+of Milly's candles.
+</p><p>
+"<i>May</i> she come down&mdash;ought she if she isn't
+really up to it?"
+</p><p>
+He had asked that in the wonderment always
+stirred in him by glimpses&mdash;rare as were these&mdash;of
+the inner truth about the girl. There was of course
+a question of health&mdash;it was in the air, it was in the
+ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds
+he heard, it was everywhere. But it was everywhere
+with the effect of a request to him&mdash;to his very delicacy,
+to the common discretion of others as well as
+his own&mdash;that no allusion to it should be made.
+There had practically been none, that morning,
+on her explained non-appearance&mdash;the absence of
+it, as we know, quite monstrous and awkward; and
+this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
+licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held
+them closed; all the more that his doing so performed
+for his own spirit a useful function. If he positively
+wanted not to be brought up with his nose against
+Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his
+conduct was marked by straightness? It was perhaps
+pathetic for her, and for himself was perhaps
+even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
+curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary
+friend. He might have shaken himself at moments
+to try, for a sort of dry decency, to have it; but that
+too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
+was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his
+feelings&mdash;it being so established that he had none
+at all. They were all for Kate, without a feather's
+weight to spare. He was acting for Kate&mdash;not, by
+the deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly
+not interested, for had he been interested
+he would have cared, and had he cared he would have
+wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
+have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity
+that had to represent his dignity and his honour.
+His dignity and his honour, at the same time, let us
+add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling his little
+talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse&mdash;it was as
+if she had wished to give him that; and it was as if,
+for himself, on current terms, he could oblige her by
+accepting it. She not only permitted, she fairly invited
+him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're
+here." It was no answer to his question, but it had
+for the moment to serve. And the rest was fully to
+come.
+</p><p>
+He smiled at her and presently found himself, as
+a kind of consequence of communion with her, talking
+her own language. "It's a very wonderful experience."
+</p><p>
+"Well"&mdash;and her raised face shone up at him&mdash;"that's
+all I want you to feel about it. If I weren't
+afraid," she added, "there are things I should like
+to say to you."
+</p><p>
+"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly
+asked.
+</p><p>
+"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides,
+I don't, you know, seem to have the chance.
+You're always, you know, <i>with</i> her."
+</p><p>
+He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his
+fixed smile; which was the more fixed as he felt in
+these last words an exact description of his course.
+It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
+with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm
+not with her now."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;and I'm so glad, since I get this from it.
+She's ever so much better."
+</p><p>
+"Better? Then she <i>has</i> been worse?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous&mdash;that's
+what she has been. She <i>is</i> marvellous.
+But she's really better."
+</p><p>
+"Oh then if she's really better&mdash;!" But he
+checked himself, wanting only to be easy about it
+and above all not to appear engaged to the point of
+mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him.
+"She's keeping herself. You'll see. You'll not
+really need to miss anything. There's to be a little
+party."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I do see&mdash;by this aggravated grandeur."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it <i>is</i> lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing.
+She's lodged for the first time as she ought, from her
+type, to be; and doing it&mdash;I mean bringing out all
+the glory of the place&mdash;makes her really happy.
+It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be&mdash;with me
+as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put
+into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only
+had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
+should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper,
+the woman in charge here, has a big red
+cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb
+for the evening." These explanations and sundry
+others Mrs. Stringham gave, though not all with the
+result of making him feel that the picture closed him
+in. What part was there for <i>him</i>, with his attitude
+that lacked the highest style, in a composition in
+which everything else would have it? "They won't,
+however, be at dinner, the few people she expects&mdash;they
+come round afterwards from their respective
+hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
+ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or
+two ago. It's for <i>him</i> she has wanted to do something&mdash;to
+let it begin at once. We shall see more
+of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad&mdash;she'll
+be glad too&mdash;that <i>you're</i> to see him." The
+good lady, in connexion with it, was urgent, was
+almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope&mdash;!"
+But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her
+cheer.
+</p><p>
+He considered a little this appearance, while she
+let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than
+she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, that you'll stay on."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he
+seemed to feel, so much that he could scarce tell where
+it ended or began.
+</p><p>
+"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music&mdash;beautiful
+instruments and songs; and not Tasso
+declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has arranged
+it&mdash;or at least I have. That is Eugenio has.
+Besides, you're in the picture."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;I!" said Densher almost with the gravity
+of a real protest.
+</p><p>
+"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses
+the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup.
+What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is that
+you'll be faithful to us&mdash;that you've not come for
+a mere foolish few days."
+</p><p>
+Densher's more private and particular shabby
+realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious,
+at this touch, in the artificial repose he had in his
+anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The
+way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and
+housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed
+working-men, engaged in an unprecedented
+sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
+acquisition! The things they took for granted and the
+general misery of explaining! He couldn't tell them
+how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he
+had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
+for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because
+that would give them a false view of the source
+of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would
+operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to
+that weight as of expected performance which these
+very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and
+more to settle on his heart. He had incurred it, the
+expectation of performance; the thing was done, and
+there was no use talking; again, again the cold breath
+of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
+floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when
+I say I've very tiresome things to consider. Botherations,
+necessities at home. The pinch, the pressure in
+London."
+</p><p>
+But she understood in perfection; she rose to the
+pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been
+her own very element. "Oh the daily task and the
+daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
+knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight
+of the precious deceiving days. Aren't they just what
+I myself have given up? I've given up all to follow
+<i>her</i>. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't you,"
+she asked, "write about Venice?"
+</p><p>
+He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could
+feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly. "Do <i>you</i>
+write about Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"No; but I would&mdash;oh wouldn't I?&mdash;if I hadn't
+so completely given up. She's, you know, my princess,
+and to one's princess&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. There you are!"
+</p><p>
+It pressed on him with this that never had a man
+been in so many places at once. "I quite understand
+that she's yours. Only you see she's not mine." He
+felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he
+had the moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and
+least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a disturbing
+implication. This was part of what he liked
+in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that
+she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him
+to know it. That was in itself a hint of possibilities
+between them, of a relation, beneficent and elastic for
+him, which wouldn't engage him further than he
+could see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt
+how strange it all was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd
+then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only
+wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
+way and from a motive so different, even though
+scarce less deep. Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so
+odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what
+each of the others did; and he was between them all,
+he was in the midst. Such perceptions made occasions&mdash;well,
+occasions for fairly wondering if it
+mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to <i>be</i>
+the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and
+yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine.
+He was glad there was no male witness; it was a
+circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a man to
+see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought
+of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom
+Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce
+with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance,
+just announced to him, required some accounting
+for. He had a vision of great London surgeons&mdash;if
+this one was a surgeon&mdash;as incisive all round; so
+that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
+ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be
+able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to
+he could take that in. It was a train, however, that
+brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
+Mark had caught him twice in the fact&mdash;the fact of
+his absurd posture; and that made a second male.
+But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark.
+</p><p>
+His companion had before this taken him up, and
+in a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of
+Milly's not being his princess. "Of course she's not.
+You must do something first."
+</p><p>
+Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be
+rather <i>she</i> who must?"
+</p><p>
+It had more than he intended the effect of bringing
+her to a stand. "I see. No doubt, if one takes it so."
+Her cheer was for the time in eclipse, and she looked
+over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of
+what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be
+kind."
+</p><p>
+It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course
+she has. No one could be more charming. She has
+treated me as if <i>I</i> were somebody. Call her my hostess
+as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm
+with you altogether. Of course," he added in the right
+spirit for her, "I do see that it's quite court life."
+</p><p>
+She promptly showed how this was almost all she
+wanted of him. "That's all I mean, if you understand
+it of such a court as never was: one of the courts
+of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
+vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
+</p><p>
+"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a
+general thing, you know," he observed, "isn't supposed
+to pay."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
+That's just the beauty here; it's why she's the great
+and only princess. With her, at her court," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
+settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage
+her. "I think you were right just now. One must
+do something first."
+</p><p>
+"Well, you've done something."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I don't see that. I can do more."
+</p><p>
+Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so!
+"You can do everything, you know."
+</p><p>
+"Everything" was rather too much for him to
+take up gravely, and he modestly let it alone, speaking
+the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a different
+but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir
+Luke Strett if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
+</p><p>
+"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs.
+Stringham explained. "He has wanted to come."
+</p><p>
+"Isn't that rather worse then&mdash;if it means he
+mayn't be easy?"
+</p><p>
+"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday.
+She has known that these several weeks." After
+which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can <i>make</i> him
+easy."
+</p><p>
+"<i>I</i> can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the
+circle of petticoats. "What have I to do with it for a
+man like that?"
+</p><p>
+"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's
+like? He's not like any one you've ever seen. He's a
+great beneficent being."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an
+outsider, to meddle."
+</p><p>
+"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged,
+"what you think."
+</p><p>
+"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared.
+It was, as they said, a large order. But he found the
+right note. "It's none of his business."
+</p><p>
+It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the
+right note. She fixed him at least with an expression
+still bright, but searching, that showed almost to excess
+what she saw in it; though what this might be he
+was not to make out till afterwards. "Say <i>that</i> to him
+then. Anything will do for him as a means of getting
+at you."
+</p><p>
+"And why should he get at me?"
+</p><p>
+"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then
+you'll see."
+</p><p>
+All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened
+his sense of immersion in an element rather more
+strangely than agreeably warm&mdash;a sense that was
+moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be
+fed to satiety by several other impressions. Milly
+came down after dinner, half a dozen friends&mdash;objects
+of interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of
+Lancaster Gate&mdash;having by that time arrived; and
+with this call on her attention, the further call of her
+musicians ushered by Eugenio, but personally and
+separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity
+offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came
+last of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the
+spell of a general, a beatific mildness. There was a
+deeper depth of it, doubtless, for some than for others;
+what he in particular knew of it was that he seemed
+to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it
+and it made no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam
+in it, and they were all together, for that matter, like
+fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of the place, the
+beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
+the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in
+themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general
+manner, and made people bland without making
+them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
+had said, staying for the week or two at the inns,
+people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers,
+gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions
+of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly, let
+loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought
+them somehow into relation with something that made
+them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture
+of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
+not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the
+previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by
+"beating down," were at last almost nobly disowned.
+There was perhaps something for him in the accident
+of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she
+hadn't yet had occasion&mdash;circulating with a clearness
+intensified&mdash;to strike him as so happily pervasive.
+She was different, younger, fairer, with the
+colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether
+lucky challenge to attention; yet he was loth
+wholly to explain it by her having quitted this once,
+for some obscure yet doubtless charming reason, her
+almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much
+as the change did for the value of her presence, she
+had never yet, when all was said, made it for <i>him</i>;
+and he was not to fail of the further amusement of
+judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke
+Strett's visit. If he could in this connexion have felt
+jealous of Sir Luke Strett, whose strong face and type,
+less assimilated by the scene perhaps than any others,
+he was anon to study from the other side of the saloon,
+that would doubtless have been most amusing
+of all. But he couldn't be invidious, even to profit by
+so high a tide; he felt himself too much "in" it, as he
+might have said: a moment's reflexion put him more
+in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for
+other cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so
+much as the attenuation of a joke, introduced him to
+English ladies&mdash;that was itself a proof; for nothing
+really of so close a communion had up to this time
+passed between them as the single bright look and the
+three gay words (all ostensibly of the last lightness)
+with which her confessed consciousness brushed by
+him.
+</p><p>
+She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he
+could see, under some supreme idea, an inspiration
+which was half her nerves and half an inevitable harmony;
+but what he especially recognised was the
+character that had already several times broken out
+in her and that she so oddly appeared able, by choice
+or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display.
+She was the American girl as he had originally found
+her&mdash;found her at certain moments, it was true, in
+New York, more than at certain others; she was the
+American girl as, still more than then, he had seen
+her on the day of her meeting him in London and in
+Kate's company. It affected him as a large though
+queer social resource in her&mdash;such as a man, for instance,
+to his diminution, would never in the world
+be able to command; and he wouldn't have known
+whether to see it in an extension or a contraction of
+"personality," taking it as he did most directly for a
+confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it was
+the right thing this evening all round: that came out
+for him in a word from Kate as she approached him to
+wreak on him a second introduction. He had under
+cover of the music melted away from the lady toward
+whom she had first pushed him; and there was something
+in her to affect him as telling evasively a tale of
+their talk in the Piazza. To what did she want to
+coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had done
+to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for
+him that he had done something; not only caused her
+perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her
+unable to get away, by any mere private effort, from
+his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence,
+and near him&mdash;and it had been as unmistakeable
+through dinner&mdash;there was no getting away for her
+at all, there was less of it than ever: so she could only
+either deal with the question straight, either frankly
+yield or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or
+else merely express herself by following up the advantage
+she did possess. It was part of that advantage
+for the hour&mdash;a brief fallacious makeweight to his
+pressure&mdash;that there were plenty of things left in
+which he must feel her will. They only told him,
+these indications, how much she was, in such close
+quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again
+that her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as
+Milly's own, gave him back the sense of his action.
+It had never yet in life been granted him to know,
+almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
+minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest.
+He had lived long enough to have been on occasion
+"liked," but it had never begun to be allowed
+him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter.
+It was a liking greater than Milly's&mdash;or it would be:
+he felt it in him to answer for that. So at all events he
+read the case while he noted that Kate was somehow&mdash;for
+Kate&mdash;wanting in lustre. As a striking young
+presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness
+that Milly diffused she had assimilated all her
+share; she might fairly have been dressed to-night in
+the little black frock, superficially indistinguishable,
+that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he perceived,
+the opposite pole from such an effect as that of
+her wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes&mdash;he
+had never forgotten it&mdash;the day of their younger
+friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She was, in her
+accepted effacement&mdash;it was actually her acceptance
+that made the beauty and repaired the damage&mdash;under
+her aunt's eyes now; but whose eyes were not
+effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the less
+certainly that almost the first thing she said to him
+showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced
+at least self-possessed.
+</p><p>
+"Don't you think her good enough <i>now?</i>"
+Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms,
+she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
+renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members
+of her little orchestra, who had approached her
+with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native
+humours&mdash;things quite in the line of old Venetian
+comedy. The girl's idea of music had been
+happy&mdash;a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic;
+thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general
+habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected
+the good manners of its interpreters, representatives
+though these might be but of the order in which taste
+was natural and melody rank. It was easy at all events
+to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good
+I think her!"
+</p><p>
+"But she's <i>too</i> nice," Kate returned with appreciation.
+"Everything suits her so&mdash;especially her
+pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll trouble
+you really to look at them." Densher, though aware
+he had seen them before, had perhaps not "really"
+looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the
+embodied poetry&mdash;his mind, for Milly's aspects,
+kept coming back to that&mdash;which owed them part
+of its style. Kate's face, as she considered them,
+struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice
+round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front
+of the wearer's breast&mdash;so far down that Milly's
+trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely
+fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably
+to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went
+on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled.
+Yet they suit her down to the ground."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;down to the ground is the word." Densher
+saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps
+still more aware of something intense in his companion's
+feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove;
+this was the figure, though it most applied to her
+spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just
+now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
+under the impression of that element of wealth in her
+which was a power, which was a great power, and
+which was dove-like only so far as one remembered
+that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have
+them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even
+came to him dimly that such wings could in a given
+case&mdash;<i>had</i>, truly, in the case with which he was concerned&mdash;spread
+themselves for protection. Hadn't
+they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach,
+and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan
+Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular, nestling
+under them to a great increase of immediate ease?
+All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of
+which he heard Kate presently going on.
+</p><p>
+"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every
+one."
+</p><p>
+"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly
+returned.
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I see myself!"
+</p><p>
+As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her&mdash;she
+would have been splendid; and with it he felt more
+what she was thinking of. Milly's royal ornament
+had&mdash;under pressure now not wholly occult&mdash;taken
+on the character of a symbol of differences, differences
+of which the vision was actually in Kate's face.
+It might have been in her face too that, well as she
+certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly
+what Merton Densher would never be able to give
+her. Wasn't <i>that</i> the great difference that Milly to-night
+symbolised? She unconsciously represented to
+Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there
+was nobody with whom she had less in common than
+a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable
+to make her on any such lines as that the least little
+present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not
+till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think
+now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham
+had said to him before dinner. He could but come
+back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's
+certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that
+I'm assured she's better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour
+or two since, was in great feather to me about it. She
+evidently believes her better."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if they choose to call it so&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"And what do <i>you</i> call it&mdash;as against them?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm
+not 'against' them!" Kate added as with just a fresh
+breath of impatience for all he had to be taught.
+</p><p>
+"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What
+do you call it to me?"
+</p><p>
+It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's
+worse. But that has nothing to do with it."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
+</p><p>
+But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except
+of course that we're doing our best for her. We're
+making her want to live." And Kate again watched
+her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke
+with a kindness that had the strange property of
+striking him as inconsequent&mdash;so much, and doubtless
+so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication
+of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"It's beautiful indeed."
+</p><p>
+He hated somehow the helplessness of his own
+note; but she had given it no heed. "She's doing
+it for <i>him</i>"&mdash;and she nodded in the direction of
+Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at
+her best. But she can't deceive him."
+</p><p>
+Densher had been looking too; which made him
+say in a moment: "And do you think <i>you</i> can? I
+mean, if he's to be with us here, about your sentiments.
+If Aunt Maud's so thick with him&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his
+side and was visibly doing her best to entertain him,
+though this failed to prevent such a direction of his
+own eyes&mdash;determined, in the way such things happen,
+precisely by the attention of the others&mdash;as
+Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly
+marked. "He's looking at <i>you</i>. He wants to speak
+to you."
+</p><p>
+"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed,
+"advised me he would."
+</p><p>
+"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need,"
+Kate went on in answer to the previous question,
+"to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's necessary, will
+do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he
+can see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so
+well. He has nothing to do with me."
+</p><p>
+"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
+</p><p>
+"For not caring for <i>you?</i> Perfectly. As a brilliant
+young man driven by it into your relation with
+Milly&mdash;as all <i>that</i> I leave you to him."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think
+I can thank you for leaving me to some one easier
+perhaps with me than yourself."
+</p><p>
+She had been looking about again meanwhile, the
+lady having changed her place, for the friend of Mrs.
+Lowder's to whom she had spoken of introducing
+him. "All the more reason why I should commit you
+then to Lady Wells."
+</p><p>
+"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished
+Lady Wells from afar, that she inspired him
+with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at the back
+of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in
+germ, of whether this was the kind of person he should
+be involved with when they were married. It was
+furthermore that the consciousness of something he
+had not got from Kate in the morning, and that
+logically much concerned him, had been made more
+keen by these very moments&mdash;to say nothing of
+the consciousness that, with their general smallness
+of opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant
+hard. If Aunt Maud, over there with Sir Luke,
+noted him as a little "attentive," that might pass for
+a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who
+had to confess to having, not very gracefully, changed
+his mind. Besides, just now, he didn't care for Aunt
+Maud except in so far as he was immediately to
+show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of
+with any finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl
+who's dying? If you're right about that, about the
+state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs. Lowder's
+being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly
+pursued, "can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever,
+the great surgeon won't deceive other people&mdash;not
+those, that is, who are closely concerned. He won't
+at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's
+greatest friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham
+deceives Aunt Maud, who's her own."
+</p><p>
+Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea
+that really was worth his having kept her for. "Why
+will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing your way so
+little."
+</p><p>
+Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had
+now for him its quick, its slightly quaking intensities.
+He had compared her once, we know, to a "new
+book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest
+quality; and his emotion (to justify that) was again
+and again like the thrill of turning the page. "Well,
+you know how deeply I marvel at the way <i>you</i> see
+it!"
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on,
+"that anything in the nature of what you call deception
+on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what you call
+odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
+</p><p>
+"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why
+should she?"
+</p><p>
+"To please you."
+</p><p>
+"And how in the world can it please me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost
+tired of his density. But she looked at him again
+as she spoke. "Well then to please Milly." And before
+he could question: "Don't you feel by this time
+that there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for
+you?"
+</p><p>
+He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply
+it corresponded with the good lady's recent reception
+of him. It was queerer than anything again, the way
+they all came together round him. But that was an
+old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on
+and on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed
+this. "She's ever so kind. Only her view of
+the right thing may not be the same as yours."
+</p><p>
+"How can it be anything different if it's the view
+of serving you?"
+</p><p>
+Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung
+fire. "Oh the difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour,
+even yet quite make out how yours does serve me."
+</p><p>
+"It helps you&mdash;put it then," said Kate very simply&mdash;"to
+serve <i>me</i>. It gains you time."
+</p><p>
+"Time for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more,
+with impatience; then as usual she qualified. "For
+anything that may happen."
+</p><p>
+Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as
+strained. "You're cryptic, love!"
+</p><p>
+It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could
+thus see that, by one of those incalculable motions in
+her without which she wouldn't have been a quarter
+so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some
+source he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a
+trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any
+human creature."
+</p><p>
+Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he
+soon enough felt his reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my
+whole insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble
+away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out again;
+it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or
+two to make. "There <i>need</i> be none whatever between
+us. There need be nothing but our sense of each other."
+</p><p>
+It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry
+while she took up again one of the so numerous links
+in her close chain. "You can tell her anything you
+like, anything whatever."
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Stringham? I <i>have</i> nothing to tell her."
+</p><p>
+"You can tell her about <i>us</i>. I mean," she wonderfully
+pursued, "that you do still like me."
+</p><p>
+It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him.
+"Only not that you still like me."
+</p><p>
+She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain
+she wouldn't repeat it."
+</p><p>
+"I see. To Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to
+any one else." Kate then, he saw, was always seeing
+Milly much more, after all, than he was; and she
+showed it again as she went on. "<i>There</i>, accordingly,
+is your time."
+</p><p>
+She did at last make him think, and it was fairly
+as if light broke, though not quite all at once. "You
+must let me say I <i>do</i> see. Time for something in
+particular that I understand you regard as possible.
+Time too that, I further understand, is time for you as
+well."
+</p><p>
+"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged
+visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him
+as through the air she had painfully made clear. Yet
+she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however,
+I'll do all the work for you. If you want things named
+you must name them."
+</p><p>
+He had quite, within the minute, been turning
+names over; and there was only one, which at last
+stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted.
+"Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
+</p><p>
+It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that
+she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might
+for the grace of silence, for favour to their conditions,
+have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
+bravely moved. "To marry her."
+</p><p>
+"So that when her death has taken place I shall
+in the natural course have money?"
+</p><p>
+It was before him enough now, and he had nothing
+more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably
+cold with the thought that all along&mdash;to
+his stupidity, his timidity&mdash;it had been, it had
+been only, what she meant. Now that he was in possession
+moreover she couldn't forbear, strangely
+enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't pronounced:
+they broke through her controlled and colourless
+voice as if she should be ashamed, to the
+very end, to have flinched. "You'll in the natural
+course have money. We shall in the natural course
+be free."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to
+Lady Wells."
+</p><p>
+He never budged&mdash;there was too much else. "I'm
+to propose it then&mdash;marriage&mdash;on the spot?"
+</p><p>
+There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the
+more simply he spoke the more he seemed ironic.
+But she remained consummately proof. "Oh I can't
+go into that with you, and from the moment you don't
+wash your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask
+me. You must act as you like and as you can."
+</p><p>
+He thought again. "I'm far&mdash;as I sufficiently
+showed you this morning&mdash;from washing my hands
+of you."
+</p><p>
+"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
+</p><p>
+"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll
+come?"
+</p><p>
+But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't
+what she meant. "You'll have a free hand, a clear
+field, a chance&mdash;well, quite ideal."
+</p><p>
+"Your descriptions"&mdash;her "ideal" was such a
+touch!&mdash;"are prodigious. And what I don't make
+out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
+</p><p>
+"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness,
+who can do what I don't like."
+</p><p>
+It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he
+was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a
+note of character that belittled his own incapacity for
+action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the greatness
+of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time
+too, moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew
+what <i>he</i> did. But something else on his lips was uppermost.
+"What I don't make out then is how you can
+even bear it."
+</p><p>
+"Well, when you know me better you'll find out
+how much I can bear." And she went on before he
+could take up, as it were, her too many implications.
+That it was left to him to know her, spiritually, "better"
+after his long sacrifice to knowledge&mdash;this for
+instance was a truth he hadn't been ready to receive
+so full in the face. She had mystified him enough,
+heaven knew, but that was rather by his own generosity
+than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem
+to suggest she might incur at his hands? In spite of
+these questions she was carrying him on. "All you'll
+have to do will be to stay."
+</p><p>
+"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh dear no&mdash;we shall go."
+</p><p>
+"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
+</p><p>
+"In a day or two&mdash;straight home. Aunt Maud
+wishes it now."
+</p><p>
+It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then
+what becomes of Miss Theale?"
+</p><p>
+"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with
+her."
+</p><p>
+He stared. "All alone?"
+</p><p>
+She had a smile that was apparently for his tone.
+"You're old enough&mdash;with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+Nothing might have been so odd for him now,
+could he have measured it, as his being able to feel,
+quite while he drew from her these successive cues,
+that he was essentially "seeing what she would say"&mdash;an
+instinct compatible for him therefore with that
+absence of a need to know her better to which she had
+a moment before done injustice. If it hadn't been
+appearing to him in gleams that she would somewhere
+break down, he probably couldn't have gone on.
+Still, as she wasn't breaking down there was nothing
+for him but to continue. "Is your going Mrs. Lowder's
+idea?"
+</p><p>
+"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what
+it does for us. And I don't," she added, "refer only to
+our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of the general
+propriety of it."
+</p><p>
+"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment.
+"It makes everything fit."
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+The word, for a little, held the air, and he might
+have seemed the while to be looking, by no means
+dimly now, at all it stood for. But he had in fact
+been looking at something else. "You leave her here
+then to die?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay.
+I mean," Kate explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
+</p><p>
+"And that's all that's necessary?"
+</p><p>
+Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we
+long ago agree that what she believes is the principal
+thing for us?"
+</p><p>
+He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from
+long ago. "Oh yes. I can't deny it." Then he added:
+"So that if I stay&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"It won't"&mdash;she was prompt&mdash;"be our fault."
+</p><p>
+"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
+</p><p>
+"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
+</p><p>
+Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared
+to leave him nothing more; and he might in fact well
+have found nothing if he hadn't presently found:
+"But what if she doesn't accept me?"
+</p><p>
+It produced in her a look of weariness that made
+the patience of her tone the next moment touch him.
+"You can but try."
+</p><p>
+"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to
+try a little hard to propose to a dying girl."
+</p><p>
+"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined
+in Kate the flash of <i>justesse</i> he could perhaps
+most, on consideration, have admired, since her retort
+touched the truth. There before him was the fact
+of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion,
+with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression
+to the depths of them, literally now perched
+on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to where
+their friend was again in range, and it made him turn
+his, so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly,
+from the other side, happened at the moment to
+notice them, and she sent across toward them in response
+all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her
+pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth.
+It brought them together again with faces made
+fairly grave by the reality she put into their plan. Kate
+herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
+only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous,
+had broken out afresh and protected more than
+interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was
+under cover.
+</p><p>
+"I might stay, you know, without trying."
+</p><p>
+"Oh to stay <i>is</i> to try."
+</p><p>
+"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of
+it?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't see how you can have the appearance
+more."
+</p><p>
+Densher waited. "You think it then possible she
+may <i>offer</i> marriage?"
+</p><p>
+"I can't think&mdash;if you really want to know&mdash;what
+she may <i>not</i> offer!"
+</p><p>
+"In the manner of princesses, who do such
+things?"
+</p><p>
+"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
+</p><p>
+Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be
+for me then to accept. But that's the way it must
+come."
+</p><p>
+Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently
+said: "You'll, on your honour, stay then?"
+</p><p>
+His answer made her wait, but when it came it was
+distinct. "Without you, you mean?"
+</p><p>
+"Without us."
+</p><p>
+"And you yourselves go at latest&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Not later than Thursday."
+</p><p>
+It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay,
+on my honour, if you'll come to me. On your honour."
+</p><p>
+Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid,
+with a rigour out of which, at a loss, she vaguely cast
+about her. Her rigour was more to him, nevertheless,
+than all her readiness; for her readiness was the woman
+herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap
+and a "dodge." She cast about, however, as happened,
+and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes,
+turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady
+Wells is tired of waiting: she's coming&mdash;see&mdash;to
+<i>us</i>."
+</p><p>
+Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for
+their visitor to cross, and he still had time. "If you
+decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand
+you. I'll do nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute
+to plead.
+</p><p>
+"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
+</p><p>
+He was to have afterwards the sense of her having
+then, as the phrase was&mdash;and for vulgar triumphs
+too&mdash;seen he meant it. She looked again at Lady
+Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back.
+"And if I do understand?"
+</p><p>
+"I'll do everything."
+</p><p>
+She found anew a pretext in her approaching
+friend: he was fairly playing with her pride. He had
+never, he then knew, tasted, in all his relation with
+her, of anything so sharp&mdash;too sharp for mere sweetness&mdash;as
+the vividness with which he saw himself
+master in the conflict. "Well, I understand."
+</p><p>
+"On your honour?"
+</p><p>
+"On my honour."
+</p><p>
+"You'll come?"
+</p><p>
+"I'll come."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK NINTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference,
+which was most to be felt moreover in his faded
+old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of
+his attachment to this scene of contemplation, within
+sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither
+side of that arch of associations and the left going up
+the Canal; he had seen it in a particular light, to
+which, more and more, his mind and his hands adjusted
+it; but the interest the place now wore for him
+had risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the
+spot, completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief
+from which&mdash;if relief was the name&mdash;he could
+find only by getting away and out of reach. What
+had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an
+obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again,
+as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and
+in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant
+and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
+watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to
+be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment
+was scarcely less futile than frivolous. Kate
+had come to him; it was only once&mdash;and this not
+from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities,
+for bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was
+at the last no blinking; yet she had come, that once,
+to stay, as people called it; and what survived of
+her, what reminded and insisted, was something he
+couldn't have banished if he had wished. Luckily he
+didn't wish, even though there might be for a man
+almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified a consequence
+of his act. It had simply <i>worked</i>, his idea, the
+idea he had made her accept; and all erect before him,
+really covering the ground as far as he could see, was
+the fact of the gained success that this represented.
+It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as directly
+applied, as converted from a luminous conception
+into an historic truth. He had known it before but as
+desired and urged, as convincingly insisted on for the
+help it would render; so that at present, <i>with</i> the help
+rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office and to
+set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own.
+He had in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance
+as an inestimable value, and what he must now know
+his case for was that of a possession of the value to the
+full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
+possessed <i>him</i>, kept him thinking of it and waiting on
+it, turning round and round it and making sure of it
+again from this side and that?
+</p><p>
+It played for him&mdash;certainly in this prime afterglow&mdash;the
+part of a treasure kept at home in safety
+and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its
+place when, with each return, he worked his heavy
+old key in the lock. The door had but to open for
+him to be with it again and for it to be all there; so
+intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible
+to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination,
+of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or
+stood, to whatever aspect he gave for the instant the
+advantage, it was in view as nothing of the moment,
+nothing begotten of time or of chance could be, or
+ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has
+risen, the play on the stage is in view, night after night,
+for the fiddlers. He remained thus, in his own theatre,
+in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the
+ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low
+and slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations
+of most importance. No other visitor was to
+come to him; he met, he bumped occasionally, in the
+Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to acquaintance,
+remembered or forgotten, at present mostly
+effusive, sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no
+address and encouraged no approach; he couldn't
+for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a third
+person. Such a person would have interrupted him,
+would have profaned his secret or perhaps have
+guessed it; would at any rate have broken the spell
+of what he conceived himself&mdash;in the absence of
+anything "to show"&mdash;to be inwardly doing. He was
+giving himself up&mdash;that was quite enough&mdash;to the
+general feeling of his renewed engagement to fidelity.
+The force of the engagement, the quantity of the article
+to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract,
+the way, above all, as a service for which the price
+named by him had been magnificently paid, his equivalent
+office was to take effect&mdash;such items might well
+fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
+outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more
+rounded and fastened down over what filled it; which
+is precisely what we have spoken of as, in its degree,
+the oppression of success, the somewhat chilled state&mdash;tending
+to the solitary&mdash;of supreme recognition.
+If it was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by
+the loss of the warmth of the element of mystery.
+The lucid reigned instead of it, and it was into the
+lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
+it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act
+his constant still communion. It wasn't still communion
+she had meant to bequeath him; it was the
+very different business of that kind of fidelity of which
+the other name was careful action.
+</p><p>
+Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful
+action than the immersion he enjoyed at home. The
+actual grand queerness was that to be faithful to Kate
+he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
+straight off her&mdash;he had to let her alone. He had
+to remember it was time to go to the palace&mdash;which
+in truth was a mercy, since the check was not less
+effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
+as yet, was that when he closed the door behind
+him for an absence he always shut her in. Shut
+her out&mdash;it came to that rather, when once he had
+got a little away; and before he reached the palace,
+much more after hearing at his heels the bang of the
+greater <i>portone</i>, he felt free enough not to know his
+position as oppressively false. As Kate was <i>all</i> in his
+poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
+it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out;
+so long as he left it to the mercy of beneficent chance
+it offered him no face and made of him no claim that
+he couldn't meet without aggravation of his inward
+sense. This aggravation had been his original horror;
+yet what&mdash;in Milly's presence, each day&mdash;was
+horror doing with him but virtually letting him off?
+He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end; there was
+time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
+Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he
+liked best, and that kept him for the time more safe.
+What he liked best was, in any case, to know why
+things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
+well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other
+friends. He then fairly perceived that&mdash;even putting
+their purity of motive at its highest&mdash;it was neither
+Kate nor he who made his strange relation to Milly,
+who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent;
+it was neither of them who practically purged it&mdash;if
+practically purged it was. Milly herself did everything&mdash;so
+far at least as he was concerned&mdash;Milly
+herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
+and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps
+still more than anything else, Milly's imagination,
+Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed a little
+aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext
+to ask himself what more he had to do. Something
+incalculable wrought for them&mdash;for him and
+Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
+and doubtless ever so much better than they: which
+wasn't a reason, however&mdash;its being so much better&mdash;for
+them not to profit by it. Not to profit by it, so
+far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to
+go directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at
+present engendered in Densher could have felt no
+greater pang than by his having to go directly against
+Milly.
+</p><p>
+To go <i>with</i> her was the thing, so far as she could
+herself go; which, from the moment her tenure of
+her loved palace stretched on, was possible but by his
+remaining near her. This remaining was of course
+on the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations&mdash;which
+was exactly why Kate had required it;
+it was so marked that on the very evening of the day
+it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not
+to reach out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness,
+for some account of it. It was as if she had wanted
+from him some name that, now they were to be almost
+alone together, they could, for their further ease,
+know it and call it by&mdash;it being, after all, almost
+rudimentary that his presence, of which the absence
+of the others made quite a different thing, couldn't
+but have for himself some definite basis. She only
+wondered about the basis it would have for himself,
+and how he would describe it; that would quite do
+for her&mdash;it even would have done for her, he could
+see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had
+he said he was waiting for money or clothes, for letters
+or for orders from Fleet Street, without which,
+as she might have heard, newspaper men never took
+a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that;
+but he had none the less had there with her, that
+night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving them alone&mdash;Mrs.
+Stringham proved really prodigious&mdash;his acquaintance
+with a shade of awkwardness darker than
+any Milly could know. He had supposed himself
+beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
+pretending, in possession of some tone that would
+serve; but there were three minutes of his feeling incapable
+of promptness quite in the same degree in which
+a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels incapable
+of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly,
+that he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken
+for him&mdash;or rather not so much in some way as in
+one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at
+the last, what she might, in the connexion, have said;
+nothing would have induced him to put such a question
+after she had been to see him: his lips were so
+sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed,
+in respect to any charge upon her freedom. There
+was something he could only therefore read back into
+the probabilities, and when he left the palace an hour
+afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed
+there, in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
+</p><p>
+Just this perception it was, however, that had made
+him for the time ugly to himself in his awkwardness.
+It was horrible, with this creature, to <i>be</i> awkward;
+it was odious to be seeking excuses for the relation
+that involved it. Any relation that involved it was
+by the very fact as much discredited as a dish would
+be at dinner if one had to take medicine as a sauce.
+What Kate would have said in one of the young women's
+last talks was that&mdash;if Milly absolutely must
+have the truth about it&mdash;Mr. Densher was staying
+because she had really seen no way but to require
+it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her&mdash;or
+didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when
+she kept him from following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't
+pretend, in scenes, the renewal of which at this time
+of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub him
+as she might. She did nothing in fact <i>but</i> snub him&mdash;wouldn't
+that have been part of the story?&mdash;only
+Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the sort that had repeatedly
+to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
+token, reasonable enough&mdash;as he now, for that matter,
+well might; he had consented to oblige them,
+aunt and niece, by giving the plainest sign possible
+that he could exist away from London. To exist
+away from London was to exist away from Kate Croy&mdash;which
+was a gain, much appreciated, to the latter's
+comfort. There was a minute, at this hour, out of
+Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of
+Milly's uttering some such allusion to their friend's
+explanation as he must meet with words that wouldn't
+destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything,
+to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
+by a breach of faith still uglier than anything
+else the beauty of their own last passage. He had
+given her his word of honour that if she would come
+to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he
+had done so with a full enough vision of what her
+sense implied. What it implied for one thing was that
+to-night in the great saloon, noble in its half-lighted
+beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
+hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable
+in her mercy&mdash;what it implied was that he should
+lie with his lips. The single thing, of all things, that
+could save him from it would be Milly's letting him
+off after having thus scared him. What made her
+mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more
+than once saved him it was yet apparently without
+knowing how nearly he was lost.
+</p><p>
+These were transcendent motions, not the less
+blest for being obscure; whereby yet once more he
+was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept on his
+feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him
+with Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't
+stand up to lie&mdash;he felt as if he should have to go
+down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking
+a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
+the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but
+he had nothing more to subscribe to, to perjure himself
+about, than the three or four inanities he had,
+on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
+scrambled a little higher than the reference to money
+and clothes, letters and directions from his manager;
+but he brought out the beauty of the chance for him&mdash;there
+before him like a temptress painted by Titian&mdash;to
+do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment
+on the difficulty of writing quietly in London;
+and he was precipitate, almost explosive, on his idea,
+long cherished, of a book.
+</p><p>
+The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your
+book here?"
+</p><p>
+"I hope to begin it."
+</p><p>
+"It's something you haven't begun?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, only just."
+</p><p>
+"And since you came?"
+</p><p>
+She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps
+after all be too easily let off. "I tried to think
+a few days ago that I had broken ground."
+</p><p>
+Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have
+let him in deeper. "I'm afraid we've made an awful
+mess of your time."
+</p><p>
+"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on
+for now is precisely to repair that ravage."
+</p><p>
+"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
+</p><p>
+"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little
+I shall mind anything."
+</p><p>
+"You'll want"&mdash;Milly had thrown herself into it&mdash;"the
+best part of your days."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment: he did what he could to
+wreathe it in smiles. "Oh I shall make shift with
+the worst part. The best will be for <i>you</i>." And he
+wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him
+moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged
+to her by such touches his quest for comfort against
+discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
+also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a
+high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion&mdash;that
+Milly was so interested. She was so interested
+that she presently asked him if he found his rooms
+propitious, while he felt that in just decently answering
+her he put on a brazen mask. He should need
+it quite particularly were she to express again her
+imagination of coming to tea with him&mdash;an extremity
+that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
+on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're
+coming"&mdash;the extremity was but to face that remainder,
+yet it demanded all his tact. Facing their
+visit itself&mdash;to that, no matter what he might have
+to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be
+pushed; and this even though it might be exactly
+such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
+top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder
+freely enough, deep within, if Kate's view of that especial
+propriety had not been modified by a subsequent
+occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
+likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference
+for tact. It pleased him to think of "tact"
+as his present prop in doubt; that glossed his predicament
+over, for it was of application among the sensitive
+and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long
+as it would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly,
+to help him not to sweeten Milly's hopes. He didn't
+want to be rude to them, but he still less wanted them
+to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
+casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to
+meet her, he put his foot, with unhappy effect, just
+in the wrong place. "Will it be safe for you to break
+into your custom of not leaving the house?"
+</p><p>
+"'Safe'&mdash;?" She had for twenty seconds an
+exquisite pale glare. Oh but he didn't need it, by
+that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
+soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what,
+so unforgettably, she had asked him in London not
+to do; he had touched, all alone with her here, the
+supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him.
+He had not, since the occasion in London, touched it
+again till now; but he saw himself freshly warned that
+it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he
+knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
+life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as
+dying, yet he couldn't pretend he thought of her as
+indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile too she had
+narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
+bad?"
+</p><p>
+He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the
+time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair
+he had found what he wanted. "I'll believe whatever
+you tell me."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, I'm splendid."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
+</p><p>
+"I mean I'm capable of life."
+</p><p>
+"I've never doubted it."
+</p><p>
+"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity
+of it.
+</p><p>
+"Well, that I know I <i>can</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity
+about it.
+</p><p>
+"Whatever I do. If I want to."
+</p><p>
+"If you want to do it?"
+</p><p>
+"If I want to live. I <i>can</i>," Milly repeated.
+</p><p>
+He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he
+hesitated with all the pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
+</p><p>
+"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight
+of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
+</p><p>
+He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You
+simply must!"
+</p><p>
+It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well
+then, if you say it, why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
+</p><p>
+"Will it help you to live?"
+</p><p>
+"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very
+little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I
+shan't want to miss it&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes?"&mdash;she had dropped again.
+</p><p>
+"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
+</p><p>
+It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at
+this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly
+broke, giving way to something inordinately strange,
+something of a nature to become clear to him only
+when he had left her. "You can come," he said,
+"when you like."
+</p><p>
+What had taken place for him, however&mdash;the
+drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense
+of her own reality&mdash;apparently showed in his face or
+his manner, and even so vividly that she could take
+it for something else. "I see how you feel&mdash;that
+I'm an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have
+any such upset, you'll go. So it's no matter."
+</p><p>
+"No matter? Oh!"&mdash;he quite protested now.
+</p><p>
+"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you
+not to go."
+</p><p>
+It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham.
+Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. "I
+won't go."
+</p><p>
+"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
+</p><p>
+"You mean you won't come to me?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;never now. It's over. But it's all right.
+I mean, apart from that," she went on, "that I won't
+do anything I oughtn't or that I'm not forced to."
+</p><p>
+"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his
+hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her
+encouragement. "You're the least coercible of
+creatures."
+</p><p>
+"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
+</p><p>
+"The freest person probably now in the world.
+You've got everything."
+</p><p>
+"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
+</p><p>
+On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in.
+"No I know you don't complain."
+</p><p>
+As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the
+pity in it. His telling her she had "everything" was
+extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so
+tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
+gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he
+might as well have praised her outright for looking
+death in the face. This was the way she just looked
+<i>him</i> again, and it was of no attenuation that she took
+him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit&mdash;when
+one sees one's way."
+</p><p>
+"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
+</p><p>
+"I mean to keeping what one has."
+</p><p>
+"Oh that's success. If what one has is good,"
+Densher said at random, "it's enough to try for."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more."
+To which then she added with a change: "And now
+about your book."
+</p><p>
+"My book&mdash;?" He had got in a moment so far
+from it.
+</p><p>
+"The one you're now to understand that nothing
+will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling."
+</p><p>
+He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not
+doing a book."
+</p><p>
+"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder.
+"You're not writing?"
+</p><p>
+He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my
+honour, what I'm doing."
+</p><p>
+It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in
+another way, he was afraid of what she would see in
+it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again
+his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
+didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words
+for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, <i>might</i>
+complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him
+some such patience as he should be perhaps able to
+arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly,
+however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might
+venture; and he could see her make out in a moment
+that she had a sort of test.
+</p><p>
+"Then if it's not for your book&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"What <i>am</i> I staying for?"
+</p><p>
+"I mean with your London work&mdash;with all you
+have to do. Isn't it rather empty for you?"
+</p><p>
+"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had
+held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered
+if this were the way she would naturally begin it.
+It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt,
+at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have
+been in the vagueness of his reply. "Oh well&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for
+herself before he could protest. "You stay because
+you've got to."
+</p><p>
+He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to."
+And he couldn't have said when he had uttered it if it
+were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner,
+away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet
+Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement
+of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would
+have told her of&mdash;the permission from Lancaster
+Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with
+either niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All
+this Densher read in the girl's sense of the spirit of
+his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and
+he had to think of something to correct that. What
+he thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough,
+whatever may be one's other complications, to stay
+after all for <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh you must judge."
+</p><p>
+He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and
+was also at last too restless. The speech in question
+at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that was the very
+tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
+kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession
+of a motive. He was staying so little "for" Milly
+that he was staying positively against her. He didn't,
+none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
+didn't care. The only thing he could say might make
+it either better or worse. "Well then, so long as I
+don't go, you must think of me all <i>as</i> judging!"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He didn't go home, on leaving her&mdash;he didn't want
+to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and
+his <i>campi</i> with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively
+sequestered café where he had already more
+than once found refreshment and comparative repose,
+together with solutions that consisted mainly and
+pleasantly of further indecisions. It was a literal
+fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
+leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against
+a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than
+the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded
+by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
+because, before getting to his feet again, there was a
+step he had seen his way to; it was simply because
+the acceptance of his position took sharper effect
+from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
+When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned
+about to Milly on the question of the impossibility
+so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under
+her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
+seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all,
+impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry;
+when people were at <i>her</i> pass everything was allowed.
+And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
+a spring, just completely his own&mdash;to the extent, as
+he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he
+should do or shouldn't would have close reference
+to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands&mdash;and
+ought never to have reference to anything else.
+It was on the cards for him that he might kill her&mdash;that
+was the way he read the cards as he sat in his
+customary corner. The fear in this thought made him
+let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless,
+for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption
+and smoked more cigarettes than he had
+ever done in the time. What had come out for him
+had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror;
+so that action itself, of any sort, the right as well as the
+wrong&mdash;if the difference even survived&mdash;had heard
+in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep from that
+moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his
+vigil lasted of several different ways for his doing so,
+and the hour might have served him as a lesson in
+going on tiptoe.
+</p><p>
+What he finally took home, when he ventured to
+leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might
+on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction
+was represented for him by the idea of his
+really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything
+whatever. Nothing so "brought," he easily argued,
+but <i>must</i> be in one way or another a catastrophe.
+He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
+be better, was mixed up in <i>him</i>, so that a single false
+motion might either way snap the coil. They helped
+him, it was true, these considerations, to a degree of
+eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted
+to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after
+all with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was
+only not to budge without the girl's leave&mdash;not,
+oddly enough at the last, to move without it, whether
+further or nearer, any more than without Kate's.
+It was to this his wisdom reduced itself&mdash;to the need
+again simply to be kind. That was the same as being still&mdash;as
+studying to create the minimum of vibration.
+He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room
+on the wall of which something precious was too precariously
+hung. A false step would bring it down,
+and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
+when he walked away again that even Fleet Street
+wouldn't at this juncture successfully touch him. His
+manager might wire that he was wanted, but he could
+easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the idle
+life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice
+was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that
+Milly in a manner supported him. The greatest of
+his expenses really was to walk to the palace to dinner.
+He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and
+he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath
+and his hand. He should be able to be still enough
+through everything.
+</p><p>
+He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after
+a little of not having failed. There had to be a delicate
+art in it, for he wasn't trying&mdash;quite the contrary&mdash;to
+be either distant or dull. That would not have
+been being "nice," which in its own form was the real
+law. That too might just have produced the vibration
+he desired to avert; so that he best kept everything in
+place by not hesitating or fearing, as it were, to let
+himself go&mdash;go in the direction, that is to say, of
+staying. It depended on where he went; which was
+what he meant by taking care. When one went on
+tiptoe one could turn off for retreat without betraying
+the manoeuvre. Perfect tact&mdash;the necessity for which
+he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised&mdash;was
+to keep all intercourse in the key of the absolutely
+settled. It was settled thus for instance that
+they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
+well that her being the American girl was, just in
+time and for the relation they found themselves concerned
+in, a boon inappreciable. If, at least, as the
+days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
+of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she
+didn't diviningly and responsively desire and labour
+to record herself as possessed of it, this wouldn't
+have been for want of Densher's keeping her, with
+his idea, well up to it&mdash;wouldn't have been in fine
+for want of his encouragement and reminder. He
+didn't perhaps in so many words speak to her of the
+quantity itself as of the thing she was least to intermit;
+but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself
+was an impersonal way, and this held it there before
+her&mdash;since he was careful also to talk pleasantly.
+It was at once their idea, when all was said, and the
+most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
+elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything;
+and yet, not stretched, it kept down, remained normal,
+remained properly within bounds. And he <i>had</i> meanwhile,
+thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted,
+the sense, for the girl's part of the business,
+of the queerest conscious compliance, of her doing
+very much what he wanted, even though without her
+quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once in saying:
+"Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's
+a kind of facilitation to you that we don't quite measure:
+I think one would have to be English to measure
+it!"&mdash;and that too, strangely enough, without
+prejudice to her good nature. She might have been
+conceived as doing&mdash;that is of being&mdash;what he
+liked in order perhaps only to judge where it would
+take them. They really as it went on <i>saw</i> each other
+at the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune
+with his conception, and he knowing she thus knew
+it. Add that he again knew she knew, and yet that
+nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression
+of the line they found most completely workable. The
+strangest fact of all for us must be that the success
+he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured
+to his gratitude as the something above and beyond
+him, above and beyond Kate, that made for daily
+decency. There would scarce have been felicity&mdash;certainly
+too little of the right lubricant&mdash;had not
+the national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably
+than entirely, in Milly's chords. It made up
+her unity and was the one thing he could unlimitedly
+take for granted.
+</p><p>
+He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without
+deepened fear of the undue vibration that was keeping
+him watchful. He knew in his nervousness that he
+was living at best from day to day and from hand to
+mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding
+a mistake. All women had alternatives, and Milly's
+would doubtless be shaky too; but the national character
+was firm in her, whether as all of her, practically,
+by this time, or but as a part; the national character
+that, in a woman still so young, made of the air
+breathed a virtual non-conductor. It wasn't till a
+certain occasion when the twenty days had passed
+that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by
+the information that the signorina padrona was not
+"receiving." The announcement met him, in the
+court, on the lips of one of the gondoliers, met him,
+he thought, with such a conscious eye as the knowledge
+of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously
+shown, could scarce fail to beget. Densher had
+not been at Palazzo Leporelli among the mere receivable,
+but had taken his place once for all among
+the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly
+braved he recognised after a moment the propriety
+of a further appeal. Neither of the two ladies,
+it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not prepared
+to say that either was <i>poco bene</i>. He was yet
+not prepared to say that either was anything, and he
+would have been blank, Densher mentally noted, if
+the term could ever apply to members of a race in
+whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses&mdash;not a
+vain surface, but a place of withdrawal in which
+something obscure, something always ominous, indistinguishably
+lived. He felt afresh indeed at this
+hour the force of the veto laid within the palace on
+any mention, any cognition, of the liabilities of its
+mistress. The state of her health was never confessed
+to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
+taken for one was another matter; of which he grew
+fully aware on carrying his question further. This
+appeal was to his friend Eugenio, whom he immediately
+sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
+protected from the weather, he was confronted in the
+gallery that led from the water-steps to the court,
+and whom he always called, in meditation, his friend;
+seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would have
+put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation
+which required a name of its own, an intimacy of
+consciousness in truth for each&mdash;an intimacy of eye,
+of ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue.
+It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far
+from occult to our young man that Eugenio took a
+view of him not less finely formal than essentially
+vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't himself
+raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air
+now again; it was as much between them as ever
+while Eugenio waited on him in the court.
+</p><p>
+The weather, from early morning, had turned to
+storm, the first sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher
+had almost invidiously brought him down the
+outer staircase&mdash;the massive ascent, the great feature
+of the court, to Milly's <i>piano nobile</i>. This was to
+pay him&mdash;it was the one chance&mdash;for all imputations;
+the imputation in particular that, clever, <i>tanto
+bello</i> and not rich, the young man from London was&mdash;by
+the obvious way&mdash;pressing Miss Theale's fortune
+hard. It was to pay him for the further ineffable
+intimation that a gentleman must take the young
+lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less
+in the high attraction) for a strangely casual appendage
+if he counted in such a connexion on impunity
+and prosperity. These interpretations were odious to
+Densher for the simple reason that they might have
+been so true of the attitude of an inferior man, and
+three things alone, accordingly, had kept him from
+righting himself. One of these was that his critic
+sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive
+inhumanity, of politeness; the second was that refinements
+of expression in a friend's servant were not a
+thing a visitor could take action on; and the third was
+the fact that the particular attribution of motive did
+him after all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar
+view, the view that might have been taken of an
+inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He
+apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as
+that came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to
+him as "my friend" because he was conscious of his
+seeing so much of him, what he made him see on the
+same lines in the course of their present interview was
+ever so much more. Densher felt that he marked
+himself, no doubt, as insisting, by dissatisfaction with
+the gondolier's answer, on the pursuit taken for
+granted in him; and yet felt it only in the augmented,
+the exalted distance that was by this time established
+between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a
+word to Miss Theale from such a pair of lips would
+cost him his place; but he could also bethink himself
+that, so long as the word never came&mdash;and it was,
+on the basis he had arranged, impossible&mdash;he enjoyed
+the imagination of mounting guard. He had
+never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as during
+these minutes in the damp <i>loggia</i> where the storm-gusts
+were strong; and there came in fact for our
+young man, as a result of his presence, a sudden
+sharp sense that everything had turned to the dismal.
+Something had happened&mdash;he didn't know what;
+and it wasn't Eugenio who would tell him. What
+Eugenio told him was that he thought the ladies&mdash;as
+if their liability had been equal&mdash;were a "leetle"
+fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause
+named for it. It was one of the signs of what Densher
+felt in him that, by a profundity, a true deviltry of
+resource, he always met the latter's Italian with English
+and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
+slightly smiled at him in the process&mdash;but ever so
+slightly this time, his manner also being attuned, our
+young man made out, to the thing, whatever it was,
+that constituted the rupture of peace.
+</p><p>
+This manner, while they stood a long minute facing
+each other over all they didn't say, played a part as
+well in the sudden jar to Densher's protected state. It
+was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for them
+alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if
+they really could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing
+rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging
+through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption,
+with the people engaged in all the water-life
+huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical,
+under archways and bridges. Our young man's mute
+exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such a
+depth of reference that, had the pressure been but
+slightly prolonged, they might have reached a point at
+which they were equally weak. Each had verily something
+in mind that would have made a hash of mutual
+suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility,
+they were more united than disjoined. But it was to
+have been a moment for Densher that nothing could
+ease off&mdash;not even the formal propriety with which
+his interlocutor finally attended him to the <i>portone</i>
+and bowed upon his retreat. Nothing had passed
+about his coming back, and the air had made itself
+felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew
+of course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's
+invitation to return was not what he missed; yet he
+knew at the same time that what had happened to
+him was part of his punishment. Out in the square
+beyond the <i>fondamenta</i> that gave access to the land-gate
+of the palace, out where the wind was higher,
+he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled his umbrella
+closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
+enough by others&mdash;the base predicament of
+having, by a concatenation, just to <i>take</i> such things:
+such things as the fact that one very acute person in
+the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
+scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was
+no attacking, no disproving, no (what was worst of all)
+even noticing. One had come to a queer pass when a
+servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
+mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances,
+it had been quite wrong. It was the more
+disagreeable accordingly that the vision of appearances
+was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
+</p><p>
+Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off
+with the more impatience that he was independently
+restless. He had to walk in spite of weather, and he
+took his course, through crooked ways, to the Piazza,
+where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here,
+in the high arcade, half Venice was crowded close,
+while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old
+columns of the Saint Theodore and of the Lion were
+the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was
+odd for him, as he moved, that it should have made
+such a difference&mdash;if the difference wasn't only that
+the palace had for the first time failed of a welcome.
+There was more, but it came from that; that gave
+the harsh note and broke the spell. The wet and the
+cold were now to reckon with, and it was to Densher
+precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at a stroke,
+of the margin on a faith in which they were all living.
+The margin had been his name for it&mdash;for the thing
+that, though it had held out, could bear no shock.
+The shock, in some form, had come, and he wondered
+about it while, threading his way among loungers
+as vague as himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly
+on the rubbish in shops. There were stretches of
+the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
+now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its
+huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the
+beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great
+drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
+and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He
+brushed shoulders with brown men whose hats askew,
+and the loose sleeves of whose pendent jackets, made
+them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and
+chairs that overflowed from the cafés were gathered,
+still with a pretence of service, into the arcade, and here
+and there a spectacled German, with his coat-collar
+up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These
+were impressions for Densher too, but he had made
+the whole circuit thrice before he stopped short, in
+front of Florian's, with the force of his sharpest. His
+eye had caught a face within the café&mdash;he had
+spotted an acquaintance behind the glass. The person
+he had thus paused long enough to look at twice was
+seated, well within range, at a small table on which a
+tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still remained;
+and though he had on his knee, as he leaned
+back, a copy of a French newspaper&mdash;the heading of
+the <i>Figaro</i> was visible&mdash;he stared straight before him
+at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
+for a minute in profile, had him for a time during
+which his identity produced, however quickly, all the
+effect of establishing connexions&mdash;connexions startling
+and direct; and then, as if it were the one thing
+more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn
+of the head, that might have been a prompt result of
+the sense of being noticed. This wider view showed
+him <i>all</i> Lord Mark&mdash;Lord Mark as encountered,
+several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
+to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark
+that was going out, on that occasion, as he came in&mdash;he
+had felt it, in the hall, at the time; and he was
+accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
+seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface,
+the same potential quantity.
+</p><p>
+It was a matter, the whole passage&mdash;it could only
+be&mdash;but of a few seconds; for as he might neither
+stand there to stare nor on the other hand make any
+advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk,
+this time to another pace. It had been for all the
+world, during his pause, as if he had caught his answer
+to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had simply
+faced him&mdash;as he had faced <i>him</i>, not placed by him,
+not at first&mdash;as one of the damp shuffling crowd.
+Recognition, though hanging fire, had then clearly
+come; yet no light of salutation had been struck from
+these certainties. Acquaintance between them was
+scant enough for neither to take it up. That neither
+had done so was not, however, what now mattered,
+but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
+place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher,
+as inevitably a haunter of the great meeting-ground,
+would in that case have seen him before. He
+paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for
+him even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat.
+He had come back for something&mdash;as a sequel to his
+earlier visit; and whatever he had come back for it had
+had time to be done. He might have arrived but last
+night or that morning; he had already made the difference.
+It was a great thing for Densher to get this answer.
+He held it close, he hugged it, quite leaned on
+it as he continued to circulate. It kept him going and
+going&mdash;it made him no less restless. But it explained&mdash;and
+that was much, for with explanations he might
+somehow deal. The vice in the air, otherwise, was too
+much like the breath of fate. The weather had
+changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea
+impossible, <i>because</i> of Lord Mark. It was because of
+him, <i>a fortiori</i>, that the palace was closed. Densher
+went round again twice; he found the visitor each time
+as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
+before him; the next time he was looking over his
+<i>Figaro</i>, which he had opened out. Densher didn't
+again stop, but left him apparently unconscious of his
+passage&mdash;on another repetition of which Lord Mark
+had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would
+be off that night; he had now gone to his hotel for
+arrangements. These things were as plain to Densher
+as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
+cleared for him&mdash;if cleared it was; there was something
+he didn't see, the great thing; but he saw so
+round it and so close to it that this was almost as
+good. He had been looking at a man who had done
+what he had come for, and for whom, as done, it
+temporarily sufficed. The man had come again to see
+Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit would
+have taken place just before or just after luncheon,
+and it was the reason why he himself had found her
+door shut.
+</p><p>
+He said to himself that evening, he still said even
+on the morrow, that he only wanted a reason, and that
+with this perception of one he could now mind, as he
+called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
+as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he
+asked himself why it should prevent this that he could
+feel, in connexion with the crisis, so remarkably
+blameless. He gave the appearances before him all
+the benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to
+accrue he shouldn't feel he had dodged it. But it
+wasn't a bit he who, that day, had touched her, and
+if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability so
+to think about it amounted for Densher during several
+hours to a kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration
+was heightened fairly, besides, by the visible conditions&mdash;sharp,
+striking, ugly to him&mdash;of Lord
+Mark's return. His constant view of it, for all the next
+hours, of which there were many, was as a demonstration
+on the face of it sinister even to his own actual
+ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil,
+seeing it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty,"
+to know more about it than he had so easily and so
+wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop on the
+poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal.
+Such a visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression,
+constituting precisely one or other of the stupid shocks
+he himself had so decently sought to spare her. Densher
+had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
+reflexion&mdash;which he positively, with occasion, might
+have brought straight out&mdash;that the only delicate
+and honourable way of treating a person in such a
+state was to treat her as <i>he</i>, Merton Densher, did.
+With time, actually&mdash;for the impression but deepened&mdash;this
+sense of the contrast, to the advantage
+of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief, and
+that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world&mdash;and
+he drew a long breath on it&mdash;as if a special
+danger for him had passed. Lord Mark had, without
+in the least intending such a service, got it straight
+out of the way. It was <i>he</i>, the brute, who had stumbled
+into just the wrong inspiration and who had
+therefore produced, for the very person he had wished
+to hurt, an impunity that was comparative innocence,
+that was almost like purification. The person he
+had wished to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably
+hanging about. To keep still meanwhile
+was, for this person, more comprehensively, to keep
+it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
+consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go
+back to the palace.
+</p><p>
+The day or two passed&mdash;stretched to three days;
+and with the effect, extraordinarily, that Densher felt
+himself in the course of them washed but the more
+clean. Some sign would come if his return should
+have the better effect; and he was at all events, in
+absence, without the particular scruple. It wouldn't
+have been meant for him by either of the women that
+he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
+impossible&mdash;the being again denied; for it made him
+practically answerable, and answerable was what he
+wasn't. There was no neglect either in absence, inasmuch
+as, from the moment he didn't get in, the one
+message he could send up would be some hope on
+the score of health. Since accordingly that sort of
+expression was definitely forbidden him he had only
+to wait&mdash;which he was actually helped to do by his
+feeling with the lapse of each day more and more
+wound up to it. The days in themselves were anything
+but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted, the
+fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of
+the world about was broken into smaller pieces. He
+walked up and down his rooms and listened to the
+wind&mdash;listened also to tinkles of bells and watched
+for some servant of the palace. He might get a note,
+but the note never came; there were hours when he
+stayed at home not to miss it. When he wasn't at
+home he was in circulation again as he had been at the
+hour of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the
+Square with the herd of refugees; he raked the approaches
+and the cafés on the chance the brute, as he
+now regularly imaged him, <i>might</i> be still there. He
+could only be there, he knew, to be received afresh;
+and that&mdash;one had but to think of it&mdash;would be
+indeed stiff. He had gone, however&mdash;it was proved;
+though Densher's care for the question either way
+only added to what was most acrid in the taste of his
+present ordeal. It all came round to what he was
+doing for Milly&mdash;spending days that neither relief
+nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What
+was it but abject for a man of his parts to be reduced
+to such pastimes? What was it but sordid for him,
+shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
+and to consider possible meetings? What was it but
+odious to find himself wondering what, as between
+him and another man, a possible meeting would produce?
+There recurred moments when in spite of
+everything he felt no straighter than another man.
+And yet even on the third day, when still nothing had
+come, he more than ever knew that he wouldn't
+have budged for the world.
+</p><p>
+He thought of the two women, in their silence, at
+last&mdash;he at all events thought of Milly&mdash;as probably,
+for her reasons, now intensely wishing him to
+go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
+else, in the air; but he didn't care for them
+any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay
+in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite
+perhaps of some final experience that would be, for
+the pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his
+one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue
+beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable,
+and the disagreeable would be a proof;
+a proof of his not having stayed for the thing&mdash;the
+agreeable, as it were&mdash;that Kate had named. The
+thing Kate had named was not to have been the
+odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of
+the odium as actual too that Kate was, for her
+comfort, just now well aloof. These were the first
+hours since her flight in which his sense of what she
+had done for him on the eve of that event was to
+incur a qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps
+base, to be thinking such things so soon; but one of
+the intimations of his solitude was that she had provided
+for herself. She was out of it all, by her act,
+as much as he was in it; and this difference grew,
+positively, as his own intensity increased. She had
+said in their last sharp snatch of talk&mdash;sharp though
+thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
+deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever
+yet spoken: "Letters? Never&mdash;<i>now</i>. Think of it.
+Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently caught her
+sense&mdash;into which he read, all the same, a strange
+inconsequence&mdash;they had practically wrapped their
+understanding in the breach of their correspondence.
+He had moreover, on losing her, done justice to her
+law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
+in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must
+have written had he spoken of themselves. That
+would have been a turbid strain, and her idea had
+been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner.
+Only it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease.
+And it left <i>him</i>, in the conditions, peculiarly alone.
+He was alone, that is, till, on the afternoon of his
+third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain, with
+his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed
+dreariness, for the mere eyes of others, at their
+worst, the grinning padrona threw open the door and
+introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound
+a difference, especially when he saw that his visitor
+was weighted. It appeared part of her weight that
+she was in a wet waterproof, that she allowed her
+umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman
+without consciousness or care, and that her face,
+under her veil, richly rosy with the driving wind,
+was&mdash;and the veil too&mdash;as splashed as if the rain
+were her tears.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder
+afterwards at the fewness of their steps. "She
+has turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+"You mean she's worse?"
+</p><p>
+The poor lady stood there as she had stopped;
+Densher had, in the instant flare of his eagerness, his
+curiosity, all responsive at sight of her, waved away,
+on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to relieve
+her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about
+through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the step
+she had taken and wishing it not to have been in
+the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I
+don't know <i>how</i> she is&mdash;and it's why I've come to
+you."
+</p><p>
+"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and
+it's quite&mdash;you make me feel&mdash;as if I had been
+wretchedly waiting for you."
+</p><p>
+She showed him again her blurred eyes&mdash;she had
+caught at his word. "Have you been wretched?"
+</p><p>
+Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It
+would have sounded for him like a complaint, and
+before something he already made out in his visitor
+he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her
+damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was
+great, and he felt she had brought it all with her.
+He answered that he had been patient and above all
+that he had been still. "As still as a mouse&mdash;you'll
+have seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together,
+than I've ever been in my life. It has seemed
+to me the only thing."
+</p><p>
+This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was
+straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her
+own light could answer. "It has been best. I've
+wondered for you. But it has been best," she said
+again.
+</p><p>
+"Yet it has done no good?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone."
+Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow,
+was deeply mature: "You <i>won't</i> go?"
+</p><p>
+"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
+</p><p>
+"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone
+now I can?"
+</p><p>
+She thought of it, and he could see even more of
+the relief she was taking from him. His presence,
+his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so
+meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably
+been to him&mdash;these things counted for her, now she
+had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that
+she still only stood there taking them all in. With it
+however popped up characteristically a throb of her
+conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal
+joy. It told Densher of the three days she on
+her side had spent. "Well, anything you do for me&mdash;<i>is</i>
+for her too. Only, only&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Only nothing now matters?"
+</p><p>
+She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact
+itself that he expressed. "Then you know?"
+</p><p>
+"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham waited&mdash;her face seemed to
+sound him. Then her own reply was strange. "She
+hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
+</p><p>
+"Not for three days?"
+</p><p>
+"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were
+all over. Not even by the faintest allusion."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean
+you haven't spoken about <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
+</p><p>
+"Well," he answered after a moment, "I <i>am</i> dead."
+</p><p>
+"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop
+of her arms on her waterproof.
+</p><p>
+It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself
+in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place,
+which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate
+had left&mdash;the sense of which, for that matter, by
+mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor&mdash;the
+very impotence of their extinction. And Densher
+had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but
+again: "Is she dying?"
+</p><p>
+It made her, however, as if these were crudities,
+almost material pangs, only say as before: "Then
+you know?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the
+marvel to me is that <i>you</i> do. I've no right in fact to
+imagine or to assume that you do."
+</p><p>
+"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same.
+I know."
+</p><p>
+"Everything?"
+</p><p>
+Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No&mdash;not
+everything. That's why I've come."
+</p><p>
+"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she
+hesitated and it affected him, he brought out in a
+groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned him from her
+to the place itself, which was a part of what was in
+him, was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever,
+of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association,
+for which he had hired it. <i>That</i> was not for
+telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so
+decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really
+have begun, by an effect already operating, to be a
+part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him,
+that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather,
+so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him
+her own abasement&mdash;that, at any rate, of grief; and
+made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he
+liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when
+she met his groan with an attenuation.
+</p><p>
+"We shall at all events&mdash;if that's anything&mdash;be
+together."
+</p><p>
+It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what
+I've ventured to feel. It's much." She replied in
+effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which,
+so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
+his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for
+it gave back to him something precious, over which,
+in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly
+closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to
+him, with her sole and single boldness&mdash;and also
+on grounds he hadn't then measured&mdash;that Mrs.
+Stringham was a person who <i>wouldn't</i>, at a pinch,
+in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another
+of the cases in which Kate was always showing. "You
+don't think then very horridly of me?"
+</p><p>
+And her answer was the more valuable that it came
+without nervous effusion&mdash;quite as if she understood
+what he might conceivably have believed. She
+turned over in fact what she thought, and that was
+what helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
+</p><p>
+It made him aware the next moment of how they
+had been planted there. She took off her cloak with
+his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat,
+removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage
+that the words she had just uttered to him were
+the one flower she had to throw. They were all her
+consolation for him, and the consolation even still
+depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate
+in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn,
+made by their meeting. The image she again evoked
+for him loomed in it but the larger. "She has turned
+her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in
+their silences, they were simply so leaving what he
+saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I don't mean not
+of me."
+</p><p>
+"Of nothing&mdash;of no one." And she went on,
+Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take
+it. "She doesn't <i>want</i> to die. Think of her age.
+Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think
+of all she is. Think of all she <i>has</i>. She lies there stiffening
+herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God&mdash;!"
+the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "You thank God&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That she's so quiet."
+</p><p>
+He continued to wonder. "<i>Is</i> she so quiet?"
+</p><p>
+"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what
+she has never been. So you see&mdash;all these days. I
+can't tell you&mdash;but it's better so. It would kill me
+if she <i>were</i> to tell me."
+</p><p>
+"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
+</p><p>
+"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't
+want it."
+</p><p>
+"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she
+doesn't want it." He had a long pause, and they
+might have been thinking together of what they could
+even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not
+what he brought out. Milly's "grimness" and the
+great hushed palace were present to him; present
+with the little woman before him as she must have
+been waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm
+have <i>you</i> done her?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I
+don't know. I come and talk of her here with you."
+</p><p>
+It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly
+hate me?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. How <i>can</i> I? No one ever will."
+</p><p>
+"She'll never tell?"
+</p><p>
+"She'll never tell."
+</p><p>
+Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"She <i>is</i> magnificent."
+</p><p>
+His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it,
+so far as he could, all over. "Would she see me
+again?"
+</p><p>
+It made his companion stare. "Should you like
+to see her?"
+</p><p>
+"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her
+surprise, and it took him some time. "No."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
+</p><p>
+"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
+</p><p>
+She had for the moment her vision of this, but it
+collapsed. "I don't see what you can do."
+</p><p>
+"I don't either. But <i>she</i> might."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too
+late."
+</p><p>
+"Too late for her to see&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Too late."
+</p><p>
+The very decision of her despair&mdash;it was after all
+so lucid&mdash;kindled in him a heat. "But the doctor,
+all the while&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's
+proud of having been approved and coached by a
+great London man. He hardly in fact goes away;
+so that I scarce know what becomes of his other
+patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage;
+he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
+events. But she has barely consented to see him, and,
+though she has told him, generously&mdash;for she <i>thinks</i>
+of me, dear creature&mdash;that he may come, that he
+may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
+only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms,
+trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with
+the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways,
+in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable
+smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk
+of her."
+</p><p>
+"By her request?"
+</p><p>
+"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish.
+We talk of the price of provisions."
+</p><p>
+"By her request too?"
+</p><p>
+"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when
+she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort
+to me he might stay as much as we liked."
+</p><p>
+Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort
+to you!"
+</p><p>
+"None whatever. That, however," she added,
+"isn't his fault. Nothing's any comfort."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly
+feel, <i>I'm</i> not."
+</p><p>
+"No. But I didn't come for that."
+</p><p>
+"You came for <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Well then call it that." But she looked at him
+a moment with eyes filled full, and something came
+up in her the next instant from deeper still. "I came
+at bottom of course&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself.
+But if it's, as you say, too late for me to do anything?"
+</p><p>
+She continued to look at him, and with an irritation,
+which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself.
+"So I did say. But, with you here"&mdash;and she
+turned her vision again strangely about her&mdash;"with
+you here, and with everything, I feel we mustn't
+abandon her."
+</p><p>
+"God forbid we should abandon her."
+</p><p>
+"Then you <i>won't?</i>" His tone had made her flush
+again.
+</p><p>
+"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons <i>me?</i>
+What can I do if she won't see me?"
+</p><p>
+"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
+</p><p>
+"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you
+tell me. I shouldn't like it only to see her as you make
+me. I should like it if I could help her. But even
+then," Densher pursued without faith, "she would
+have to want it first herself. And there," he continued
+to make out, "is the devil of it. She <i>won't</i> want
+it herself. She <i>can't!</i>"
+</p><p>
+He had got up in his impatience of it, and she
+watched him while he helplessly moved. "There's
+one thing you can do. There's only that, and even
+for that there are difficulties. But there <i>is</i> that." He
+stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and
+he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was
+coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to
+utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in
+the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of
+rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her
+fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really know
+yourself what it is."
+</p><p>
+He did know what it was, and with it even, as she
+said&mdash;rather!&mdash;there were difficulties. He turned
+away on them, on everything, for a moment; he
+moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted
+channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite,
+blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance.
+Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact,
+for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was
+the first again to speak. When he did so, however,
+it was not in straight answer to her last remark&mdash;he
+only started from that. He said, as he came back
+to her, "Let me, you know, <i>see</i>&mdash;one must understand,"
+almost as if he had for the time accepted it.
+And what he wished to understand was where, on the
+essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
+Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't
+<i>he</i> be the one least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the
+worst, in the dark without him?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept
+me going. I wired the first night, and he answered
+like an angel. He'll come like one. Only he can't
+arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
+</p><p>
+"Well then that's something."
+</p><p>
+She considered. "Something&mdash;yes. She likes
+him."
+</p><p>
+"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which,
+when he was here in October&mdash;that night when she
+was in white, when she had people there and those
+musicians&mdash;she committed him to my care. It was
+beautiful for both of us&mdash;she put us in relation. She
+asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so,
+and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher said
+with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
+</p><p>
+"He liked <i>you</i>," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
+</p><p>
+"Ah I know nothing about that."
+</p><p>
+"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries
+and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him
+the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember
+telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
+he might really have been a great judge. I mean
+of the beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what
+he is&mdash;in having judged <i>her</i>. He hasn't," he went
+on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in her&mdash;which
+we must make the most of&mdash;can only be supremely
+beneficent."
+</p><p>
+He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in
+his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes
+sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance
+from the recognition he had a few moments before
+partly confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you
+like him!"
+</p><p>
+There was something for him in the sound of it.
+"Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself.
+Surely <i>you</i> like him. Surely, when he was here,
+we all liked him."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks.
+And I should think, with all the time you spent with
+him, you'd know it," she said, "yourself."
+</p><p>
+Densher stopped short, though at first without a
+word. "We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned
+her, even to sound her name, and nothing
+whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this
+picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an
+instant resisted it. "That was his professional propriety."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue
+in him, and it was something more besides." And
+he spoke with sudden intensity. "I couldn't <i>talk</i> to
+him about her!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+"I can't talk to any one about her."
+</p><p>
+"Except to <i>me</i>," his friend continued.
+</p><p>
+"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam
+of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept
+him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too&mdash;that
+is for his own words&mdash;he had quickly coloured:
+he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse
+with Kate. His visitor, for the minute, while
+their eyes met, might have been watching him hold
+it down. And he <i>had</i> to hold it down&mdash;the effort
+of which, precisely, made him red. He couldn't let
+it come up; at least not yet. She might make what she
+would of it. He attempted to repeat his statement, but
+he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
+nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him.
+Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"And <i>real</i>"&mdash;she had taken him right up with a
+huge emphasis&mdash;"was more impossible still." No
+doubt&mdash;he didn't deny it; and she had straightway
+drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I
+say&mdash;that there were immensities between you.
+Otherwise you'd have chattered."
+</p><p>
+"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both
+thinking of her."
+</p><p>
+"You were neither of you thinking of any one else.
+That's why you kept together."
+</p><p>
+Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but
+he came straight back to what he had originally said.
+"I haven't a notion, all the same, of what he thinks."
+She faced him, visibly, with the question into which
+he had already observed that her special shade of
+earnestness was perpetually flowering, right and left&mdash;"Are
+you <i>very</i> sure?"&mdash;and he could only note
+her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
+believe that he thinks she's gone."
+</p><p>
+She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter
+what I believe."
+</p><p>
+"Well, we shall see"&mdash;and he felt almost basely
+superficial. More and more, for the last five minutes,
+had he known she had brought something with
+her, and never in respect to anything had he had such
+a wish to postpone. He would have liked to put
+everything off till Thursday; he was sorry it was now
+Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
+wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly,
+who was dying; nor of Mrs. Stringham, who was
+sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of Kate either,
+for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
+swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus
+prolonged, had cast on it some influence under which
+it had ceased to act. She was as absent to his sensibility
+as she had constantly been, since her departure,
+absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and
+it was the first time, among the objects now surrounding
+him, that his sensibility so noted her. He knew
+soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and
+that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly
+be more so. "Meanwhile," he added for his companion,
+"it has been everything for me to see you."
+She slowly rose at the words, which might almost
+have conveyed to her the hint of his taking care.
+She stood there as if she had in fact seen him abruptly
+moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness would have
+been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground
+for insistence to her imagination of his state. It would
+take her moreover, she clearly showed him she was
+thinking, but a minute or two to insist. Besides, she
+had already said it. "Will you do it if <i>he</i> asks you?
+I mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will
+you give him"&mdash;oh she was earnest now!&mdash;"the
+opportunity to put it to you?"
+</p><p>
+"The opportunity to put what?"
+</p><p>
+"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
+</p><p>
+Densher felt himself&mdash;as had already once befallen
+him in the quarter of an hour&mdash;turn red to the top
+of his forehead. Turning red had, however, for him,
+as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
+his consciousness of it at the present moment was
+rather as a sign of his fear. It showed him sharply
+enough of what he was afraid. "If I deny what to
+her?"
+</p><p>
+Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for
+hadn't he all along been letting her see that he knew?
+"Why, what Lord Mark told her."
+</p><p>
+"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment&mdash;of
+seeing him as suddenly perverse. "I've been judging
+that you yourself know." And it was she who
+now blushed deep.
+</p><p>
+It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too
+by other things. "Then <i>you</i> know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's
+what has done it."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;I understand that. But you also know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+He had faltered again, but all she knew she now
+wanted to say. "I'm speaking," she said soothingly,
+"of what he told her. It's <i>that</i> that I've taken you as
+knowing."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
+</p><p>
+It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment,
+the quality of relief, as if he had supposed her
+thinking of something else. Thereupon, straightway,
+that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
+it for <i>true!</i>"
+</p><p>
+Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw
+that he had betrayed himself. Not, however, that it
+mattered, as he immediately saw still better. There
+it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there was
+no postponing. They were left with her idea&mdash;the
+one she was wishing to make him recognise. He had
+expressed ten minutes before his need to understand,
+and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
+he was to understand was no small matter; it might
+be larger even than as yet appeared.
+</p><p>
+He took again one of his turns, not meeting what
+she had last said; he mooned a minute, as he would
+have called it, at a window; and of course she could
+see that she had driven him to the wall. She did
+clearly, without delay, see it; on which her sense
+of having "caught" him became as promptly a
+scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What
+I mean is that he told her you've been all the while
+engaged to Miss Croy."
+</p><p>
+He gave a jerk round; it was almost&mdash;to hear it&mdash;the
+touch of a lash; and he said&mdash;idiotically, as he
+afterwards knew&mdash;the first thing that came into his
+head. "All <i>what</i> while?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness.
+"I only repeat to you what he told her."
+</p><p>
+Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped,
+had already caught himself up. "Pardon my brutality.
+Of course I know what you're talking about.
+I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained,
+"in the Piazza; only just saw him&mdash;through the
+glass at Florian's&mdash;without any words. In fact
+I scarcely know him&mdash;there wouldn't have been
+occasion. It was but once, moreover&mdash;he must have
+gone that night. But I knew he wouldn't have come
+for nothing, and I turned it over&mdash;what he would
+have come for."
+</p><p>
+Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
+</p><p>
+Densher approved. "He came to let her know
+that he knows better than she for whom it was she
+had a couple of months before, in her fool's paradise,
+refused him."
+</p><p>
+"How you <i>do</i> know!"&mdash;and Mrs. Stringham
+almost smiled.
+</p><p>
+"I know that&mdash;but I don't know the good it does
+him."
+</p><p>
+"The good, he thinks, if he has patience&mdash;not too
+much&mdash;may be to come. He doesn't know what he
+has done to her. Only <i>we</i>, you see, do that."
+</p><p>
+He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him&mdash;what
+she felt?"
+</p><p>
+"She was able&mdash;I'm sure of it&mdash;not to show anything.
+He dealt her his blow, and she took it without
+a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain, spoke by
+book, and it brought into play again her appreciation
+of what she related. "She's magnificent."
+</p><p>
+Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
+</p><p>
+"And <i>he</i>," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
+</p><p>
+"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on
+the stupid doom in it, they looked at each other.
+"Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
+</p><p>
+"So awfully&mdash;it's Maud Lowder's own view.
+And he was nice, in London," said Mrs. Stringham,
+"to <i>me</i>. One could almost pity him&mdash;he has had
+such a good conscience."
+</p><p>
+"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but it wasn't&mdash;I could see from the only
+few things she first told me&mdash;that he meant <i>her</i> the
+least harm. He intended none whatever."
+</p><p>
+"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned.
+"He only of course meant harm to me."
+</p><p>
+"And good to himself&mdash;he thought that would
+come. He had been unable to swallow," Mrs. Stringham
+pursued, "what had happened on his other visit.
+He had been then too sharply humiliated."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I saw that."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received,
+as it were, while he was turned away."
+</p><p>
+"Perfectly," Densher said&mdash;"I've filled it out.
+And also that he has known meanwhile for <i>what</i> I
+was then received. For a stay of all these weeks.
+He had had it to think of."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely&mdash;it was more than he could bear. But
+he has it," said Mrs. Stringham, "to think of still."
+</p><p>
+"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself
+somehow, at this point, was having more to think of
+even than he had yet had&mdash;"only, after all, how has
+he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
+</p><p>
+"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
+</p><p>
+"He can only have acted&mdash;it would have been his
+sole safety&mdash;from full knowledge."
+</p><p>
+He had gone on without heeding her question;
+but, face to face as they were, something had none
+the less passed between them. It was this that, after
+an instant, made her again interrogative. "What
+do you mean by full knowledge?"
+</p><p>
+Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been
+since October?"
+</p><p>
+"I think he has been back to England. He came
+in fact, I've reason to believe, straight from there."
+</p><p>
+"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, to try again&mdash;with the help perhaps of a
+new fact. To make himself possibly right with her&mdash;a
+different attempt from the other. He had at any
+rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
+opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or
+perhaps indeed half an hour would be just what was
+most effective. It <i>has</i> been!" said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+Her companion took it in, understanding but too
+well; yet as she lighted the matter for him more,
+really, than his own courage had quite dared&mdash;putting
+the absent dots on several i's&mdash;he saw new questions
+swarm. They had been till now in a bunch,
+entangled and confused; and they fell apart, each
+showing for itself. The first he put to her was at
+any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs.
+Lowder."
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally
+upon news of Milly."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally,
+upon news of <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
+</p><p>
+"I've given her none that hasn't been decently
+good. This will have been the first."
+</p><p>
+"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
+</p><p>
+"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as
+she is."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs.
+Lowder written about him? Has she written that he
+has been with them?"
+</p><p>
+"She has mentioned him but once&mdash;it was in her
+letter before the last. Then she said something."
+</p><p>
+"And what did she say?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well
+it was in reference to Miss Croy. That she thought
+Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I should say
+rather that he was thinking of <i>her</i>&mdash;only it seemed
+this time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the
+way more open to him."
+</p><p>
+Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but
+he presently raised them to speak, and there was that
+in his face which proved him aware of a queerness in
+his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged
+to <i>propose</i> to her niece?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know what she means."
+</p><p>
+"Of course not"&mdash;he recovered himself; "and I
+oughtn't to seem to trouble you to piece together
+what I can't piece myself. Only I 'guess,'" he added,
+"I <i>can</i> piece it."
+</p><p>
+She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I
+dare say I can piece it too."
+</p><p>
+It was one of the things in her&mdash;and his conscious
+face took it from her as such&mdash;that from the moment
+of her coming in had seemed to mark for him,
+as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
+They had parted four days earlier with
+many things, between them, deep down. But these
+things were now on their troubled surface, and it
+wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up.
+Women were wonderful&mdash;at least this one was. But
+so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of
+all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what
+he had been feeling about the circle of petticoats.
+They were all <i>such</i> petticoats! It was just the fineness
+of his tangle. The sense of that, in its turn, for us too,
+might have been not unconnected with his putting
+to his visitor a question that quite passed over her
+remark. "Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our
+friend?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "<i>her</i> friend also.
+But not a single word that I know of."
+</p><p>
+He had taken it for certain she hadn't&mdash;the thing
+being after all but a shade more strange than his
+having himself, with Milly, never for six weeks mentioned
+the young lady in question. It was for that
+matter but a shade more strange than Milly's not having
+mentioned her. In spite of which, and however
+inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
+He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and
+the furthest he could get was by reverting for a minute
+to the man they had been judging. "How did he
+manage to get <i>at</i> her? She had only&mdash;with what had
+passed between them before&mdash;to say she couldn't
+see him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier,"
+the good lady explained with a slight embarrassment,
+"than at the other time."
+</p><p>
+"Easier?"
+</p><p>
+"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
+</p><p>
+"Yes. But exactly not <i>the</i> difference."
+</p><p>
+"Exactly not the difference of her having to be
+harsh. Perfectly. She could afford to be the opposite."
+With which, as he said nothing, she just impatiently
+completed her sense. "She had had <i>you</i>
+here for six weeks."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
+</p><p>
+"Besides, I think he must have written her first&mdash;written
+I mean in a tone to smooth his way. That it
+would be a kindness to himself. Then on the spot&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked?
+The horrid little beast!"
+</p><p>
+It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though
+quickening, as for hope, the intensity of her look at
+him. "Oh he went off without an alarm."
+</p><p>
+"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
+</p><p>
+"Ah that, certainly."
+</p><p>
+"Then it <i>was</i> mere base revenge. Hasn't he known
+her, into the bargain," the young man asked&mdash;"didn't
+he, weeks before, see her, judge her, feel her,
+as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than
+a few months to live?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at
+him in silence; and it gave more force to what she
+then remarkably added. "He has doubtless been
+aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself
+been aware."
+</p><p>
+"He has wanted her, you mean, just <i>because</i>&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He
+moved off, however, with a hot face, as soon as he
+had spoken, conscious again of an intention in his
+visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he
+had once more taken counsel of the dreariness without
+he turned to his companion. "Shall we have lights&mdash;a
+lamp or the candles?"
+</p><p>
+"Not for me."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing?"
+</p><p>
+"Not for me."
+</p><p>
+He waited at the window another moment and then
+faced his friend with a thought. "He <i>will</i> have proposed
+to Miss Croy. That's what has happened."
+</p><p>
+Her reserve continued. "It's you who must
+judge."
+</p><p>
+"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done
+so too&mdash;only <i>she</i>, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy's
+refusal of him will have struck him"&mdash;Densher continued
+to make it out&mdash;"as a phenomenon requiring
+a reason."
+</p><p>
+"And you've been clear to him <i>as</i> the reason?"
+</p><p>
+"Not too clear&mdash;since I'm sticking here and
+since that has been a fact to make his descent on
+Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has believed,"
+said Densher bravely, "that I may have been
+a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time
+have been up to something in Venice."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own.
+"'Up to' something? Up to what?"
+</p><p>
+"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To
+some deviltry. To some duplicity."
+</p><p>
+"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is
+a monstrous supposition." Her companion, after a
+stiff minute&mdash;sensibly long for each&mdash;fell away
+from her again, and then added to it another minute,
+which he spent once more looking out with his hands
+in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly knew,
+to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state
+for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
+left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined,
+for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights.
+These would have been an advantage mainly to herself.
+Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence
+of them. It came out in her very tone when at
+last she addressed him&mdash;so differently, for confidence&mdash;in
+words she had already used. "If Sir Luke
+himself asks it of you as something you can do for
+<i>him</i>, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been
+made so dreadfully to believe?"
+</p><p>
+Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he
+said: "You're absolutely certain then that she does
+believe it?"
+</p><p>
+"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation.
+"Judge!"
+</p><p>
+He took his time again to judge. "Do <i>you</i> believe
+it?"
+</p><p>
+He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her
+hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a
+pain to her discretion. She answered none the less,
+and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
+will inevitably depend more or less on your action.
+You can perfectly settle it&mdash;if you care. I promise
+to believe you down to the ground if, to save her life,
+you consent to a denial."
+</p><p>
+"But a denial, when it comes to that&mdash;confound
+the whole thing, don't you see!&mdash;of exactly what?"
+</p><p>
+It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but
+in fact she enlarged. "Of everything."
+</p><p>
+Everything had never even yet seemed to him so
+incalculably much. "Oh!" he simply moaned into
+the gloom.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir
+Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of
+other rigours. The weather changed, the stubborn
+storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for
+many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came
+into its own again and, with an almost audible paean,
+a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
+bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed
+and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was
+like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows,
+blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid
+stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced
+in this on the occasion of his going to the station
+to meet the great doctor. He went after consideration,
+which, as he was constantly aware, was at
+present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything.
+That was where the event had landed him&mdash;where
+no event in his life had landed him before. He had
+thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much
+more than he had acted; except indeed that he
+remembered thoughts&mdash;a few of them&mdash;which at
+the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
+almost like adventures. But anything like his actual
+state he had not, as to the prohibition of impulse,
+accident, range&mdash;the prohibition in other words of
+freedom&mdash;hitherto known. The great oddity was
+that if he had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially
+as an adventure, nothing could now less resemble
+one than the fact of his staying. It would be
+an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back,
+above all, to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done
+so; but there was something of the merely, the almost
+meanly, obliged and involved sort in his going
+on as he was. That was the effect in particular of
+Mrs. Stringham's visit, which had left him as with
+such a taste in his mouth of what he couldn't do. It
+had made this quantity clear to him, and yet had
+deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what,
+for a refuge, he possibly <i>could</i>.
+</p><p>
+It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he
+knew, to go to the station for Sir Luke. Nothing
+equally free, at all events, had he yet turned over so
+long. What then was his odious position but that
+again and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself
+under this consciousness as if it had been a tax
+levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time proposed
+to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate
+in his life. Such was simply the advantage it had
+actually got of him. He was afraid for instance that
+an advance to his distinguished friend might prove
+for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was
+afraid of it as a current that would draw him too
+far; yet he thought with an equal aversion of being
+shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally prevailed
+with him was the reflexion that, whatever
+might happen, the great man had, after that occasion
+at the palace, their young woman's brief sacrifice to
+society&mdash;and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal
+had brought it well to the surface&mdash;shown him
+marked benevolence. Mrs. Stringham's comments on
+the relation in which Milly had placed them made
+him&mdash;it was unmistakeable&mdash;feel things he perhaps
+hadn't felt. It was in the spirit of seeking a chance
+to feel again adequately whatever it was he had missed&mdash;it
+was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it went
+a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes,
+paced the platform before the train came in. Only,
+after it had come and he had presented himself at the
+door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything that
+followed&mdash;only, as the situation developed, the sense
+of an anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his
+apprehensions and hesitations even of the scant dignity
+they might claim. He could scarce have said if the
+visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
+might have suggested expectation, or made shorter
+work of surprise in presence of the fact.
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke had clean forgotten&mdash;so Densher read&mdash;the
+rather remarkable young man he had formerly
+gone about with, though he picked him up again, on
+the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man
+felt himself so picked, and the thing immediately
+affected him as the proof of a splendid economy.
+Opposed to all the waste with which he was now connected
+the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly
+to admonish him. The eminent pilgrim, in the train,
+all the way, had used the hours as he needed, thinking
+not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
+him. An exquisite case awaited him&mdash;of which,
+in this queer way, the remarkable young man was
+an outlying part; but the single motion of his face,
+the motion into which Densher, from the platform,
+lightly stirred its stillness, was his first renewed cognition.
+If, however, he had suppressed the matter
+by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress now,
+in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this
+became as a symbol of the whole pitch, so far as
+one might one's self be concerned, of his visit. One
+saw, our friend further meditated, everything that, in
+contact, he appeared to accept&mdash;if only, for much,
+not to trouble to sink it: what one missed was the
+inward use he made of it. Densher began wondering,
+at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
+make of the anomaly of their having there to separate.
+Eugenio had been on the platform, in the respectful
+rear, and the gondola from the palace, under his
+direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching mixture
+of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
+together. Densher didn't at all mind now that,
+he himself of necessity refusing a seat on the deep
+black cushions beside the guest of the palace, he had
+Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this susceptibility,
+he also knew, it was something to have
+left behind. All he did was to smile down vaguely
+from the steps&mdash;they could see him, the donkeys, as
+shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
+headshake, "go there now."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no
+more of it; so that the thing was splendid, Densher
+fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite inevitable
+and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to
+make of it that he supposed it might be for respect
+to the crisis. He didn't moreover afterwards make
+much more of anything&mdash;after the classic craft, that
+is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke
+from the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by
+which it presented, receding, a back, so to speak,
+rendered positively graceful by the high black hump
+of its <i>felze</i>. Densher watched the gondola out of sight&mdash;he
+heard Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the
+water, for the sharp firm swerve into a side-canal, a
+short cut to the palace. He had no gondola of his
+own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly&mdash;as
+in Venice it <i>is</i> humble&mdash;walked away,
+though not without having for some time longer
+stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
+him. It was strange enough, but he found himself
+as never yet, and as he couldn't have reckoned, in
+presence of the truth that was the truest about Milly.
+He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
+instantly made&mdash;for it was all in the air as he
+heard Pasquale's cry and saw the boat disappear&mdash;by
+the mere visibility, on the spot, of the personage
+summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been
+near the facts of her condition&mdash;which counted so
+as a blessing for him; he hadn't only, with all the
+world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
+within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness
+made up of smiles and silences and beautiful
+fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to
+breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
+now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in
+the direct interest of every one's good manner, every
+one's pity, every one's really quite generous ideal.
+It was a conspiracy of silence, as the <i>cliché</i> went, to
+which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
+of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain
+and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit
+or of speech that consented to reflect it. "The mere
+aesthetic instinct of mankind&mdash;!" our young man had
+more than once, in the connexion, said to himself;
+letting the rest of the proposition drop, but touching
+again thus sufficiently on the outrage even to taste involved
+in one's having to <i>see</i>. So then it had been&mdash;a
+general conscious fool's paradise, from which the
+specified had been chased like a dangerous animal.
+What therefore had at present befallen was that the
+specified, standing all the while at the gate, had now
+crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person
+and quite on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct.
+Densher's nerves, absolutely his heart-beats
+too, had measured the change before he on this occasion
+moved away.
+</p><p>
+The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain,
+of the chance grimly narrowed, had been made, at
+a stroke, intense, and this was to be the way he was
+now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
+making vision not only possible but inevitable, the
+one thing left to be thankful for was the breadth of
+Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should one be able to
+keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
+It was, however, far from plain to Densher for
+the first day or two that he was again to see his distinguished
+friend at all. That he couldn't, on any
+basis actually serving, return to the palace&mdash;this
+was as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature
+of his case, the fact of the publicity attaching to his
+proscription through his not having taken himself off.
+He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli gondola.
+As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption
+destined to meet Sir Luke about the town, where the
+latter would have neither time nor taste to lounge,
+nothing more would occur between them unless the
+great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His
+doing that, Densher further reflected, wouldn't even
+simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's having decided
+to&mdash;as they might say&mdash;turn him on. It would
+depend as well&mdash;for there would be practically some
+difference to her&mdash;on her actually attempting it;
+and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke would
+make of such an overture. Densher had for that
+matter his own view of the amount, to say nothing of
+the particular sort, of response it might expect from
+him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
+personage even to understand such an appeal. To
+what extent could he be prepared, and what importance
+in fine could he attach? Densher asked himself
+these questions, in truth, to put his own position
+at the worst. He should miss the great man completely
+unless the great man should come to see him, and the
+great man could only come to see him for a purpose
+unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all,
+and consequently there was nothing to hope.
+</p><p>
+It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this
+violence to all probability; but it pressed on him that
+there were few possible diversions he could afford
+now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was so odd
+as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not
+afraid of Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he
+clung to, based on a previous taste of the visitor's
+company, that <i>he</i> would somehow let him off. The
+truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and
+sounded in his tread, became by the fact of his presence
+the name and the form, for the time, of everything
+in the place; but it didn't, for the difference,
+sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned
+to Densher at the earlier season. His presence on
+the first occasion, not as the result of a summons, but
+as a friendly whim of his own, had had quite another
+value; and though our young man could scarce regard
+that value as recoverable he yet reached out in
+imagination to a renewal of the old contact. He didn't
+propose, as he privately and forcibly phrased the
+matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after
+all did want for himself. It was something&mdash;this
+stuck to him&mdash;that Sir Luke would have had for him
+if it hadn't been impossible. These were his worst
+days, the two or three; those on which even the sense
+of the tension at the palace didn't much help him
+not to feel that his destiny made but light of him. He
+had never been, as he judged it, so down. In mean
+conditions, without books, without society, almost
+without money, he had nothing to do but to wait.
+His main support really was his original idea, which
+didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth his
+predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent,
+if he but gave it time, some refinement of the horrible.
+It was just inventing meanwhile this suppression of
+Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign
+he knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham
+during her call on him no such answer as would
+have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had described
+as ready for him when <i>he</i> should be ready was
+therefore&mdash;if on no other ground than her want of
+this power to answer for him&mdash;not to be presented.
+The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
+</p><p>
+That was not, either, we hasten to declare&mdash;as
+Densher then soon enough saw&mdash;the idea with which
+Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For stand
+before him again he finally did; just when our friend
+had gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his
+power to absent himself from London obligations
+would have been reached. Four or five days, exclusive
+of journeys, represented the largest supposable
+sacrifice&mdash;to a head not crowned&mdash;on the part of
+one of the highest medical lights in the world; so that
+really when the personage in question, following up
+a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the doorway, it was
+to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
+like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful
+word, of the magnitude&mdash;he shrank from calling
+it anything else&mdash;of Milly's case. The great man had
+not gone then, and an immense surrender to her immense
+need was so expressed in it that some effect,
+some help, some hope, were flagrantly part of the
+expression. It was for Densher, with his reaction
+from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten
+things at once&mdash;the foremost being that just conceivably,
+since Sir Luke <i>was</I> still there, she had been
+saved. Close upon its heels, however, and quite as
+sharply, came the sense that the crisis&mdash;plainly even
+now to be prolonged for him&mdash;was to have none of
+that sound simplicity. Not only had his visitor not
+dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't dropped
+in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to
+show that during the brief remainder of his stay, the
+end of which was now in sight, as little as possible of
+that was to be looked for. The demonstration, such
+as it was, was in the key of their previous acquaintance,
+and it was their previous acquaintance that had
+made him come. He was not to stop longer than the
+Saturday next at hand, but there were things of interest
+he should like to see again meanwhile. It was for
+these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity
+of Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it,
+and a turn about, that he had looked his young man
+up&mdash;producing on the latter's part, as soon as the
+case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four
+hours, so defined itself, the most incongruous, yet
+most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in fact
+have been more monstrous on the surface&mdash;and
+Densher was well aware of it&mdash;than the relief he
+found during this short period in the tacit drop of
+all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
+nor asking for it. That was what had come out for
+him, on his visitor's entrance, even in the very seconds
+of suspense that were connecting the fact also
+directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had
+come to say he had saved her&mdash;he had come, as from
+Mrs. Stringham, to say how she might <i>be</i> saved&mdash;he
+had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
+was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous
+for all their distinctness, merged their identity
+in a bound of the heart just as immediate and
+which remained after they had passed. It simply
+did wonders for him&mdash;this was the truth&mdash;that Sir
+Luke was, as he would have said, quiet.
+</p><p>
+The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of
+a blest calm after a storm. He had been trying for
+weeks, as we know, to keep superlatively still, and
+trying it largely in solitude and silence; but he looked
+back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the
+right stillness was this particular form of society.
+They walked together and they talked, looked up
+pictures again and recovered impressions&mdash;Sir
+Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the
+dealers in old wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and
+mild drinks; blessed above all the grand weather, a
+bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light. Once
+or twice while they rested the great man closed his
+eyes&mdash;keeping them so for some minutes while his
+companion, the more easily watching his face for it,
+made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
+He had been up at night with her&mdash;he in person, for
+hours; but this was all he showed of it and was apparently
+to remain his nearest approach to an allusion.
+The extraordinary thing was that Densher could
+take it in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the
+image looking out of it; and yet that he could at
+the same time not intermit a throb of his response to
+accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience
+that held its own, and he continued to know why, in
+spite of his deserts, in spite of his folly, in spite of
+everything, he had so fondly hoped for it. He had
+hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
+because he had thus divined in it, should it come,
+some power to let him off. He was <i>being</i> let off; dealt
+with in the only way that didn't aggravate his responsibility.
+The beauty was also that this wasn't
+on system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it
+was just by being a man of the world and by knowing
+life, by feeling the real, that Sir Luke did him good.
+There had been in all the case too many women. A
+man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and
+he wondered what man, had he chosen, would have
+been more to his purpose than this one. He was large
+and easy&mdash;that was the benediction; he knew what
+mattered and what didn't; he distinguished between
+the essence and the shell, the just grounds and the
+unjust for fussing. One was thus&mdash;if one were concerned
+with him or exposed to him at all&mdash;in his
+hands for whatever he should do, and not much less
+affected by his mercy than one might have been by
+his rigour. The grand thing&mdash;it did come to that&mdash;was
+the way he carried off, as one might fairly
+call it, the business of making odd things natural.
+Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have exceeded
+the unexplained oddity, between them, of
+Densher's now complete detachment from the poor
+ladies at the palace; nothing could have exceeded
+the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
+abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done
+when they met at the station, nothing whatever of
+anything; and the effect of it, Densher would have
+said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
+doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as
+one might have taken a dose&mdash;except that the cue
+was pleasant in the taking.
+</p><p>
+That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion,
+why for the three or four days Densher again
+and again did so leave it; merely wondering a little, at
+the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced term
+of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion,
+the Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance
+at the station, our friend had to recognise the
+drop of his own borrowed ease, the result, naturally
+enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
+was that, on such lines as had served them, the
+support was Sir Luke's personal presence. Would he
+go without leaving some substitute for that?&mdash;and
+without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
+errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at
+the hour of his call, and what was truly prodigious at
+so supreme a moment was that&mdash;as had immediately
+to appear&mdash;no gleam of light on what he had been
+living with for a week found its way out of him. What
+he had been doing was proof of a huge interest as well
+as of a huge fee; yet when the Leporelli gondola again,
+and somewhat tardily, approached, his companion,
+watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed
+face as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from
+the highest authority, on the subject of the relevant, so
+that its blankness affected Densher of a sudden almost
+as a cruelty, feeling it quite awfully compatible,
+as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
+the suspense continued after they had passed together,
+as time was short, directly into the station, where
+Eugenio, in the field early, was mounting guard over
+the compartment he had secured. The strain, though
+probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple
+of minutes, prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's
+nerves that he involuntarily directed a long
+look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as only Eugenio
+could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the
+time to the right bestowal of his numerous effects,
+about which he was particular, and Densher fairly
+found himself, so far as silence could go, questioning
+the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate
+him now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that
+that personage exactly knew how little he satisfied
+him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir Luke&mdash;to
+the extent of the extraordinary things with which
+his facial habit was compatible. By the time, however,
+that Densher had taken from it all its possessor
+intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
+farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech;
+only on meeting his eyes could our young man see that
+they had never yet so completely looked at him. It
+was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
+one time than at another; but they looked longer, and
+this, even a shade of it, might mean on his part everything.
+It meant, Densher for ten seconds believed,
+that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at last
+spoken made him start.
+</p><p>
+"I shall come back."
+</p><p>
+"Then she's better?"
+</p><p>
+"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke
+repeated without heeding the question. He had
+dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
+still. "I bring you a message from Miss
+Theale," he said as if they hadn't spoken of her.
+"I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
+see her."
+</p><p>
+Densher's rebound from his supposition had a
+violence that his stare betrayed. "She asks me?"
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which
+the guard had closed; but he spoke again as he stood
+at the window, bending a little but not leaning out.
+"She told me she'd like it, and I promised that, as
+I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
+</p><p>
+Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but
+what he took brought the blood into his face quite as
+what he had had to take from Mrs. Stringham. And
+he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"She can receive you."
+</p><p>
+"And you're coming back&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to
+stay. I come to her."
+</p><p>
+"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see&mdash;saw
+the sense of his friend's words and saw beyond it
+as well. What Mrs. Stringham had announced, and
+what he had yet expected not to have to face, <i>had</i>
+then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but
+there it was, and the colourless compact form it was
+now taking&mdash;the tone of one man of the world to another,
+who, after what had happened, would understand&mdash;was
+but the characteristic manner of his appeal.
+Densher was to understand remarkably much;
+and the great thing certainly was to show that he
+did. "I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He
+brought that out, but in his pause, while they continued
+to look at each other, the train had slowly
+creaked into motion. There was time but for one
+more word, and the young man chose it, out of twenty,
+with intense concentration. "Then she's better?"
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better."
+And he kept it at the window while the train
+receded, holding him with it still. It was to be his
+nearest approach to the utter reference they had
+hitherto so successfully avoided. If it stood for everything;
+never had a face had to stand for more. So
+Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply reflected;
+so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss
+it pushed him, even while conscious of retreating
+under the maintained observation of Eugenio.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK TENTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+"Then it has been&mdash;what do you say? a whole
+fortnight?&mdash;without your making a sign?"
+</p><p>
+Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December
+dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time
+he had been back; but he saw with it straightway that
+she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct&mdash;which
+was a system as well&mdash;of not admitting the
+possibility between them of small resentments, of
+trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the
+renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh sight of her
+have stirred him to his depths if something else, something
+no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred
+him still more. It was in seeing her that he felt what
+their interruption had been, and that they met across
+it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in
+time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
+had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were
+as different for her as she herself had immediately
+appeared: which was but his way indeed of taking in,
+with his thrill, that&mdash;even going by the mere first
+look&mdash;she had never been so handsome. That fact
+bloomed for him, in the firelight and lamplight that
+glowed their welcome through the London fog, as the
+flower of her difference; just as her difference itself&mdash;part
+of which was her striking him as older in a degree
+for which no mere couple of months could account&mdash;was
+the fruit of their intimate relation. If
+she was different it was because they had chosen together
+that she should be, and she might now, as a
+proof of their wisdom, their success, of the reality of
+what had happened&mdash;of what in fact, for the spirit
+of each, was still happening&mdash;been showing it to him
+for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered
+days, so still, had been, he was quite aware, the
+first point he should have to tackle; with which consciousness
+indeed he had made a clean breast of it in
+finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to
+his present visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the
+finer way; and it would doubtless have been to be
+noted that he needed no effort not to write to Kate.
+Venice was three weeks behind him&mdash;he had come
+up slowly; but it was still as if even in London he must
+conform to her law. That was exactly how he was
+able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to her
+feeling for the situation and explain his stretched
+delicacy. He had come to tell her everything, so far
+as occasion would serve them; and if nothing was
+more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits, his
+delay to reopen communication had kept pace with
+this resolve, so the inconsequence was doubtless at
+bottom but one of the elements of intensity. He was
+gathering everything up, everything he should tell
+her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he
+felt on the spot, he couldn't have brought it all with
+him before this afternoon. He <i>had</i> brought it, to the
+last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't be
+hard&mdash;as he in fact found&mdash;to produce, for Kate's
+understanding, his first reason.
+</p><p>
+"A fortnight, yes&mdash;it was a fortnight Friday; but
+I've only been keeping in, you see, with our wonderful
+system." He was so easily justified as that this
+of itself plainly enough prevented her saying she
+didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly
+still vivid for her; and such a gage of its equal vividness
+for himself was precisely what she must have
+asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
+remark that on the very face of it, she would remember,
+their wonderful system attached no premium to
+rapidities of transition. "I couldn't quite&mdash;don't
+you know?&mdash;take my rebound with a rush; and I
+suppose I've been instinctively hanging off to minimise,
+for you as well as for myself, the appearances
+of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I knew
+you'd understand." It was presently as if she really
+understood so well that she almost appealed from his
+insistence&mdash;yet looking at him too, he was not unconscious,
+as if this mastery of fitnesses was a strong
+sign for her of what she had done to him. He might
+have struck her as expert for contingencies in the very
+degree of her having in Venice struck <i>him</i> as expert.
+He smiled over his plea for a renewal with stages and
+steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and graduated;
+though&mdash;finely as she must respond&mdash;she
+met the smile but as she had met his entrance five
+minutes before. Her soft gravity at that moment&mdash;which
+was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
+charged with life to the brim and wishing
+not to overflow&mdash;had not qualified her welcome;
+what had done this being much more the presence in
+the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman
+who had introduced him and who had been interrupted
+in preparing the tea-table.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to
+appoint the tea-hour, five o'clock on Sunday, for his
+seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired him, without
+a signature, "Come on Sunday <i>before</i> tea&mdash;about a
+quarter of an hour, which will help us"; and he had
+arrived therefore scrupulously at twenty minutes to
+five. Kate was alone in the room and hadn't delayed
+to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily
+gathered, was to be, for the interval&mdash;not long but
+precious&mdash;engaged with an old servant, retired and
+pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
+was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs.
+They were to have the scrap of time, after the withdrawal
+of the footman, to themselves, and there was
+a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
+spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety
+of shades, it proclaimed itself indeed precious. And
+all without prejudice&mdash;that was what kept it noble&mdash;to
+Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful self-command.
+If he had his discretion she had her perfect
+manner, which was <i>her</i> decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he
+had, to finish with the question of his delay, furthermore
+observed, Mrs. Stringham would have written
+to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so
+that it wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them.
+They'd know he was no longer there.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, we've known it."
+</p><p>
+"And you continue to hear?"
+</p><p>
+"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I
+mean Aunt Maud does."
+</p><p>
+"Then you've recent news?"
+</p><p>
+Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day
+or two I believe. But haven't <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I've heard nothing." And it was now that
+he felt how much he had to tell her. "I don't get
+letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder does." With
+which he added: "Then of course you know." He
+waited as if she would show what she knew; but she
+only showed in silence the dawn of a surprise that she
+couldn't control. There was nothing but for him to
+ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
+</p><p>
+Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you <i>know?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"How should I, my dear&mdash;in the absence of everything?"
+And he himself stared as for light. "She's
+dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she slowly
+shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
+</p><p>
+It came out in Kate's face that there were several
+questions on her lips, but the one she presently put
+was: "Is it very terrible?"
+</p><p>
+"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly
+dying?" He had to think a moment. "Well, yes&mdash;since
+you ask me: very terrible to <i>me</i>&mdash;so far as,
+before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't
+think," he went on, "that&mdash;though I'll try&mdash;I <i>can</i>
+quite tell you what it was, what it is, for me. That's
+why I probably just sounded to you," he explained,
+"as if I hoped it might be over."
+</p><p>
+She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this
+time saw that, so far as telling her all was concerned,
+she would be divided between the wish and the reluctance
+to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
+unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing
+scruple of a respect for misfortune. The more she
+studied him too&mdash;and he had never so felt her closely
+attached to his face&mdash;the more the choice of an attitude
+would become impossible to her. There would
+simply be a feeling uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't
+be eagerness. This perception grew in him fast,
+and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment
+the quick forecast of her possibly breaking out
+at him, should he go too far, with a wonderful:
+"What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
+the sound&mdash;wouldn't it be open to him fairly to
+bring that out himself?&mdash;of a repudiation, for pity
+and almost for shame, of everything that in Venice had
+passed between them. Not that she would confess to
+any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
+or horror give her away; but it was in the air
+for him&mdash;yes&mdash;that she wouldn't want details, that
+she positively wouldn't take them, and that, if he
+would generously understand it from her, she would
+prefer to keep him down. Nothing, however, was
+more definite for him than that at the same time he
+must remain down but so far as it suited him. Something
+rose strong within him against his not being free
+with her. She had been free enough about it all, three
+months before, with <i>him</i>. That was what she was at
+present only in the sense of treating him handsomely.
+"I can believe," she said with perfect consideration,
+"how dreadful for you much of it must have
+been."
+</p><p>
+He didn't however take this up; there were things
+about which he wished first to be clear. "There's
+no other possibility, by what you now know? I mean
+for her life." And he had just to insist&mdash;she would
+say as little as she could. "She <i>is</i> dying?"
+</p><p>
+"She's dying."
+</p><p>
+It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that
+Lancaster Gate could make him any surer; yet what
+in the world, in the matter of Milly, wasn't strange?
+Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour&mdash;his
+present as well as his past. He could but do as he
+must. "Has Sir Luke Strett," he asked, "gone back
+to her?"
+</p><p>
+"I believe he's there now."
+</p><p>
+"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
+</p><p>
+She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to
+be; but she spoke otherwise after a minute. "You
+won't know, unless you've perhaps seen him yourself,
+that Aunt Maud has been to him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add
+to it.
+</p><p>
+"For real news," Kate herself after an instant
+added.
+</p><p>
+"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
+</p><p>
+"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt
+Maud's trying again three days ago to see him that
+she heard at his house of his having gone. He had
+started I believe some days before."
+</p><p>
+"And won't then by this time be back?"
+</p><p>
+Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to
+know."
+</p><p>
+"He won't leave her then"&mdash;Densher had turned
+it over&mdash;"while she lives. He'll stay to the end.
+He's magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"I think <i>she</i> is," said Kate.
+</p><p>
+It had made them again look at each other long;
+and what it drew from him rather oddly was: "Oh
+you don't know!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, she's after all my friend."
+</p><p>
+It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the
+answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned
+with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of
+her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of
+it. You <i>were</i> sure of it."
+</p><p>
+"Of course I was sure of it."
+</p><p>
+And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which
+Densher, however, presently broke. "If you don't
+think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what do you think
+of Lord Mark's?"
+</p><p>
+She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
+</p><p>
+"You haven't seen him?"
+</p><p>
+"Not since he saw her."
+</p><p>
+"You've known then of his seeing her?"
+</p><p>
+"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"And have you known," Densher went on, "the
+rest?"
+</p><p>
+Kate wondered. "What rest?"
+</p><p>
+"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't
+stand&mdash;it was what then took place that simply
+killed her."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had
+turned pale, and he saw that, whatever her degree of
+ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't put on.
+"Mrs. Stringham hasn't said <i>that</i>."
+</p><p>
+He observed none the less that she didn't ask what
+had then taken place; and he went on with his contribution
+to her knowledge. "The way it affected her was
+that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
+all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a
+vagueness that made him pursue.
+</p><p>
+"One can see now that she was living by will&mdash;which
+was very much what you originally told me of
+her."
+</p><p>
+"I remember. That was it."
+</p><p>
+"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke
+down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow's
+dastardly stroke. He told her, the scoundrel,
+that you and I are secretly engaged."
+</p><p>
+Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know
+it!"
+</p><p>
+"That doesn't matter. <i>She</i> did by the time he had
+left her. Besides," Densher added, "he does know
+it. When," he continued, "did you last see him?"
+</p><p>
+But she was lost now in the picture before her.
+"<i>That</i> was what made her worse?"
+</p><p>
+He watched her take it in&mdash;it so added to her
+sombre beauty. Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham
+had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style;
+so that he continued consistently: "She learned it, you
+see, too soon&mdash;since of course one's idea had been
+that she might never even learn it at all. And she <i>had</i>
+felt sure&mdash;through everything we had done&mdash;of
+there not being between us, so far at least as you were
+concerned, anything she need regard as a warning."
+</p><p>
+She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't
+through anything <i>you</i> did&mdash;whatever that may have
+been&mdash;that she gained her certainty. It was by the
+conviction she got from me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you
+to take your share!"
+</p><p>
+"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of
+denying it?"
+</p><p>
+Her look and her tone made him for the instant
+regret his comment, which indeed had been the first
+that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what
+they would have called between them her straightness.
+Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty
+could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside
+the mark. "Of course I don't suppose anything
+but that we're together in our recognitions, our responsibilities&mdash;whatever
+we choose to call them. It
+isn't a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing
+invidiously among such impressions as
+it was our idea to give."
+</p><p>
+"It wasn't <i>your</i> idea to give impressions," said Kate.
+</p><p>
+He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its
+strained character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
+</p><p>
+It was perhaps not as going into it that she had
+another idea&mdash;an idea born, she showed, of the
+vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have been
+possible then to deny the truth of the information?
+I mean of Lord Mark's."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
+</p><p>
+"Why for you."
+</p><p>
+"To tell her he lied?"
+</p><p>
+"To tell her he's mistaken."
+</p><p>
+Densher stared&mdash;he was stupefied; the "possible"
+thus glanced at by Kate being exactly the alternative
+he had had to face in Venice and to put utterly
+away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a
+difference in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you
+mean, to do it? We <i>are</i>, my dear child," he said, "I
+suppose, still engaged."
+</p><p>
+"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her
+life&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of
+course, it was to be remembered, she had always
+simplified, and it brought back his sense of the degree
+in which, to her energy as compared with his
+own, many things were easy; the very sense that so
+often before had moved him to admiration. "Well,
+if you must know&mdash;and I want you to be clear about
+it&mdash;I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her
+face. The question of it&mdash;<i>as</i> possibly saving her&mdash;was
+put to me definitely enough; but to turn it
+over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+</p><p>
+"You mean she would have had no faith in your
+correction?" She had spoken with a promptitude
+that affected him of a sudden as almost glib; but he
+himself paused with the overweight of all he meant,
+and she meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
+</p><p>
+"I hadn't even a chance."
+</p><p>
+Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner
+of at once having it all before her and yet keeping
+it all at its distance. "She wouldn't see you?"
+</p><p>
+"Not after your friend had been with her."
+</p><p>
+She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
+</p><p>
+It made him also think, but with a difference.
+"She had turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+This again for a moment hushed her, and they
+were both too grave now for parenthetic pity. But
+her interest came out for at least the minimum of
+light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
+</p><p>
+"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was
+miserably, prohibitively ill."
+</p><p>
+"Well, that was what she had been before."
+</p><p>
+"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted,
+"it didn't; and I don't pretend that she's not
+magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
+</p><p>
+He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear.
+But that's how it is," he wound up; "and there we
+are."
+</p><p>
+His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps
+sound him much more deeply, asking him above
+all two or three specific things. He had fairly fancied
+her even wanting to know and trying to find out how
+far, as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone,
+and how near, by the same token, they had come. He
+had asked himself if he were prepared to hear her do
+that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
+of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared
+for her ascertaining if her two or three prophecies
+had found time to be made true? He had fairly believed
+himself ready to say whether or no the overture
+on Milly's part promised according to the boldest of
+them had taken place. But what was in fact blessedly
+coming to him was that so far as such things were
+concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's
+pressure on the question of what had taken place
+remained so admirably general that even her present
+enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then that
+after Lord Mark's interference you never again
+met?"
+</p><p>
+It was what he had been all the while coming to.
+"No; we met once&mdash;so far as it could be called a
+meeting. I had stayed&mdash;I didn't come away."
+</p><p>
+"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely"&mdash;he felt himself wonderful; "and I
+wanted to be no less. She sent for me, I went to her,
+and that night I left Venice."
+</p><p>
+His companion waited. "Wouldn't <i>that</i> then have
+been your chance?"
+</p><p>
+"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if
+before her there I had wanted to. What did it signify
+either? She was dying."
+</p><p>
+"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not
+just <i>because</i> she was dying?" She had however
+all her discretion. "But of course I know that seeing
+her you could judge."
+</p><p>
+"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see
+her! If I had denied you moreover," Densher said
+with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to it."
+</p><p>
+She took for a moment the intention of his face.
+"You mean that to convince her you'd have insisted
+or somehow proved&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"I mean that to convince <i>you</i> I'd have insisted or
+somehow proved&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince
+'me'?"
+</p><p>
+"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions,
+only to take it back afterwards."
+</p><p>
+With this quickly light came for her, and with it
+also her colour flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with
+me to make your denial a truth? You'd have 'chucked'
+me"&mdash;she embraced it perfectly&mdash;"to save your
+conscience?"
+</p><p>
+"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton
+Densher. "So you see how right I was not to
+commit myself, and how little I could dream of it.
+If it ever again appears to you that I <i>might</i> have done
+so, remember what I say."
+</p><p>
+Kate again considered, but not with the effect at
+once to which he pointed. "You've fallen in love
+with her."
+</p><p>
+"Well then say so&mdash;with a dying woman. Why
+need you mind and what does it matter?"
+</p><p>
+It came from him, the question, straight out of the
+intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity
+into which, from the first, from his entering the room,
+they had found themselves thrown; but it gave them
+their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is
+dead! Mrs. Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph."
+After which, in a tone still different, "For
+what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
+</p><p>
+"It was what I tried to make out before I went.
+I must tell you moreover that I had no doubt of its
+really being to give me, as you say, a chance. She
+believed, I suppose, that I <i>might</i> deny; and what, to
+my own mind, was before me in going to her was the
+certainty that she'd put me to my test. She wanted
+from my own lips&mdash;so I saw it&mdash;the truth. But I
+was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked
+me for it."
+</p><p>
+"She never wanted the truth"&mdash;Kate had a high
+headshake. "She wanted <i>you</i>. She would have
+taken from you what you could give her and been
+glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might
+have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you
+and felt you lie, and yet&mdash;since it was all for tenderness&mdash;she
+would have thanked you and blessed
+you and clung to you but the more. For that was
+your strength, my dear man&mdash;that she loves you
+with passion."
+</p><p>
+"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
+</p><p>
+"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was
+it to ask of you?" And then&mdash;quite without irony&mdash;as
+he waited a moment to say: "Was it just once
+more to look at you?"
+</p><p>
+"She had nothing to ask of me&mdash;nothing, that is,
+but not to stay any longer. She did to that extent
+want to see me. She had supposed at first&mdash;after
+he had been with her&mdash;that I had seen the propriety
+of taking myself off. Then since I hadn't&mdash;seeing
+my propriety as I did in another way&mdash;she found,
+days later, that I was still there. This," said Densher,
+"affected her."
+</p><p>
+"Of course it affected her."
+</p><p>
+Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib.
+"If it was somehow for <i>her</i> I was still staying, she
+wished that to end, she wished me to know how little
+there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
+wished herself to tell me so."
+</p><p>
+"And she did tell you so?"
+</p><p>
+"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
+</p><p>
+"And as <i>you</i> of course did."
+</p><p>
+"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration;
+"not as I did. I hadn't desired it in the
+least."
+</p><p>
+"You only went to oblige her?"
+</p><p>
+"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
+</p><p>
+"'Glad'?"&mdash;he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
+</p><p>
+"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it
+especially in having stayed. But that was all?" Kate
+went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
+</p><p>
+"That was really all&mdash;and in perfect kindness."
+</p><p>
+"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she
+asked of you such a&mdash;well, such an effort. That you
+mustn't wait&mdash;that was the point," Kate added&mdash;"to
+see her die."
+</p><p>
+"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
+</p><p>
+He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second.
+I paid her the visit&mdash;just like another."
+</p><p>
+"Like another person?"
+</p><p>
+"Like another visit."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the
+effect of slightly arresting his speech&mdash;an arrest she
+took advantage of to continue; making with it indeed
+her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against
+which he had braced himself. "Did she receive you&mdash;in
+her condition&mdash;in her room?"
+</p><p>
+"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received
+me just as usual: in that glorious great <i>salone</i>, in the
+dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner
+of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
+the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you
+remember what you originally said to me of her?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I've said so many things."
+</p><p>
+"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she
+wouldn't taste of medicine. Well, she didn't."
+</p><p>
+"So that it was really almost happy?"
+</p><p>
+It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he
+partly was in feeling how nobody but Kate could
+have invested such a question with the tone that was
+perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently
+waited. "I don't think I can attempt to say now what
+it was. Some day&mdash;perhaps. For it would be worth
+it for us."
+</p><p>
+"Some day&mdash;certainly." She seemed to record
+the promise. Yet she spoke again abruptly. "She'll
+recover."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
+</p><p>
+She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she
+show anything of her feeling? I mean," Kate explained,
+"of her feeling of having been misled."
+</p><p>
+She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just
+mentioned that he would have rather to glide. "She
+showed nothing but her beauty and her strength."
+</p><p>
+"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of
+her strength?"
+</p><p>
+He seemed to look about for a use he could name;
+but he had soon given it up. "She must die, my dear,
+in her own extraordinary way."
+</p><p>
+"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you
+have that she was ever alienated."
+</p><p>
+"I have the proof that she refused for days and days
+to see me."
+</p><p>
+"But she was ill."
+</p><p>
+"That hadn't prevented her&mdash;as you yourself a
+moment ago said&mdash;during the previous time. If it
+had been only illness it would have made no difference
+with her."
+</p><p>
+"She would still have received you?"
+</p><p>
+"She would still have received me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from
+Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+"Because you've told her?"
+</p><p>
+"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her
+nothing. She's a person who does see."
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too.
+She as well is prodigious. You see what interest in a
+man does. It does it all round. So you needn't be
+afraid."
+</p><p>
+"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+Kate moved from her place then, looking at the
+clock, which marked five. She gave her attention to
+the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge silver kettle,
+which had been exposed to its lamp and which she
+had not soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard.
+"Well, it's all most wonderful!" she exclaimed as she
+rather too profusely&mdash;a sign her friend noticed&mdash;ladled
+tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
+this occupation, coming nearer the table while she
+put in the steaming water. "You'll have some?"
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant&mdash;the
+deprecation, by their old law, of betrayals of the
+intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
+done it!"
+</p><p>
+"Humbugged her?"
+</p><p>
+"Squared her. You've pleased her."
+</p><p>
+Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was
+thinking of something else, and his thought in a moment
+came out. "What a brute then I must be!"
+</p><p>
+"A brute&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"To have pleased so many people."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've
+done it to please <i>me</i>." But she was already, with her
+gleam, reverting a little. "What I don't understand is&mdash;won't
+you have any sugar?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, please."
+</p><p>
+"What I don't understand," she went on when she
+had helped him, "is what it was that had occurred to
+bring her round again. If she gave you up for days
+and days, what brought her back to you?"
+</p><p>
+She asked the question with her own cup in her
+hand, but it found him ready enough in spite of his
+sense of the ironic oddity of their going into it over the
+tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
+back. His visit, his presence there did it."
+</p><p>
+"He brought her back then to life."
+</p><p>
+"Well, to what I saw."
+</p><p>
+"And by interceding for you?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know
+what he did."
+</p><p>
+Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
+</p><p>
+"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically
+didn't speak of her."
+</p><p>
+Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
+</p><p>
+"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been
+before&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
+</p><p>
+"He understood," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+"But understood what?"
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully
+well."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, and made <i>her</i> understand? I see," she went
+on as he said nothing. "But how did he convince
+her?"
+</p><p>
+Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You
+must ask Sir Luke."
+</p><p>
+He stood looking at the fire and there was a time
+without sound. "The great thing," Kate then resumed,
+"is that she's satisfied. Which," she continued,
+looking across at him, "is what I've worked
+for."
+</p><p>
+"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, at peace with you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the
+fire.
+</p><p>
+"The peace of having loved."
+</p><p>
+He raised his eyes to her. "Is <i>that</i> peace?"
+</p><p>
+"Of having <i>been</i> loved," she went on. "That is.
+Of having," she wound up, "realised her passion. She
+wanted nothing more. She has had <i>all</i> she wanted."
+</p><p>
+Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a
+beautiful authority that he could for the time meet
+with no words. He could only again look at her,
+though with the sense in so doing that he made her
+more than he intended take his silence for assent.
+Quite indeed as if she did so take it she quitted the
+table and came to the fire. "You may think it hideous
+that I should now, that I should <i>yet</i>"&mdash;she made a
+point of the word&mdash;"pretend to draw conclusions.
+But we've not failed."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he only again murmured.
+</p><p>
+She was once more close to him, close as she had
+been the day she came to him in Venice, the quickly
+returning memory of which intensified and enriched
+the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions
+nothing that she said, and what she said was, with
+it, visibly, a fruit of that knowledge. "We've succeeded."
+She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
+"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made
+him wince, but she insisted. "And you won't have
+loved <i>me</i>."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He was to remain for several days under the deep
+impression of this inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged
+from moment to moment, but interrupted at
+its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
+Maud, who found them standing together near the
+fire. The bearings of the colloquy, however, sharp
+as they were, were less sharp to his intelligence,
+strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs.
+Lowder alone for which she soon gave him&mdash;or for
+which perhaps rather Kate gave him&mdash;full occasion.
+What had happened on her at last joining them was
+to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring
+to have him to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the
+opening of the door, had fallen apart with a certain
+suddenness, so that she had turned her hard fine eyes
+from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself,
+to his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's
+rare alertness. She instantly spoke to her
+aunt of what had first been uppermost for herself,
+inviting her thereby intimately to join them, and doing
+it the more happily also, no doubt, because the
+fact she resentfully named gave her ample support.
+"Had you quite understood, my dear, that it's full
+three weeks&mdash;?" And she effaced herself as if to
+leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view
+with this extravagance. Densher of course straightway
+noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was
+to make, no less, all of it he could; and their tracks,
+as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time
+their hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission,
+the measure of his scant eagerness. Kate
+had moved away as if no great showing were needed
+for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She
+had been entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf&mdash;a
+visitor she had been at one time suspected
+of favouring too much and who had now come back
+to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It
+wasn't that the fate of the other person, her exquisite
+friend, didn't, in its tragic turn, also concern herself:
+it was only that her acceptance of Mr. Densher as a
+source of information could scarcely help having an
+awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under
+Densher's eyes, and he marvelled on his side at the
+instant creation. It served her as the fine cloud that
+hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man
+was but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of
+his visit she had, for consideration, melted into it and
+out of sight.
+</p><p>
+He was taken up promptly with another matter&mdash;the
+truth of the remarkable difference, neither
+more nor less, that the events of Venice had introduced
+into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these
+weeks of their separation had caused quite richly to
+ripen for him. She had not sat down to her tea-table
+before he felt himself on terms with her that were
+absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second
+cup without her seeming herself, and quite wittingly,
+so to define and establish them. She regretted, but
+she quite understood, that what was taking place had
+obliged him to hang off; they had&mdash;after hearing
+of him from poor Susan as gone&mdash;been hoping for
+an early sight of him; they would have been interested,
+naturally, in his arriving straight from the scene. Yet
+she needed no reminder that the scene precisely&mdash;by
+which she meant the tragedy that had so detained and
+absorbed him, the memory, the shadow, the sorrow
+of it&mdash;was what marked him for unsociability. She
+thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the guise
+in which she had now adopted him, and it was the
+element of truth in the character that he found himself,
+for his own part, adopting. She treated him as
+blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
+and for him to feel that this opened for him a new
+chapter of frankness with her he scarce had also to
+perceive how it smoothed his approaches to Kate. It
+made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to
+be; it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association
+positively hostile to any other legend. It was quickly
+vivid to him that, were he minded, he could "work"
+this association: he had but to use the house freely for
+his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be
+out of it. Stranger than anything moreover was to be
+the way that by the end of a week he stood convicted
+to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lowder's
+view. He had somehow met it at a point that had
+brought him on&mdash;brought him on a distance that he
+couldn't again retrace. He had private hours of
+wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
+others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use.
+His only want of candour was Aunt Maud's wealth
+of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the
+worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
+himself&mdash;everything was too real; but it was none
+the less not false that he <i>had</i> been through a mill.
+</p><p>
+It was in particular not false for instance that when
+she had said to him, on the Sunday, almost cosily,
+from her sofa behind the tea, "I want you not to
+doubt, you poor dear, that I'm <i>with</i> you to the end!"
+his meeting her halfway had been the only course
+open to him. She was with him to the end&mdash;or she
+might be&mdash;in a way Kate wasn't; and even if it literally
+made her society meanwhile more soothing he
+must just brush away the question of why it shouldn't.
+Was he professing to her in any degree the possession
+of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in the world
+<i>could</i> he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his
+greatest reality? Such only was at bottom what there
+was between them, and two or three times over it
+made the hour pass. These were occasions&mdash;two
+and a scrap&mdash;on which he had come and gone without
+mention of Kate. Now that almost as never yet
+he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn of their
+affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn
+that when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly
+nothing else seemed to come up. He called upon her
+almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
+queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should
+require it. He liked her better; he was really behaving,
+he had occasion to say to himself, as if he liked
+her best. The thing was absolutely that she met <i>him</i>
+halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her
+vision, than her loquacity, than her sympathy. It
+appeared to gratify, to satisfy her to see him as he
+was; that too had its effect. It was all of course the
+last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a
+change by which he was completely <i>free</i> with this
+lady; and it wouldn't indeed have come about if&mdash;for
+another monstrosity&mdash;he hadn't ceased to be
+free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in
+especial of being alone with her he found himself
+uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible
+of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder
+gave him in fact, on the ground of what he must keep
+from her, but one uneasy moment. That was when,
+on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed herself,
+she referred to her regret that he mightn't have
+stayed to the end. He found his reason difficult to
+give her, but she came after all to his help.
+</p><p>
+"You simply couldn't stand it?"
+</p><p>
+"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see&mdash;!"
+But he paused.
+</p><p>
+"Besides what?" He had been going to say more&mdash;then
+he saw dangers; luckily however she had again
+assisted him. "Besides&mdash;oh I know!&mdash;men haven't,
+in many relations, the courage of women."
+</p><p>
+"They haven't the courage of women."
+</p><p>
+"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared&mdash;"if
+we hadn't come away for the special reason that
+you so frankly appreciated."
+</p><p>
+Densher had said nothing about his appreciation:
+hadn't his behaviour since the hour itself sufficiently
+shown it? But he presently said&mdash;he couldn't help
+going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss
+Croy would have stayed." And he saw again into the
+bargain what a marvel was Susan Shepherd. She did
+nothing but protect him&mdash;she had done nothing but
+keep it up. In copious communication with the friend
+of her youth she had yet, it was plain, favoured this
+lady with nothing that compromised him. Milly's
+act of renouncement she had described but as a change
+for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent,
+as even without her it might be known, so that
+she mustn't appear to conceal it; but she had suppressed
+explanations and connexions, and indeed,
+for all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented
+commendable fictions. Thus it was absolutely that
+he was at his ease. Thus it was that, shaking for ever,
+in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
+leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such
+comfort as came. She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud,
+questions that Kate hadn't; but this was just the
+difference, that from her he positively liked them.
+He had taken with himself on leaving Venice the
+resolution to regard Milly as already dead to him&mdash;that
+being for his spirit the only thinkable way to
+pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it
+was what suited her, and it wasn't for him to go, as
+they said in America, behind this; which imposed on
+him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
+interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and
+he would have nothing to do with it; the last thing
+he wished was to be unconscious of her&mdash;what he
+wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
+for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to
+hang about in London while the pain went on&mdash;what
+would that do but make his days impossible?
+His scheme was accordingly to convince himself&mdash;and
+by some art about which he was vague&mdash;that the
+sense of waiting had passed. "What in fact," he
+restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
+it? Let me assume the thing actually over&mdash;as it
+at any moment may be&mdash;and I become good again
+for something at least to somebody. I'm good, as it is,
+for nothing to anybody, least of all to <i>her</i>." He consequently
+tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking
+grimly about was a trial; but his plan was carried
+out, it may well be guessed, neither with marked success
+nor with marked consistency. The days, whether
+lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression
+of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life
+itself was the taste of suspense. That he <i>was</i> waiting
+was in short at the bottom of everything; and it required
+no great sifting presently to feel that if he took
+so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this
+was just for that reason.
+</p><p>
+She helped him to hold out, all the while that she
+was subtle enough&mdash;and he could see her divine it
+as what he wanted&mdash;not to insist on the actuality of
+their tension. His nearest approach to success was
+thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in
+default of any one better; her company eased his
+nerves even while they pretended together that they
+had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying
+girl in the past tense; they said no worse of her than
+that she had <i>been</i> stupendous. On the other hand,
+however&mdash;and this was what wasn't for Densher
+pure peace&mdash;they insisted enough that stupendous
+was the word. It was the thing, this recognition, that
+kept him most quiet; he came to it with her repeatedly;
+talking about it against time and, in particular, we
+have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
+as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost
+as if she herself enjoyed the perfection of the pathos;
+she sat there before the scene, as he couldn't help
+giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
+might have sat, during a play that made people cry,
+in the pit or the family-circle. What most deeply
+stirred her was the way the poor girl must have wanted
+to live.
+</p><p>
+"Ah yes indeed&mdash;she did, she did: why in pity
+shouldn't she, with everything to fill her world? The
+mere <i>money</i> of her, the darling, if it isn't too disgusting
+at such a time to mention that&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud mentioned it&mdash;and Densher quite
+understood&mdash;but as fairly giving poetry to the life
+Milly clung to: a view of the "might have been"
+before which the good lady was hushed anew to
+tears. She had had her own vision of these possibilities,
+and her own social use for them, and since
+Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her
+about them, what was the cruelty of the event but a
+cruelty, of a sort, to herself? That came out when
+he named, as <i>the</i> horrible thing to know, the fact of
+their young friend's unapproachable terror of the
+end, keep it down though she would; coming out
+therefore often, since in so naming it he found the
+strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its vividness,
+as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
+shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream
+of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking
+indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might
+imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in
+the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door
+from some object clutched for resistance. Densher,
+in a cold moment, so pictured the case for Mrs. Lowder,
+but no moment cold enough had yet come to
+make him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front
+so presented that had been, in Milly, heroic; presented
+with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud by this
+time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her.
+He had let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory,
+how he had been received on that occasion: with
+a positive effect&mdash;since she was indeed so perfectly
+the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her&mdash;of
+princely state.
+</p><p>
+Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques
+and cherubs, all gaiety and gilt, and that was
+warm at that hour too with a wealth of autumn sun,
+the state in question had been maintained and the
+situation&mdash;well, Densher said for the convenience of
+exquisite London gossip, sublime. The gossip&mdash;for
+it came to as much at Lancaster Gate&mdash;wasn't the
+less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
+the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much
+drawn aside. He himself for that matter took in the
+scene again at moments as from the page of a book.
+He saw a young man far off and in a relation inconceivable,
+saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath,
+but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something
+immense and holding himself painfully together
+not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen
+was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
+and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher
+had known. He had known then at the same time
+what the young man had been conscious of, and he was
+to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
+lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew
+he had gathered all&mdash;that passed between them
+mutely as in the intervals of their associated gaze they
+exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far as
+association could go, but it was far enough when
+she knew the essence. The essence was that something
+had happened to him too beautiful and too
+sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
+sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't
+coherently express. It would have required an
+explanation&mdash;fatal to Mrs. Lowder's faith in him&mdash;of
+the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
+scene, they just stood at the door. They had
+the sense of the presence within&mdash;they felt the
+charged stillness; after which, their association deepened
+by it, they turned together away.
+</p><p>
+That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became
+by the end of a week the very principle of reaction:
+so that he woke up one morning with such a sense
+of having played a part as he needed self-respect
+to gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster
+Gate that, as a haunted man&mdash;a man haunted with
+a memory&mdash;he was harmless; but the degree to
+which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained
+his new aspect laid upon him practically the weight
+of a declaration. What he hadn't in the least stated
+her own manner was perpetually stating; it was as
+haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting
+him down. There offered itself however to his
+purpose such an element as plain honesty, and he had
+embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper corrective.
+They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas
+this year was, as in the London of so many other
+years, disconcertingly mild; the still air was soft, the
+thick light was grey, the great town looked empty,
+and in the Park, where the grass was green, where
+the sheep browsed, where the birds multitudinously
+twittered, the straight walks lent themselves to slowness
+and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it fast
+this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour,
+and then went with it to the nearest post-office
+and fixed it fast in a telegram; thinking of it moreover
+as a sacrifice only because he had, for reasons,
+felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
+to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than
+on the occasion of past appeals; which was precisely
+why he&mdash;perhaps innocently&mdash;made his telegram
+persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
+for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic;
+but there was a good deal of it in one way and another,
+representing as it did a rich impulse and costing
+him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
+later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he
+measured watchfully one of their old alleys, he might
+have been supposed by a cynical critic to be reckoning
+his chance of getting his money back. He was
+waiting&mdash;but he had waited of old; Lancaster Gate
+as a danger was practically at hand&mdash;but she had
+risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller now,
+with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which
+indeed he was graver as he lingered and looked out.
+</p><p>
+Kate came at last by the way he had thought least
+likely, came as if she had started from the Marble
+Arch; but her advent was response&mdash;that was the
+great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable
+to him, even after Aunt Maud's responses,
+as nothing had been since his return to London. She
+had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
+begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct
+of what he might be again intending to press upon
+her she had decided&mdash;though not with ease&mdash;to deprive
+him of his chance. He would have of course,
+she knew, other chances, but she perhaps saw the
+present as offering her special danger. This, in fact,
+Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he had
+so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he
+waited, in all that the conditions had to say to him
+of their simpler and better time. The shortest day
+of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
+place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much
+to their purpose as the days of sunny afternoons
+when they had taken their first trysts. This and
+that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare
+boughs over the couple of chairs in which they had
+sat of old and in which&mdash;for they really could sit
+down again&mdash;they might recover the clearness of
+their prime. It was to all intents however this very
+reference that showed itself in Kate's face as, with
+her swift motion, she came toward him. It helped
+him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
+nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only
+by showing him afresh how terribly well she looked.
+It had been all along, he certainly remembered, a
+phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her, at
+particular moments, handsomer than ever before;
+one of these for instance being still present to him
+as her entrance, under her aunt's eyes, at Lancaster
+Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
+from America; and another her aspect on the same
+spot two Sundays ago&mdash;the light in which she struck
+the eyes he had brought back from Venice. In the
+course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got
+it the other times, his apprehension of the special
+stamp of the fortune of the moment.
+</p><p>
+Whatever it had been determined by as the different
+hours recurred to him, it took on at present a
+prompt connexion with an effect produced for him in
+truth more than once during the past week, only now
+much intensified. This effect he had already noted
+and named: it was that of the attitude assumed by
+his friend in the presence of the degree of response
+on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she
+couldn't possibly have failed to notice. She <i>had</i>
+noticed it, and she had beautifully shown him so;
+wearing in its honour the finest shade of studied serenity,
+a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of
+time. Everything of course was relative, with the
+shadow they were living under; but her condonation
+of the way in which he now, for confidence, distinguished
+Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer.
+She had so by her own air consecrated the distinction,
+invidious in respect to herself though it might be; and
+nothing, really, more than this demonstration, could
+have given him had he still wanted it the measure of
+her superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this
+superiority alone that on the winter noon gave smooth
+decision to her step and charming courage to her
+eyes&mdash;a courage that deepened in them when he had
+presently got to what he did want. He had delayed
+after she had joined him not much more than long
+enough for him to say to her, drawing her hand into
+his arm and turning off where they had turned of old,
+that he wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments
+of not quite believing he should ever again be
+so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
+whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own
+belief was in high happiness for them if they would
+only have patience; though nothing at the same time
+could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was
+only make-believe of course, with what had taken
+place for them, that they couldn't meet at home; she
+spoke of their opportunities as suffering at no point.
+He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished
+the present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot,
+beneath a great wintry tree, he let his entreaty come
+sharp.
+</p><p>
+"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost.
+We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our feeling <i>for</i>
+ourselves and for each other, not to wait another day.
+Our marriage will&mdash;fundamentally, somehow, don't
+you see?&mdash;right everything that's wrong, and I
+can't express to you my impatience. We've only to
+announce it&mdash;and it takes off the weight."
+</p><p>
+"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if
+not understanding, though she had listened to him
+without confusion.
+</p><p>
+"To accomplish it then&mdash;to-morrow if you will;
+<i>do</i> it and announce it as done. That's the least part
+of it&mdash;after it nothing will matter. We shall be so
+right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
+wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness.
+It will seem a bad dream."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him without flinching&mdash;with the
+look she had brought at his call; but he felt now the
+strange chill of her brightness. "My dear man, what
+has happened to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, that I can bear it no longer. <i>That's</i> simply
+what has happened. Something has snapped, has
+broken in me, and here I am. It's <i>as</i> I am that you
+must have me."
+</p><p>
+He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it;
+but he saw her also not consider it. Yet he saw her,
+felt her, further&mdash;he heard her, with her clear voice&mdash;try
+to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see,
+you know, what has changed." She had a large
+strange smile. "We've been going on together so
+well, and you suddenly desert me?"
+</p><p>
+It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so
+'well'? You've touches, upon my soul&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"I call it perfect&mdash;from my original point of view.
+I'm just where I was; and you must give me some
+better reason than you do, my dear, for <i>your</i> not
+being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're
+only right as to what has been between us so long as
+we do wait. I don't think we wish to have behaved
+like fools." He took in while she talked her imperturbable
+consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
+to see her stand there and breathe into their mild
+remembering air. He had brought her there to be
+moved, and she was only immoveable&mdash;which was
+not moreover, either, because she didn't understand.
+She understood everything, and things he
+refused to; and she had reasons, deep down, the
+sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too
+again most of all her strange significant smile. "Of
+course if it's that you really <i>know</i> something&mdash;?" It
+was quite conceivable and possible to her, he could
+see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she
+meant, and he only looked at her in gloom. His
+gloom however didn't upset her. "You do, I believe,
+only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy
+to me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should
+have no delicacy in hearing it, so that if you can <i>tell</i>
+me you know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended
+on it.
+</p><p>
+"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't,
+I grant you, in that case wait; and I can see what you
+mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I don't even
+ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content
+with your moral certainty."
+</p><p>
+By this time it had come over him&mdash;it had the
+force of a rush. The point she made was clear, as
+clear as that the blood, while he recognised it,
+mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
+</p><p>
+"You've not an idea?"
+</p><p>
+"I've not an idea."
+</p><p>
+"I'd consent," she said&mdash;"I'd announce it to-morrow,
+to-day, I'd go home this moment and announce
+it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an idea
+straight <i>from</i> you, I mean as your own, given me in
+good faith. There, my dear!"&mdash;and she smiled
+again. "I call that really meeting you."
+</p><p>
+If it <i>was</i> then what she called it, it disposed of his
+appeal, and he could but stand there with his wasted
+passion&mdash;for it was in high passion that he had from
+the morning acted&mdash;in his face. She made it all out,
+bent upon her&mdash;the idea he didn't have, and the
+idea he had, and his failure of insistence when it
+brought up <i>that</i> challenge, and his sense of her personal
+presence, and his horror, almost, of her lucidity.
+They made in him a mixture that might have
+been rage, but that was turning quickly to mere cold
+thought, thought which led to something else and
+was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
+she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had
+before this, between them, saved their position. When
+she had come nearer to him, when, putting her hand
+upon him, she made him sink with her, as she leaned
+to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
+irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion.
+She had an advantage with his passion now.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He had said to her in the Park when challenged on
+it that nothing had "happened" to him as a cause
+for the demand he there made of her&mdash;happened he
+meant since the account he had given, after his return,
+of his recent experience. But in the course of a few
+days&mdash;they had brought him to Christmas morning&mdash;he
+was conscious enough, in preparing again to
+seek her out, of a difference on that score. Something
+had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking
+the night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not
+absolutely first, involved was his immediately again
+putting himself in relation with her. The fact itself
+had met him there&mdash;in his own small quarters&mdash;on
+Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once
+affected him as implying that consequence. So far
+as he on the spot and for the next hours took its
+measure&mdash;a process that made his night mercilessly
+wakeful&mdash;the consequences possibly implied were
+numerous to distraction. His spirit dealt with them,
+in the darkness, as the slow hours passed; his intelligence
+and his imagination, his soul and his sense,
+had never on the whole been so intensely engaged.
+It was his difficulty for the moment that he was
+face to face with alternatives, and that it was
+scarce even a question of turning from one to the
+other. They were not in a perspective in which they
+might be compared and considered; they were, by
+a strange effect, as close as a pair of monsters of
+whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot
+breath and the huge eyes. He saw them at once and
+but by looking straight before him; he wouldn't
+for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
+his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation
+was still&mdash;was not, for the slow hours a matter
+of restless motion. He lay long, after the event, on
+the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white
+light of convenience that he hated, he had thrown
+himself without undressing. He stared at the buried
+day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
+Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself
+somehow determined. The common wisdom had
+had its say to him&mdash;that safety in doubt was <i>not</i> action;
+and perhaps what most helped him was this
+very commonness. In his case there was nothing of
+<i>that</i>&mdash;in no case in his life had there ever been less:
+which association, from one thing to another, now
+worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath
+and his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element
+of the rare which he felt to be the sign of his crisis.
+And that is why, dressed with more state than usual
+and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
+Christmas day.
+</p><p>
+Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared,
+carried with it a certain complexity. We should have
+known, walking by his side, that his final prime decision
+hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
+Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was
+none the less urgent. His prime decision was for another
+matter, to which impatience, once he was on
+the way, had now added itself; but he remained sufficiently
+aware that he must compromise with the perhaps
+excessive earliness. This, and the ferment set up
+within him, were together a reason for not driving; to
+say nothing of the absence of cabs in the dusky festal
+desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
+walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had
+his interval thus to turn over his view&mdash;the view to
+which what had happened the night before had not
+sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just mentioned
+was to be offered within the next few minutes
+another item to assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house,
+when he reached it, a brougham was drawn up&mdash;at
+the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought
+him for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't
+long, but it was long enough to flash upon him a revelation
+in the light of which he caught his breath. The
+carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a
+day Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the
+great doctor was back. This would prove something
+else, in turn, still more intensely, and it was in the act
+of the double apprehension that Densher felt himself
+turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a
+projectile that has suddenly been met by another: he
+stared at the strange truth that what he wanted <i>more</i>
+than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness who had
+just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be
+in his presence and to hear his voice&mdash;which was the
+spasm of his consciousness that produced the flash.
+Fortunately for him, on the spot, there supervened
+something in which the flash went out. He became
+aware within this minute that the coachman on the
+box of the brougham had a face known to him,
+whereas he had never seen before, to his knowledge,
+the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
+nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box
+was just the face that, in coming and going at Lancaster
+Gate, he would vaguely have noticed, outside, in
+attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
+Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote
+from his own, presented herself for news; and
+news, in the house, she was clearly getting, since her
+brougham had stayed. Sir Luke <i>was</i> then back&mdash;only
+Mrs. Lowder was with him.
+</p><p>
+It was under the influence of this last reflexion
+that Densher again delayed; and it was while he
+delayed that something else occurred to him. It was
+all round, visibly&mdash;given his own new contribution&mdash;a
+case of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate,
+for quicker knowledge, might have come out with her
+aunt. The possibility that in this event she might be
+sitting in the carriage&mdash;the thing most likely&mdash;had
+had the effect, before he could check it, of bringing
+him within range of the window. It wasn't there he
+had wished to see her; yet if she <i>was</i> there he couldn't
+pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
+made out was that if some one was there it
+wasn't Kate Croy. It was, with a sensible shock
+for him, the person who had last offered him a conscious
+face from behind the clear plate of a café in
+Venice. The great glass at Florian's was a medium less
+obscure, even with the window down, than the air of
+the London Christmas; yet at present also, none the
+less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions
+could occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest&mdash;which,
+he disgustedly remembered, his back as
+quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as his special
+privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and
+touched the bell with a keen consciousness of being
+habitually looked at by Kate's friend from positions
+of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for the time
+the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
+young man had in a manner assisted at the
+departure of the disconcerted, since Lord Mark was
+not looking disconcerted now any more than he had
+looked from his bench at his café. Densher was
+thinking that <i>he</i> seemed to show as vagrant while
+another was ensconced. He was thinking of the
+other as&mdash;in spite of the difference of situation&mdash;more
+ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him
+above all as the friend of the person with whom his
+recognition had, the minute previous, associated
+him. The man was seated in the very place in which,
+beside Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate,
+and that was a sufficient identity. Meanwhile at any
+rate the door of the house had opened and Mrs.
+Lowder stood before him. It was something at least
+that <i>she</i> wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in
+all her affluence; with presence of mind both to decide
+at once that Lord Mark, in the brougham, didn't
+matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
+word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there
+to listen to her passage with the gentleman who had
+rung. "<i>I'll</i> tell Mr. Densher; you needn't wait!"
+And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on
+the steps.
+</p><p>
+"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early.
+I couldn't not come to learn."
+</p><p>
+"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On
+my way," he added, "to Lancaster Gate."
+</p><p>
+"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and
+he saw her face was attuned. It made him, with what
+she had just before said, know all, and he took the
+thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
+functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her
+medium with him and that yet had now a fresh glow.
+"So you <i>have</i> had your message?"
+</p><p>
+He knew so well what she meant, and so equally
+with it what he "<i>had</i> had" no less than what he
+hadn't, that, with but the smallest hesitation, he
+strained the point. "Yes&mdash;my message."
+</p><p>
+"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded
+her wonderful wings."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;folded them."
+</p><p>
+It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as
+she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent
+for self-control. "Unless it's more true," she
+accordingly added, "that she has spread them the
+wider."
+</p><p>
+He again but formally assented, though, strangely
+enough, the words fitted a figure deep in his own
+imagination. "Rather, yes&mdash;spread them the
+wider."
+</p><p>
+"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now
+with a look, he feared, that did a little warn her off.
+</p><p>
+"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve,
+"entitled to direct news. Ours came late last
+night: I'm not sure otherwise I shouldn't have gone
+to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+He had had a minute by this time to think further,
+and the window of the brougham was still within
+range. Her rich "me," reaching him moreover
+through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on
+his chest. "Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed
+squared, and the extent of it just now perversely
+enough took away his breath. His look from where
+they stood embraced the aperture at which the person
+sitting in the carriage might have shown, and he saw
+his interlocutress, on her side, understand the question
+in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
+you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive
+parley with the image of his condition that now flourished
+in her, almost hypocritical. It sounded as if
+he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
+exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had
+suddenly&mdash;since the night before&mdash;dried up in him,
+and he had never been aware of a deeper reserve.
+</p><p>
+But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely
+alone. I should otherwise never have dreamed;
+feeling, dear friend, but too much!" Failing on her
+lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
+with which she had the next moment condolingly
+pressed his own. "Dear friend, dear friend!"&mdash;she
+was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be still
+more so: which was what made her immediately continue.
+"Or wouldn't you this evening, for the sad
+Christmas it makes us, dine with me <i>tête-à-tête?</i>"
+</p><p>
+It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her&mdash;making
+the difference, to his relief, of several
+hours; but it also rather mystified him. This however
+didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall you
+mind if I don't tell you at once?"
+</p><p>
+"Not in the least&mdash;leave it open: it shall be as
+you may feel, and you needn't even send me word.
+I only <i>will</i> mention that to-day, of all days, I shall
+otherwise sit there alone."
+</p><p>
+Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
+</p><p>
+"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs.
+Lowder, "is spending her Christmas in the bosom of
+her more immediate family."
+</p><p>
+He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his
+face might show. "You mean she has left you?"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the
+enquiry with a consciousness in which he saw a reflexion
+of events. He was made sure by it, even at
+the moment and as he had never been before, that
+since he had known these two women no confessed
+nor commented tension, no crisis of the cruder sort
+would really have taken form between them: which
+was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered
+her boat. The situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's
+present expression lighted up by contrast that superficial
+smoothness; which afterwards, with his time to
+think of it, was to put before him again the art, the
+particular gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed,
+so intimately familiar for him, as her talent for life.
+The peace, within a day or two&mdash;since his seeing
+her last&mdash;had clearly been broken; differences, deep
+down, kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as
+deep, had been shaken to the surface by some exceptional
+jar; with which, in addition, he felt Lord
+Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season
+vaguely associated. The talent for life indeed, it at
+the same time struck him, would probably have
+shown equally in the breach, or whatever had occurred;
+Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a
+strain rather than a stroke. Of these quick thoughts,
+at all events, that lady was already abreast. "She
+went yesterday morning&mdash;and not with my approval,
+I don't mind telling you&mdash;to her sister:
+Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean, who lives
+somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs&mdash;that
+I should have to say such things to-day!&mdash;are
+a constant worry; so that Kate, in consequence&mdash;well,
+of events!&mdash;has simply been called in. My
+own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with <i>such</i> events
+she need have, in her situation, next to nothing to
+do."
+</p><p>
+"But she differed with you?"
+</p><p>
+"She differed with me. And when Kate differs
+with you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point
+in the scale of hypocrisy at which he could ask himself
+why a little more or less should signify. Besides,
+with the intention he had had he <i>must</i> know. Kate's
+move, if he didn't know, might simply disconcert
+him; and of being disconcerted his horror was by
+this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
+allude to events at all calamitous."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;only horrid and vulgar."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure,
+had discovered in free speech to him a momentary
+balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I suppose
+you know, a dreadful horrible father."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Densher again.
+</p><p>
+"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come
+upon Marian, and Marian has shrieked for help."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his
+curiosity compromised for an instant with his discretion.
+"Come upon her&mdash;for money?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh for that of course always. But, at <i>this</i> blessed
+season, for refuge, for safety: for God knows what.
+He's <i>there</i>, the brute. And Kate's with them. And
+that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the steps,
+"is her Christmas."
+</p><p>
+She had stopped again at the bottom while he
+thought of an answer. "Yours then is after all rather
+better."
+</p><p>
+"It's at least more decent." And her hand once
+more came out. "But why do I talk of <i>our</i> troubles?
+Come if you can."
+</p><p>
+He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
+</p><p>
+"And now&mdash;I dare say&mdash;you'll go to church?"
+</p><p>
+She had asked it, with her good intention, rather
+in the air and by way of sketching for him, in the line
+of support, something a little more to the purpose
+than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
+finishing off their intensities of expression that he
+found himself to all appearance receiving her hint as
+happy. "Why yes&mdash;I think I will": after which,
+as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had
+opened from within, he was free to turn his back. He
+heard the door, behind him, sharply close again and
+the vehicle move off in another direction than his own.
+</p><p>
+He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite
+of which indeed he was at the end of ten minutes
+aware of having walked straight to the south. That,
+he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
+there had formed itself in his mind, even while
+Aunt Maud finally talked, an instant recognition of
+his necessary course. Nothing was open to him but
+to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than
+the influence of the step she had taken on the emotion
+itself that possessed him. Her complications,
+which had fairly, with everything else, an awful
+sound&mdash;what were they, a thousand times over, but
+his own? His present business was to see that they
+didn't escape an hour longer taking their proper
+place in his life. He accordingly would have held
+his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he
+had just lied to Mrs. Lowder&mdash;a term it perversely
+eased him to keep using&mdash;even more than was necessary.
+To what church was he going, to what church,
+in such a state of his nerves, <i>could</i> he go?&mdash;he pulled
+up short again, as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs.
+Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And yet the desire
+queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word.
+He was just then however by a happy chance in the
+Brompton Road, and he bethought himself with a
+sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He had
+but to turn the other way and he should find himself
+soon before it. At the door then, in a few minutes,
+his idea was really&mdash;as it struck him&mdash;consecrated:
+he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid service&mdash;the
+flocking crowd told of it&mdash;which glittered and
+resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights
+and the swell of organ and choir. It didn't
+match his own day, but it was much less of a discord
+than some other things actual and possible. The
+Oratory in short, to make him right, would do.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon&mdash;dusk
+thick from an early hour&mdash;had gathered
+when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
+gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present
+himself in Chelsea at luncheon-time and also
+remembering that he must attempt independently to
+make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
+achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim
+void of the club library, with nobody, up or down, to
+be seen, and there after a while, closing his eyes,
+recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during
+the night. Before doing this indeed he had written&mdash;it
+was the first thing he did&mdash;a short note, which,
+in the Christmas desolation of the place, he had managed
+only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a
+messenger. He wished it carried by hand, and he was
+obliged, rather blindly, to trust the hand, as the messenger,
+for some reason, was unable to return with a
+gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to
+face with Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room
+he found to his relief that his notification had reached
+her. She was expectant and to that extent prepared;
+which simplified a little&mdash;if a little, at the present
+pass, counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to
+him from the moment of his coming in, and vivid
+partly by their difference, a difference sharp and suggestive,
+from those in which he had hitherto constantly
+seen her. He had seen her but in places comparatively
+great; in her aunt's pompous house, under
+the high trees of Kensington and the storied ceilings
+of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great
+occasion, as the centre itself of the splendid Piazza:
+he had seen her there, on a still greater one, in his
+own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with her,
+having state and ancientry even in their poorness;
+but Mrs. Condrip's interior, even by this best view of
+it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as
+a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and
+charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
+stranger&mdash;a stranger to the little Chelsea street&mdash;who
+was making the best of a queer episode and a
+place of exile. The extraordinary thing was that at
+the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly
+a stranger in it than she.
+</p><p>
+A part of the queerness&mdash;this was to come to him
+in glimpses&mdash;sprang from the air as of a general
+large misfit imposed on the narrow room by the scale
+and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments
+were, for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals
+of what would, in the case of Mrs. Condrip at
+least, have been called better days. The curtains that
+overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables
+that stayed circulation, the chimney-ornaments that
+reached to the ceiling and the florid chandelier that almost
+dropped to the floor, were so many mementoes
+of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy
+mother. Whatever might have been in itself
+the quality of these elements Densher could feel the
+effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
+blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly
+almost to the point of the sinister. They failed to
+accommodate or to compromise; they asserted their
+differences without tact and without taste. It was
+truly having a sense of Kate's own quality thus
+promptly to see them in reference to it. But that
+Densher had this sense was no new thing to him, nor
+did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded
+of it. He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination
+so constantly played him, that he was, so far as
+her present tension went, very specially sorry for her&mdash;which
+was not the view that had determined his
+start in the morning; yet also that he himself would
+have taken it all, as he might say, less hard. <i>He</i>
+could have lived in such a place; but it wasn't given
+to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
+anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness
+that they could somehow make shift. His natural,
+his inevitable, his ultimate home&mdash;left, that is,
+to itself&mdash;wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and
+impossible as what was just round them, though
+doubtless in less ample masses. As he took in moreover
+how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the
+creature she was if what was just round them hadn't
+mismatched her, hadn't made for her a medium involving
+compunction in the spectator, so, by the
+same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation
+with her companions there, such a fact as filled him
+at once, oddly, both with assurance and with suspense.
+If he himself, on this brief vision, felt her as
+alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they
+not feel her and how above all must she not feel them?
+</p><p>
+Densher could ask himself that even after she had
+presently lighted the tall candles on the mantel-shelf.
+This was all their illumination but the fire, and she
+had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet left
+play, visibly, to her implication between them, in
+their trouble and failing anything better, of the presumably
+genial Christmas hearth. So far as the genial
+went this had in strictness, given their conditions, to
+be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
+nothing but that he must promptly see her and that
+he hoped she might be able to make it possible; but
+he understood from the first look at her that his
+promptitude was already having for her its principal
+reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few
+minutes," he explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she
+had let you know, though I rather gathered she had;
+and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
+It was because I was so struck at the moment with
+your having, as she did tell me, so suddenly come
+here."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine
+in the contracted firelight, with her hands in her
+lap, Kate considered what he had said. He had
+spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir
+Luke Strett's door. "She has let me know nothing.
+But that doesn't matter&mdash;if it's what <i>you</i> mean."
+</p><p>
+"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but
+what he went on with, after a pause during which she
+waited, was apparently not the rest of that. "She
+had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late
+last night. But to me the poor lady hasn't wired.
+The event," he added, "will have taken place yesterday,
+and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
+and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow
+morning. So that Mrs. Stringham, I judge, is left
+to face in some solitude the situation bequeathed to
+her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke
+couldn't stay."
+</p><p>
+Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal
+of the sense that he was gaining time. "Was
+your telegram from Sir Luke?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I've had no telegram."
+</p><p>
+She wondered. "But not a letter&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Not from Mrs. Stringham&mdash;no." He failed
+again however to develop this&mdash;for which her forbearance
+from another question gave him occasion.
+From whom then had he heard? He might at last,
+confronted with her, really have been gaining time;
+and as if to show that she respected this impulse she
+made her enquiry different. "Should you like to
+go out to her&mdash;to Mrs. Stringham?"
+</p><p>
+About that at least he was clear. "Not at all.
+She's alone, but she's very capable and very courageous.
+Besides&mdash;!" He had been going on, but he
+dropped.
+</p><p>
+"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of
+course one remembers Eugenio."
+</p><p>
+She had uttered the words as definitely to show
+them for not untender; and he showed equally every
+reason to assent. "One remembers him indeed, and
+with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value
+to her&mdash;he's capable of anything. What I was going
+to say," he went on, "is that some of their people
+from America must quickly arrive."
+</p><p>
+On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to
+satisfy him. "Mr. Someone-or-other, the person
+principally in charge of Milly's affairs&mdash;her first
+trustee, I suppose&mdash;had just got there at Mrs. Stringham's
+last writing."
+</p><p>
+"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to
+me&mdash;I mean the last time before this morning.
+I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said, "they'll do."
+</p><p>
+"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as
+if it wasn't what each was most thinking of. Kate
+presently got however a step nearer to that. "But if
+you had been wired to by nobody what then this
+morning had taken you to Sir Luke?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh something else&mdash;which I'll presently tell
+you. It's what made me instantly need to see you;
+it's what I've come to speak to you of. But in a
+minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at
+seeing you in this place." He got up as he spoke;
+she herself remained perfectly still. His movement
+had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with his
+back to it, to look down on her from where he stood,
+he confined himself to his point. "Is it anything very
+bad that has brought you?"
+</p><p>
+He had now in any case said enough to justify her
+wish for more; so that, passing this matter by, she
+pressed her own challenge. "Do you mean, if I
+may ask, that <i>she</i>, dying&mdash;?" Her face, wondering,
+pressed it more than her words.
+</p><p>
+"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said.
+"What has come to me is what, as I say, I came expressly
+to tell you. I don't mind letting you know,"
+he went on, "that my decision to do this took for
+me last night and this morning a great deal of thinking
+of. But here I am." And he indulged in a smile
+that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her as
+mechanical.
+</p><p>
+She went straighter with him, she seemed to
+show, than he really went with her. "You didn't
+want to come?"
+</p><p>
+"It would have been simple, my dear"&mdash;and he
+continued to smile&mdash;"if it had been, one way or the
+other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took, I admit
+it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of
+difficult and portentous forms. It came up for me
+really&mdash;well, not at all for my happiness."
+</p><p>
+This word apparently puzzled her&mdash;she studied
+him in the light of it. "You look upset&mdash;you've
+certainly been tormented. You're not well."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;well enough!"
+</p><p>
+But she continued without heeding. "You hate
+what you're doing."
+</p><p>
+"My dear girl, you simplify"&mdash;and he was now
+serious enough. "It isn't so simple even as that."
+</p><p>
+She had the air of thinking what it then might be.
+"I of course can't, with no clue, know what it is."
+She remained none the less patient and still. "If
+at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably
+quite at sea. One doesn't, with the best will
+in the world, understand." And then as Densher
+had a pause which might have stood for all the
+involved explanation that, to his discouragement,
+loomed before him: "You <i>haven't</i> decided what to
+do."
+</p><p>
+She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he
+didn't instantly say otherwise. But he said so after
+a look at her. "Oh yes&mdash;I have. Only with this sight
+of you here and what I seem to see in it for you&mdash;!"
+And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned
+from one part of the room to another.
+</p><p>
+"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is
+it for anything awful you've had to come?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything
+<i>you</i> may have. Don't mind," she continued, "the
+'sight of me here,' nor whatever&mdash;which is more
+than I yet know myself&mdash;may be 'in it' for me.
+And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in
+trouble I can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can
+absolutely even do it."
+</p><p>
+"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of
+your wish&mdash;! I suppose I'm in trouble&mdash;I suppose
+that's it." He said this with so odd a suddenness
+of simplicity that she could only stare for it&mdash;which
+he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could
+his vagueness. "And yet I oughtn't to be." Which
+sounded indeed vaguer still.
+</p><p>
+She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my
+own business, anything very awful?"
+</p><p>
+"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you
+find it so. I mean if you find my idea&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?"
+A sound of impatience&mdash;the form of a laugh&mdash;at
+last escaped her. "I can't find it anything at all till
+I know what you're talking about."
+</p><p>
+It brought him then more to the point, though it
+did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug
+before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile
+to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement
+a recall of another time&mdash;the hour in Venice,
+the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd
+had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was
+sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as
+now, what he might say and mightn't. Yet the present
+occasion after all was somehow the easier. He
+tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while
+he stopped before his companion. "The communication
+I speak of can't possibly belong&mdash;so far as its
+date is concerned&mdash;to these last days. The postmark,
+which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable,
+for anything else, that she wrote&mdash;!" He dropped,
+looking at her as if she'd understand.
+</p><p>
+It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?"
+But Kate took an instant's thought. "Aren't we
+agreed that there was never any one in the world like
+her?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly
+enough. "There was never any one in the world like
+her."
+</p><p>
+Kate, from her chair, always without a movement,
+raised her eyes to the unconscious reach of his own.
+Then when the latter again dropped to her she added
+a question. "And won't it further depend a little on
+what the communication is?"
+</p><p>
+"A little perhaps&mdash;but not much. It's a communication,"
+said Densher.
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean a letter?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand&mdash;in
+hers unmistakeably."
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh perfectly."
+</p><p>
+It was as if his tone for this prompted&mdash;with a
+slight strangeness&mdash;her next demand. "Have you
+had many letters from her?"
+</p><p>
+"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight
+at her. "And very, very short ones."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter.
+Three lines would be enough if you're sure you remember."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued,
+"I've seen her hand in other ways. I seem
+to recall how you once, before she went to Venice,
+showed me one of her notes precisely <i>for</i> that. And
+then she once copied me something."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask
+you for the detail of your reasons. One good one's
+enough." To which however she added as if precisely
+not to speak with impatience or with anything like
+irony: "And the writing has its usual look?"
+</p><p>
+Densher answered as if even to better that description
+of it. "It's beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;it <i>was</i> beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer
+to him still, further remarked, "it's not news to
+us now that she was stupendous. Anything's possible."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, anything's possible"&mdash;he appeared oddly
+to catch at it. "That's what I say to myself. It's
+what I've been believing you," he a trifle vaguely
+explained, "still more certain to feel."
+</p><p>
+She waited for him to say more, but he only, with
+his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this
+time to the single window of the room, where in the
+absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn.
+He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the
+small sordid London street&mdash;for sordid, with his
+other association, he felt it&mdash;as he had lost himself,
+with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of the
+Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording
+consciousness that when he had last been driven to
+such an attitude the very depth of his resistance to the
+opportunity to give Kate away was what had so driven
+him. His waiting companion had on that occasion
+waited for him to say he <i>would</i>; and what he had
+meantime glowered forth at was the inanity of such
+a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
+minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus
+familiarly presented&mdash;rested as with a view of their
+expression, a reference to things unimparted, links
+still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make
+them out as she would. The result of her tension was
+that she again took him up. "You received&mdash;what
+you spoke of&mdash;last night?"
+</p><p>
+It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet
+Street&mdash;earlier by an hour than usual&mdash;I found it
+with some other letters on my table. But my eyes
+went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the
+door. I recognised it, knew what it was, without
+touching it."
+</p><p>
+"One can understand." She listened with respect.
+His tone however was so singular that she presently
+added: "You speak as if all this while you <i>hadn't</i>
+touched it."
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since,
+I'd been touching nothing else. I quite firmly," he
+pursued as if to be plainer, "took hold of it."
+</p><p>
+"Then where is it?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I have it here."
+</p><p>
+"And you've brought it to show me?"
+</p><p>
+"I've brought it to show you."
+</p><p>
+So he said with a distinctness that had, among his
+other oddities, almost a sound of cheer, yet making
+no movement that matched his words. She could
+accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while
+his own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill
+with another thought. "But now that you've done
+so you feel you don't want to."
+</p><p>
+"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell
+me nothing."
+</p><p>
+She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were
+an unreasonable child. "It seems to me I tell you
+quite as much as you tell me. You haven't yet even
+told me how it is that such explanations as you require
+don't come from your document itself." Then
+as he answered nothing she had a flash. "You mean
+you haven't read it?"
+</p><p>
+"I haven't read it."
+</p><p>
+She stared. "Then how am I to help you with
+it?"
+</p><p>
+Again leaving her while she never budged he paced
+five strides, and again he was before her. "By telling
+me <i>this</i>. It's something, you know, that you wouldn't
+tell me the other day."
+</p><p>
+She was vague. "The other day?"
+</p><p>
+"The first time after my return&mdash;the Sunday I
+came to you. What's he doing," Densher went on,
+"at that hour of the morning with her? What does
+his having been with her there mean?"
+</p><p>
+"Of whom are you talking?"
+</p><p>
+"Of that man&mdash;Lord Mark of course. What does
+it represent?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my dear&mdash;and with you. It comes more or
+less to the same thing; and it's what you didn't tell
+me the other day when I put you the question."
+</p><p>
+Kate tried to remember the other day. "You
+asked me nothing about any hour."
+</p><p>
+"I asked you when it was you last saw him&mdash;previous,
+I mean, to his second descent at Venice. You
+wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a matter
+comparatively more important I let it pass. But the
+fact remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't
+told me."
+</p><p>
+Two things in this speech appeared to have reached
+Kate more distinctly than the others. "I 'wouldn't
+say'?&mdash;and you 'let it pass'?" She looked just
+coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping
+something back."
+</p><p>
+"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not
+even telling me now. All I want to know," he nevertheless
+explained, "is whether there was a connexion
+between that proceeding on his part, which was practically&mdash;oh
+beyond all doubt!&mdash;the shock precipitating
+for her what has now happened, and anything
+that had occurred with him previously for yourself.
+How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">V</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the
+candles and sat down, the first movement she had
+made. "Are you trying to fix it on me that I must
+have told him?"
+</p><p>
+She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay&mdash;which
+he showed he immediately took in.
+"My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix' anything; but
+I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
+What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
+</p><p>
+"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
+</p><p>
+She shook her head as if in recovery, within the
+minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason.
+There was in it&mdash;and for his reason really&mdash;one of
+those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
+often before made, over some point of difference, her
+own terms with him. Practically she was making
+them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably,
+all the same, he was accepting it. She stood
+there close to him, with something in her patience
+that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke
+more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He
+hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal
+was none the less the quieter. "What's he doing,
+from ten o'clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs.
+Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's
+staying there?"
+</p><p>
+"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it.
+"'Staying'?&mdash;since when?"
+</p><p>
+"Since day before yesterday. He was there before
+I came away." And then she explained&mdash;confessing
+it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident&mdash;like Aunt
+Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas,
+but it isn't after all so monstrous. <i>We</i> stayed&mdash;and,
+with my having come here, she's sorry now&mdash;because
+we neither of us, waiting from day to day
+for the news you brought, seemed to want to be with
+a lot of people."
+</p><p>
+"You stayed for thinking of&mdash;Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"Of course we did. For what else? And even a
+little," Kate wonderfully added&mdash;"it's true at least
+of Aunt Maud&mdash;for thinking of you."
+</p><p>
+He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way.
+But whom," he enquired, "has Lord Mark stayed for
+thinking of?"
+</p><p>
+"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace
+matter. He has some rooms which he has
+had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
+let&mdash;such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed
+want of money, he hasn't had it in him, in
+spite of everything, not to jump at."
+</p><p>
+Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything?
+In spite of what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being
+scarcely supposed to do that sort of thing."
+</p><p>
+"To try to get money?"
+</p><p>
+"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently
+however he has had for some reason to do what
+he can. He turned at a couple of days' notice out of
+his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt
+Maud, who's deeply in his confidence about all such
+matters, said: 'Come then to Lancaster Gate&mdash;to
+sleep at least&mdash;till, like all the world, you go to the
+country.' He was to have gone to the country&mdash;I
+think to Matcham&mdash;yesterday afternoon: Aunt
+Maud, that is, told me he was."
+</p><p>
+Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through
+this statement, beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive.
+"Told you, you mean, so that you needn't leave
+the house?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;so far as she had taken it into her head
+that his being there was part of my reason."
+</p><p>
+"And <i>was</i> it part of your reason?"
+</p><p>
+"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here&mdash;as
+I knew there would be&mdash;without it. So that," she
+said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad I am here:
+even if for all the good I do&mdash;!" She implied however
+that that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as
+you tell me, get off then to Matcham; though he may
+possibly, if it is possible, be going this afternoon. But
+what strikes me as most probable&mdash;and it's really,
+I'm bound to say, quite amiable of him&mdash;is that he
+has declined to leave Aunt Maud, as I've been so
+ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone. If moreover
+he has given up Matcham for her it's a <i>procédé</i>
+that won't please her less. It's small wonder therefore
+that she insists, on a dull day, in driving him
+about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
+"what may happen between them; but that's all I see
+in it."
+</p><p>
+"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher
+returned, "something that, while I'm with you
+at least, I always take from you as the truth itself."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully
+extracting the sting of his reservation; then she
+spoke with a quiet gravity that seemed to show how fine
+she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
+everything else, its effect. They were still closely face
+to face, and, yielding to the impulse to which he
+hadn't yielded just before, he laid his hands on her
+shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
+little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more
+mingled things, all difficult, than he could speak.
+Then bending his head he applied his lips to her
+cheek. He fell, after this, away for an instant, resuming
+his unrest, while she kept the position in which,
+all passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration.
+It didn't prevent her, however, from offering
+him, as if what she had had was enough for
+the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet
+lucid connexion and as she made it sat down again.
+"I've been trying to place exactly, as to its date,
+something that did happen to me while you were in
+Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me&mdash;spoke
+out."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled
+round.
+</p><p>
+"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it,
+by having refused to meet him as he wanted&mdash;as he
+pressed&mdash;I plead guilty to being so. Would you have
+liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
+would have kept him from going?"
+</p><p>
+It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you
+know he was going?"
+</p><p>
+"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that&mdash;even
+if it doesn't fit your strange suppositions&mdash;I should
+have given him just the same answer if I had known.
+If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust
+upon you, that's simply because it's not a matter in
+the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope
+that if I've satisfied you about it," she continued,
+"it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest."
+But the next moment he pursued: "He saw something.
+He guessed."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he
+was unfortunately the one person we hadn't deceived,
+I can't contradict you."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;of course not. But <i>why</i>," Densher still
+risked, "was he unfortunately the one person&mdash;?
+He's not really a bit intelligent."
+</p><p>
+"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a
+mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as&mdash;all
+things considered and when it came to the point&mdash;my
+attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and
+on his conviction he acted."
+</p><p>
+Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's
+conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature.
+"Do you mean because you had appeared to him to
+have encouraged him?"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise
+where <i>were</i> we?"
+</p><p>
+"'Where'&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"You and I. What I appeared to him, however,
+hadn't mattered. What mattered was how I appeared
+to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
+that he has had all along his impression of <i>you</i>. You
+can't help it," she said, "but you're after all&mdash;well,
+yourself."
+</p><p>
+"As much myself as you please. But when I took
+myself to Venice and kept myself there&mdash;what,"
+Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
+</p><p>
+"Your being in Venice and liking to be&mdash;which is
+never on any one's part a monstrosity&mdash;was explicable
+for him in other ways. He was quite capable
+moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
+</p><p>
+"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder
+now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second
+descent, hadn't convinced him&mdash;all the more that
+my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back
+convinced." And then as her companion still showed
+a face at a loss: "I mean after he had seen Milly,
+spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
+</p><p>
+"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
+</p><p>
+"That you were sincere. That it was <i>her</i> you
+loved." It came to him from her in such a way that
+he instantly, once more, turned, found himself yet
+again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return
+here," she meanwhile continued, "had it from him.
+And that's why you're now so well with Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+He only for a minute looked out in silence&mdash;after
+which he came away. "And why <i>you</i> are." It was
+almost, in its extremely affirmative effect between
+them, the note of recrimination; or it would have
+been perhaps rather if it hadn't been so much more
+the note of truth. It was sharp because it was true,
+but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
+so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel.
+That made, while they faced each other over it without
+speech, the gravity of everything. It was as if
+there were almost danger, which the wrong word
+might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better
+purpose: he drew, standing there before her, a
+pocket-book from the breast of his waistcoat and he
+drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which
+her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the
+receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the
+less odd for being visibly instinctive and unconscious,
+carried the hand containing his letter behind him.
+What he thus finally spoke of was a different matter.
+"Did I understand from Mrs. Lowder that your father's
+in the house?"
+</p><p>
+If it never had taken her long in such excursions
+to meet him it was not to take her so now. "In the
+house, yes. But we needn't fear his interruption"&mdash;she
+spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in
+bed."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean with illness?"
+</p><p>
+She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill.
+He's a marvel. He's only&mdash;endless."
+</p><p>
+Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you
+with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely,
+had it all. "By our making your visit as little of an
+affair as possible for him&mdash;and for Marian too."
+</p><p>
+"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't&mdash;could
+I?&mdash;not have come."
+</p><p>
+"No, you couldn't not have come."
+</p><p>
+"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as
+possible?"
+</p><p>
+Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day,
+put ugly words into my mouth. I've enough of my
+trouble without it."
+</p><p>
+"I know&mdash;I know!" He spoke in instant pleading.
+"It's all only that I'm as troubled <i>for</i> you. When
+did he come?"
+</p><p>
+"Three days ago&mdash;after he hadn't been near her
+for more than a year, after he had apparently, and
+not regrettably, ceased to remember her existence;
+and in a state which made it impossible not to take
+him in."
+</p><p>
+Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such
+want&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"No, not of food, of necessary things&mdash;not even,
+so far as his appearance went, of money. He looked
+as wonderful as ever. But he was&mdash;well, in terror."
+</p><p>
+"In terror of what?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. Of somebody&mdash;of something.
+He wants, he says, to be quiet. But his quietness is
+awful."
+</p><p>
+She suffered, but he couldn't not question.
+"What does he do?"
+</p><p>
+It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
+</p><p>
+Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it.
+"What <i>has</i> he done?"
+</p><p>
+It made her slowly rise, and they were once more
+fully face to face. Her eyes held his own and she was
+paler than she had been. "If you love me&mdash;now&mdash;don't
+ask me about father."
+</p><p>
+He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because
+I love you that I'm here. It's because I love
+you that I've brought you this." And he drew from
+behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
+</p><p>
+But her eyes only&mdash;though he held it out&mdash;met
+the offer. "Why you've not broken the seal!"
+</p><p>
+"If I had broken the seal&mdash;exactly&mdash;I should
+know what's within. It's for <i>you</i> to break the seal
+that I bring it."
+</p><p>
+She looked&mdash;still not touching the thing&mdash;inordinately
+grave. "To break the seal of something to
+you from <i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by
+whatever you think of it."
+</p><p>
+"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you
+yourself think?" And then as he didn't answer:
+"It seems to me <i>I</i> think you know. You have your
+instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
+</p><p>
+Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation,
+an accusation for which he was prepared
+and which there was but one way to face. "I have
+indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried
+it out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the
+hour." He held up his letter and seemed now to insist
+more than to confess. "This thing had been
+timed."
+</p><p>
+"For Christmas Eve?"
+</p><p>
+"For Christmas Eve."
+</p><p>
+Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season
+of gifts!" After which, as he said nothing, she went
+on: "And had been written, you mean, while she
+could write, and kept to <i>be</i> so timed?"
+</p><p>
+Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again
+didn't reply. "What do <i>you</i> mean by the proof?"
+</p><p>
+"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved.
+But I won't," she said, "break your seal."
+</p><p>
+"You positively decline?"
+</p><p>
+"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly:
+"I know without."
+</p><p>
+He had another pause. "And what is it you
+know?"
+</p><p>
+"That she announces to you she has made you
+rich."
+</p><p>
+His pause this time was longer. "Left me her
+fortune?"
+</p><p>
+"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But
+money to a large amount. I don't care," Kate went
+on, "to know how much." And her strange smile
+recurred. "I trust her."
+</p><p>
+"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
+</p><p>
+"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought.
+"That wouldn't, on my part, have been playing fair
+with her. And I did," she added, "play fair."
+</p><p>
+Densher, who had believed her&mdash;he couldn't help
+it&mdash;continued, holding his letter, to face her. He
+was much quieter now, as if his torment had somehow
+passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and
+that's why&mdash;since we talk of proofs&mdash;I want to give
+<i>you</i> one. I've wanted to let you see&mdash;and in preference
+even to myself&mdash;something I feel as sacred."
+</p><p>
+She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
+</p><p>
+"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by
+which I can peculiarly recognise&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he
+dropped.
+</p><p>
+"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice.
+You were capable in Venice of an act of splendid
+generosity."
+</p><p>
+"And the privilege you offer me with that document
+is my reward?"
+</p><p>
+He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol
+of my attitude."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear,
+is that you're afraid of yourself. You've had to
+take yourself in hand. You've had to do yourself
+violence."
+</p><p>
+"So it is then you meet me?"
+</p><p>
+She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from
+which her hand still stayed itself. "You absolutely
+<i>desire</i> me to take it?"
+</p><p>
+"I absolutely desire you to take it."
+</p><p>
+"To do what I like with it?"
+</p><p>
+"Short of course of making known its terms. It
+must remain&mdash;pardon my making the point&mdash;between
+you and me."
+</p><p>
+She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke
+it. "Trust me." Taking from him the sacred script
+she held it a little while her eyes again rested on
+those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
+before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is
+to know."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I <i>know!</i>" said Merton Densher.
+</p><p>
+"Well then if we both do&mdash;!" She had already
+turned to the fire, nearer to which she had moved,
+and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing into the
+flame. He started&mdash;but only half&mdash;as to undo her
+action: his arrest was as prompt as the latter had been
+decisive. He only watched, with her, the paper burn;
+after which their eyes again met. "You'll have it all,"
+Kate said, "from New York."
+</p><p>
+It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard
+from New York that she paid him a visit one morning
+at his own quarters&mdash;coming not as she had
+come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but
+as a need recognised in the first instance by herself,
+even though also as the prompt result of a missive
+delivered to her. This had consisted of a note from
+Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed
+him by an eminent American legal firm, a
+firm of whose high character he had become conscious
+while in New York as of a thing in the air
+itself, and whose head and front, the principal executor
+of Milly Theale's copious will, had been duly
+identified at Lancaster Gate as the gentleman hurrying
+out, by the straight southern course, before the
+girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's
+act on receipt of the document in question&mdash;an act
+as to which and to the bearings of which his
+resolve had had time to mature&mdash;constituted in strictness,
+singularly enough, the first reference to Milly,
+or to what Milly might or might not have done, that
+had passed between our pair since they had stood
+together watching the destruction, in the little vulgar
+grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand.
+They had at the time, and in due deference now, on
+his part, to Kate's mention of her responsibility for
+his call, immediately separated, and when they met
+again the subject was made present to them&mdash;at all
+events till some flare of new light&mdash;only by the intensity
+with which it mutely expressed its absence.
+They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
+often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January
+and a part of February, actually become for
+them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's stay at
+Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances
+from her aunt which would have been a mystery to
+Densher had he not been admitted, at Lancaster
+Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view
+of them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there
+said to him as if she really despised ideas&mdash;which she
+didn't; "and I've taken up with my own, which is to
+give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
+<i>has</i> had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but
+as she's as proud as the deuce she'll come back when
+she has found some reason&mdash;having nothing in common
+with her disgust&mdash;of which she can make a
+show. She calls it her holiday, which she's spending
+in her own way&mdash;the holiday to which, once a year or
+so, as she says, the very maids in the scullery have a
+right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
+not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides,
+she's quite decent; she comes often&mdash;whenever
+I make her a sign; and she has been good, on
+the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself,
+I don't complain. She has really been, poor
+dear, very much what one hoped; though I needn't,
+you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell <i>you</i>, after
+all, you clever creature, what that was."
+</p><p>
+It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity
+for this that Densher's appearances under
+the good lady's roof markedly, after Christmas, interspaced
+themselves. The phase of his situation
+that on his return from Venice had made them for
+a short time almost frequent was at present quite obscured,
+and with it the impulse that had then acted.
+Another phase had taken its place, which he would
+have been painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise
+set on its feet, but of which the steadily rising
+tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite high and
+dry. There had been a moment when it seemed
+possible that Mrs. Stringham, returning to America
+under convoy, would pause in London on her way
+and be housed with her old friend; in which case he
+was prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance.
+But this danger passed&mdash;he had felt it a danger, and
+the person in the world whom he would just now
+have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed
+away westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote
+to her, having broken, in this respect, after Milly's
+death, the silence as to the sense of which, before that
+event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
+answered him from Venice twice, and had had time
+to answer him twice again from New York. The last
+letter of her four had come by the same post as the
+document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into
+the question of also enclosing that. His correspondence
+with Milly's companion was somehow already
+presenting itself to him as a feature&mdash;as a factor,
+he would have said in his newspaper&mdash;of the time
+whatever it might be, long or short, in store for him;
+but one of his acutest current thoughts was apt to be
+devoted to his not having yet mentioned it to Kate.
+She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever
+hear?"&mdash;so that he hadn't been brought to the
+point. This he described to himself as a mercy, for
+he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the same
+personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce,
+scarce even wincing while he recognised it as
+the one connexion in which he wasn't straight. He
+had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental image&mdash;he
+saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of
+waters, the bottomless grey expanse of straightness.
+The fact that he had on several recent occasions taken
+with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that was each time
+to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
+say than for what they did&mdash;this fact failed somehow
+to mitigate for him a strange consciousness of exposure.
+There was something deep within him that he
+had absolutely shown to no one&mdash;to the companion
+of these walks in particular not a bit more than he
+could help; but he was none the less haunted, under
+its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It
+was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
+good faith; and it was queer enough that on his
+emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd,
+he should figure himself as hidden from view. That
+represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
+delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all
+events knew&mdash;what Kate did know, and she was
+also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of
+which it was as if his <i>act</i>, so deeply associated with
+her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad
+on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed
+it with Kate, was the very element of that menace:
+to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their
+final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury
+in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge
+of each other that they couldn't undo.
+</p><p>
+Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these
+days a question of arms was limited, this might have
+been the intimate expedient to which they were actually
+resorting. It had its value, in conditions that
+made everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea
+Park&mdash;where Mrs. Lowder now never drove&mdash;he
+had adopted the usual means, in sequestered alleys,
+of holding her close to his side. She could make
+absences, on her present footing, without having
+too inordinately to account for them at home&mdash;which
+was exactly what gave them for the first time
+an appreciable margin. He supposed she could always
+say in Chelsea&mdash;though he didn't press it&mdash;that
+she had been across the town, in decency, for a look
+at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons
+at Lancaster Gate for her not being able to plead
+the look at her other relatives. It was therefore between
+them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
+which for that matter also they made in various ways
+no little show of cherishing as such. They made the
+show indeed in every way but the way of a large use&mdash;an
+inconsequence that they almost equally gave time
+to helping each other to regard as natural. He put
+it to his companion that the kind of favour he now
+enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful warmth
+of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground
+from under their feet. He was too horribly trusted&mdash;they
+had succeeded too well. He couldn't in short
+make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
+Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that
+lady without tying his hands. Kate saw what he
+meant just as he saw what she did when she admitted
+that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing,
+in the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence.
+It was special at present&mdash;she was handsomely used;
+she confessed accordingly to a scruple about misapplying
+her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found&mdash;and
+all unconsciously now&mdash;the way to baffle them.
+It wasn't however that they didn't meet a little,
+none the less, in the southern quarter, to point for
+their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They
+crossed the river; they wandered in neighbourhoods
+sordid and safe; the winter was mild, so that, mounting
+to the top of trams, they could rumble together
+to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time
+their minutes had never been so counted it struck Densher
+that by a singular law their tone&mdash;he scarce
+knew what to call it&mdash;had never been so bland. Not
+to talk of what they <i>might</i> have talked of drove them
+to other ground; it was as if they used a perverse
+insistence to make up what they ignored. They concealed
+their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm
+of their manner; they took precautions for the courtesy
+they had formerly left to come of itself; often,
+when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
+off, with the aftersense of their change. He would
+have described their change&mdash;had he so far faced it
+as to describe it&mdash;by their being so damned civil.
+That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
+point to which they had brought them, a touch almost
+of the droll. What danger had there ever been of
+their becoming rude&mdash;after each had long since made
+the other so tremendously tender? Such were the
+things he asked himself when he wondered what in
+particular he most feared.
+</p><p>
+Yet all the while too the tension had its charm&mdash;such
+being the interest of a creature who could bring
+one back to her by such different roads. It was her
+talent for life again; which found in her a difference
+for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition
+up; she but made of it something new. Frankly
+moreover she had never been more agreeable nor in
+a way&mdash;to put it prosaically&mdash;better company:
+he felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined
+basis&mdash;which he even hesitated whether to
+measure as reduced or as extended; as if at all events
+he were admiring her as she was probably admired
+by people she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned
+that she would still have something fresh for him;
+yet this was what she had&mdash;that on the top of a tram
+in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner.
+What a person she would be if they <i>had</i> been rich&mdash;with
+what a genius for the so-called great life, what
+a presence for the so-called great house, what a grace
+for the so-called great positions! He might regret
+at once, while he was about it, that they weren't
+princes or billionaires. She had treated him on their
+Christmas to a softness that had struck him at the
+time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold
+thick, but stretched a little thin; at present, however,
+she gave him the impression of a contact multitudinous
+as only the superficial can be. She had throughout
+never a word for what went on at home. She came
+out of that and she returned to it, but her nearest
+reference was the look with which, each time, she
+bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated prohibition:
+"It's what I <i>have</i> to see and to know&mdash;so
+don't touch it. That but wakes up the old evil, which
+I keep still, in my way, by sitting by it. I go now&mdash;leave
+me alone!&mdash;to sit by it again. The way to pity
+me&mdash;if that's what you want&mdash;is to believe in me.
+If we could really <i>do</i> anything it would be another
+matter."
+</p><p>
+He watched her, when she went her way, with the
+vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried. It was
+confused and obscure, but how, with her head high,
+it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
+might at these moments have been swaying a little
+aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket. It
+was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as
+this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day
+of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly
+rapid. They contained for him the contradiction that,
+whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general
+to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that
+made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
+to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while
+the days melted, something rare went with them.
+This something was only a thought, but a thought
+precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made
+the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the
+hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his
+intimate companion was the last person he might have
+shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
+left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but
+came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding
+it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner
+and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
+handling them, handling <i>it</i>, as a father, baffled and
+tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was
+before him&mdash;in his dread of who else might see it.
+Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words,
+that he should never, never know what had been in
+Milly's letter. The intention announced in it he should
+but too probably know; only that would have been,
+but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it.
+The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would
+have given her act. This turn had possibilities that,
+somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination
+had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It
+had made of them a revelation the loss of which was
+like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes&mdash;his
+pledge given not to save it&mdash;into the fathomless
+sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of
+something sentient and throbbing, something that,
+for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a
+faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished
+when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought
+and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there
+till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively
+coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden
+it&mdash;doubtless by the same process with which they
+would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was
+somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the
+sacred hush that he couldn't complain. He had given
+poor Kate her freedom.
+</p><p>
+The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood
+there on the occasion we have already named, was
+that she was now in high possession of it. This
+would have marked immediately the difference&mdash;had
+there been nothing else to do it&mdash;between their
+actual terms and their other terms, the character of
+their last encounter in Venice. That had been <i>his</i>
+idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few
+marks they had in common were, from the first moment,
+to his conscious vision, almost pathetically
+plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
+around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as
+before, in an air in which her words at the moment
+itself fell flat, to an interest in the place and a curiosity
+about his "things"; there was a recall in the way
+in which, after she had failed a little to push up her
+veil symmetrically and he had said she had better
+take it off altogether, she had acceded to his suggestion
+before the glass. It was just these things that
+were vain; and what was real was that his fancy
+figured her after the first few minutes as literally
+now providing the element of reassurance which had
+previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
+who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for
+that matter very prompt use of it. "You see I've not
+hesitated this time to break your seal."
+</p><p>
+She had laid on the table from the moment of her
+coming in the long envelope, substantially filled,
+which he had sent her enclosed in another of still
+ampler make. He had however not looked at it&mdash;his
+belief being that he wished never again to do
+so; besides which it had happened to rest with its
+addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and it was
+only into her eyes that her remark made him look,
+declining any approach to the object indicated. "It's
+not 'my' seal, my dear; and my intention&mdash;which
+my note tried to express&mdash;was all to treat it to you
+as not mine."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine
+then?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs&mdash;that of the
+good people in New York, the authors of our communication.
+If the seal is broken well and good;
+but we <i>might</i>, you know," he presently added, "have
+sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied,"
+he smiled with his heart in his mouth,
+"by an absolutely kind letter."
+</p><p>
+Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which
+a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical
+hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on
+the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
+sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a
+flicker of possibilities. She was&mdash;merely to put it at
+that&mdash;intelligent enough for anything. "Is it what
+you're proposing we <i>should</i> do?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah it's too late to do it&mdash;well, ideally. Now,
+with that sign that we <i>know</i>&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"But you don't know," she said very gently.
+</p><p>
+"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to
+what would have been the handsome way. Its being
+dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one's
+assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof
+of this in the state of the envelope&mdash;<i>that</i> would have
+been really satisfying."
+</p><p>
+She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope
+proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on
+the insufficiency of the sum?"
+</p><p>
+Densher smiled again as for the play, however
+whimsical, of her humour. "Well yes&mdash;something
+of that sort."
+</p><p>
+"So that if cognisance <i>has</i> been taken&mdash;so far as
+I'm concerned&mdash;it spoils the beauty?"
+</p><p>
+"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed
+in the hope&mdash;which I confess I entertained&mdash;that
+you'd bring the thing back to me as you had received
+it."
+</p><p>
+"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
+</p><p>
+"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself.
+I wanted&mdash;oh yes, if that's what you wish to
+ask me&mdash;to see what you'd do."
+</p><p>
+"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my
+departure from delicacy?"
+</p><p>
+He continued steady now; a kind of ease&mdash;from
+the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn't
+yet have named&mdash;had come to him. "Well, I wanted&mdash;in
+so good a case&mdash;to test you."
+</p><p>
+She was struck&mdash;it showed in her face&mdash;by his
+expression. "It <i>is</i> a good case. I doubt whether a
+better," she said with her eyes on him, "has ever been
+known."
+</p><p>
+"The better the case then the better the test!"
+</p><p>
+"How do you know," she asked in reply to this,
+"what I'm capable of?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken
+I should have known sooner."
+</p><p>
+"I see"&mdash;she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't
+have known at all. And you wouldn't have known,
+either, what I do know."
+</p><p>
+"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if
+you've been moved to correct my ignorance I very
+particularly request you not to."
+</p><p>
+She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect
+of the corrections? Can you only do it by doing it
+blindly?"
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak
+of my doing?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the only thing in the world that I take you
+as thinking of. Not accepting&mdash;what she has done.
+Isn't there some regular name in such cases? Not
+taking up the bequest."
+</p><p>
+"There's something you forget in it," he said after
+a moment. "My asking you to join with me in doing
+so."
+</p><p>
+Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same
+time didn't make her less firm. "How can I 'join'
+in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
+</p><p>
+"How? By a single word."
+</p><p>
+"And what word?"
+</p><p>
+"Your consent to my giving up."
+</p><p>
+"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent
+you."
+</p><p>
+"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that
+well," he said.
+</p><p>
+She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you
+won't give up if I <i>don't</i> consent?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes. I do nothing."
+</p><p>
+"That, as I understand, is accepting."
+</p><p>
+Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
+</p><p>
+"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the
+money."
+</p><p>
+"I won't touch the money."
+</p><p>
+It had a sound&mdash;though he had been coming to it&mdash;that
+made for gravity. "Who then in such an
+event <i>will?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Any one who wants or who can."
+</p><p>
+Again a little she said nothing: she might say too
+much. But by the time she spoke he had covered
+ground. "How can I touch it but <i>through</i> you?"
+</p><p>
+"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can
+renounce it except through you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she
+explained, "in my power."
+</p><p>
+"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"In what way?"
+</p><p>
+"In the way I show&mdash;and the way I've always
+shown. When have I shown," he asked as with a
+sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
+must feel&mdash;so that you needn't wish to appear to
+spare me in it&mdash;how you 'have' me."
+</p><p>
+"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously
+laughed, "to put me so thoroughly up to it!"
+</p><p>
+"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you
+up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago,
+I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty
+is therefore in every way complete."
+</p><p>
+It had come to the point really that they showed
+each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between
+them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror
+of their further conflict. Something even rose between
+them in one of their short silences&mdash;something
+that was like an appeal from each to the other
+not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
+before them, but which of them must meet it first?
+"Thank you!" Kate said for his word about her
+freedom, but taking for the minute no further action
+on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them,
+and during another slow moment their very sense
+of it cleared the air.
+</p><p>
+There was an effect of this in the way he soon
+went on. "You must intensely feel that it's the
+thing for which we worked together."
+</p><p>
+She took up the remark, however, no more than if
+it were commonplace; she was already again occupied
+with a point of her own. "Is it absolutely true&mdash;for
+if it is, you know, it's tremendously interesting&mdash;that
+you haven't so much as a curiosity about
+what she has done for you?"
+</p><p>
+"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath
+on it?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;but I don't understand. It seems to me
+in your place&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do
+you know of my place? Pardon me," he at once
+added; "my preference is the one I express."
+</p><p>
+She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought.
+"But won't the facts be published?"
+</p><p>
+"'Published'?"&mdash;he winced.
+</p><p>
+"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
+</p><p>
+It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next
+minute another insistence. "Your desire is to escape
+everything?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+"And do you need no more definite sense of what
+it is you ask me to help you to renounce?"
+</p><p>
+"My sense is sufficient without being definite.
+I'm willing to believe that the amount of money's
+not small."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
+</p><p>
+"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly
+pursued, "it would inevitably not be meagre."
+</p><p>
+Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy
+of her. It's what she was herself&mdash;if you remember
+what we once said <i>that</i> was."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated&mdash;as if there had been many things.
+But he remembered one of them. "Stupendous?"
+</p><p>
+"Stupendous." A faint smile for it&mdash;ever so
+small&mdash;had flickered in her face, but had vanished
+before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had
+shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled&mdash;but
+that made her continue. She continued gently. "I
+think that what it really is must be that you're afraid.
+I mean," she explained, "that you're afraid of <i>all</i> the
+truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
+indeed can you be more? And you're afraid&mdash;it's
+wonderful!&mdash;to be in love with her."
+</p><p>
+"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe
+that now&mdash;for the time she lived. I believe it
+at least for the time you were there. But your change
+came&mdash;as it might well&mdash;the day you last saw her;
+she died for you then that you might understand her.
+From that hour you <i>did</i>." With which Kate slowly
+rose. "And I do now. She did it <i>for</i> us." Densher
+rose to face her, and she went on with her thought.
+"I used to call her, in my stupidity&mdash;for want of
+anything better&mdash;a dove. Well she stretched out her
+wings, and it was to <i>that</i> they reached. They cover us."
+</p><p>
+"They cover us," Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound
+up. "That's what I've done for you."
+</p><p>
+His look at her had a slow strangeness that had
+dried, on the moment, his tears. "Do I understand
+then&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her
+head. "No&mdash;for I see. You'll marry me without
+the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
+consent <i>you</i> don't."
+</p><p>
+"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it
+frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. "Well, you
+lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny."
+</p><p>
+Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no
+smile this time to spare. "Precisely&mdash;so that I must
+choose."
+</p><p>
+"You must choose."
+</p><p>
+Strange it was for him then that she stood in his
+own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond
+any that had ever made his breath come slow,
+he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that
+can save you from my choice."
+</p><p>
+"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes"&mdash;and she gave a nod at the long envelope
+on the table&mdash;"your surrender of that."
+</p><p>
+"What is it then?"
+</p><p>
+"Your word of honour that you're not in love
+with her memory."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;her memory!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah"&mdash;she made a high gesture&mdash;"don't speak
+of it as if you couldn't be. I could in your place;
+and you're one for whom it will do. Her memory's
+your love. You <i>want</i> no other."
+</p><p>
+He heard her out in stillness, watching her face
+but not moving. Then he only said: "I'll marry you,
+mind you, in an hour."
+</p><p>
+"As we were?"
+</p><p>
+"As we were."
+</p><p>
+But she turned to the door, and her headshake was
+now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"
+</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4 align="center">THE END</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4 align="center">The Riverside Press</h4>
+<h4 align="center">CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS</h4>
+<h4 align="center">U . S . A</h4>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30059 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume II
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2009 [EBook #30059]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOLUME II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Adcock. Special thanks to The Internet
+Archive: American Libraries, and Project Gutenberg Australia
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+BY HENRY JAMES
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+1909
+
+
+Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+"I say, you know, Kate--you _did_ stay!" had been Merton Densher's
+punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
+of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
+see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
+recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
+helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
+flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
+street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
+corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
+to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
+But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquent
+at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck
+him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his
+absence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved them
+to face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.
+That it would require some handling, that they should still have to
+deal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the
+great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
+consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had
+twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and
+the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He
+had arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the
+moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the
+station, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had
+praised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered frankly
+enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care
+to-day who saw her, and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow,
+inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
+would become a baser creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It
+was none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed
+their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
+obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,
+with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise
+to Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and had
+suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea
+that had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but
+nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in the
+refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the
+notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "have
+something" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
+come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
+
+He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
+hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
+to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
+there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
+rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
+nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
+Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
+and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
+they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
+did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
+which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit,
+the truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that
+once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop
+there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't
+be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
+deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,
+respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further
+fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
+single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
+the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
+garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
+seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
+coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
+love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
+happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
+how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
+Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
+would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
+one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
+red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
+She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
+coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
+yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
+such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
+of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
+that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
+did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
+well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
+him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
+and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.
+
+She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
+convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
+that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
+he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
+effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
+night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
+the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
+He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
+to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
+believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
+Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
+made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
+court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from
+such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
+suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
+subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
+names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
+love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
+have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
+course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
+whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
+he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
+money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
+the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
+bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
+produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
+change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
+without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
+lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
+might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
+something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
+tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
+personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
+almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
+Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
+waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
+had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
+all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
+master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
+final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
+the impossible.
+
+She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
+had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
+their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
+for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
+unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
+interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
+They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
+with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
+again, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and
+tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
+frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
+halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
+an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
+for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
+might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
+touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
+as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
+pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
+service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
+it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
+brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
+the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
+thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
+that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
+still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
+interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
+about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
+her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
+which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
+more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
+blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
+better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
+superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
+exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
+appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
+look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
+remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
+the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
+the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
+inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
+he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
+it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
+picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
+independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadful
+closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
+breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
+into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
+together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
+probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
+reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
+thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
+Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
+mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.
+
+What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
+by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
+greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
+new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
+there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
+answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
+however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
+things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
+individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
+moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
+went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
+phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
+group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
+persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
+to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
+pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
+him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
+that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
+yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
+fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
+some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
+separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
+aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
+later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
+pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
+put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
+part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and
+looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
+for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
+first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
+full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
+sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
+street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
+managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
+or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
+there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
+but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
+sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.
+
+He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
+direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
+a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
+though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
+from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
+added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
+troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
+really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
+of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
+what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
+first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
+at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
+than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
+part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
+meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
+weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
+the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
+Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
+stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
+this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
+for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
+with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
+he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
+when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
+sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than
+as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under
+providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
+concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,
+even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
+question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her
+appeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He
+recalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,
+funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
+itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt
+himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of
+her very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
+solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that
+time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--a
+surprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. It
+meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least
+out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made
+him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.
+
+"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And
+she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
+quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
+surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'll
+leave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of
+betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite
+the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it
+will be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask
+to-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my
+cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."
+
+He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
+now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
+that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
+This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
+questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
+about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
+Milly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
+popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
+felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
+advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
+had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
+know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
+foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
+scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
+the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
+not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
+weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
+after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
+meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
+that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
+might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
+them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
+hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
+their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
+this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
+preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
+at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.
+
+
+II
+
+It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
+when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
+the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of
+a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
+appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
+parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
+and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
+fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with
+the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
+American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,
+they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One
+couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,
+please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to
+help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak
+to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:
+Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate
+embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
+perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece
+than as receiving it in a steady light. He had always felt, however,
+that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he
+imaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even before
+his absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when
+we're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
+that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and
+the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to
+prevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a
+truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his
+immediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted
+questions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her
+patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for
+instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do
+nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
+possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms
+of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some
+occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me
+these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so
+accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And
+it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He
+was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you
+see we can't work it anyhow."
+
+If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was
+because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown
+himself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you
+hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully
+good-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You're
+quite right--so long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
+lucidly, that the dear things couldn't _help_, simply as charming
+friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but they
+won't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend
+always helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by this
+time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she
+particularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,
+make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
+made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, they
+could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of
+the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the
+first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of
+them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in
+truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,
+on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just
+what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"
+
+It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
+come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at
+her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
+back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he
+knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
+Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one
+of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but
+visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of
+blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and
+Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,
+that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular
+time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.
+But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him
+now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They
+_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and
+the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They
+connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in
+him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it
+amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he
+could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her
+inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine
+as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where
+their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse
+independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will
+you take me just as I am?"
+
+She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified
+to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he
+found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant
+into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with
+him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't
+spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only
+believe in me, and it will be beautiful."
+
+He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
+didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
+with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
+as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to
+say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she
+closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she
+could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response
+her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited
+by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
+appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
+they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
+certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger
+than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was
+that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity
+making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
+and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to
+swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact
+only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up
+more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,
+and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted
+was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow
+suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more
+consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
+certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of
+indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."
+
+"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"
+
+He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the
+first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after
+all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
+at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most
+people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,
+without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no
+more money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or than
+he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would
+be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some
+months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how
+their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity
+than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand
+he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her
+indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was
+would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that
+she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other
+terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of complicated
+brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact
+by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed
+her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he
+would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any
+_definite_ sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
+"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after
+all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
+there is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as we
+play with her."
+
+"She doesn't want to play with _me_, my dear," Kate lucidly replied;
+"she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares
+for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value.
+_This_ has a value--her being as she has been about us to-day. I
+believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself
+while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'--not a bit."
+
+"What is it then," the young man returned--"from the moment it isn't
+her blessing and a cheque?"
+
+Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is
+something in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn't
+propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a
+thing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really
+but one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about
+us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in
+detail we fight her."
+
+"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this,
+"that it's in detail we deceive her"--a speech that, as soon as he had
+uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
+to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
+
+Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,
+whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to
+make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she
+explained, "meet here."
+
+Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If
+Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come
+back at all?"
+
+"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's
+in love with you."
+
+But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make
+out, you know, that every one's in love with me."
+
+She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
+
+"You said just now Miss Theale."
+
+"I said she liked you--yes."
+
+"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued:
+"Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for
+_this_--as from myself."
+
+"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the
+implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general
+prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"
+
+Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well
+tell her all."
+
+It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a
+manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her
+anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;
+make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see that
+you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."
+
+But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I
+see, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged if
+I do! It _is_," he said with feeling, "a game."
+
+"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up--or I
+give _you_--if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."
+
+"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked,
+"what good does it do?"
+
+Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what--?"
+
+"Does my pleasing her--does anything. I _can't_," he impatiently
+declared, "please her."
+
+Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency;
+but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere
+complaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him
+under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and
+took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her
+form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met
+it, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified _all_ things so to
+possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these
+terms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
+everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments to
+one of her previous--and as positively seemed--her most precious ideas.
+"You accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love with you. Well,
+if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That's the good
+she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you--so that she'll help
+us to go on."
+
+Densher stared--she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basis
+does it make for my seeing _her?_"
+
+"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
+
+"Don't mind my leading her on?"
+
+She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading _you_."
+
+"Well, she won't--so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that
+'help,'" he pursued, "with what she knows?"
+
+"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
+
+He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
+
+"Prevent her helping you. She's _like_ that," Kate Croy explained.
+
+It took indeed some understanding. "Making nothing of the fact that I
+love another?"
+
+"Making everything," said Kate. "To console you."
+
+"But for what?"
+
+"For not getting your other."
+
+He continued to stare. "But how does she know--?"
+
+"That you _won't_ get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she
+doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of
+Aunt Maud's stand. _That_"--Kate was lucid--"gives her the chance to be
+nice to you."
+
+"And what does it give _me_," the young man none the less rationally
+asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"
+
+Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his
+violence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there
+are reasons. I mean others."
+
+"What others?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you," the girl added,
+"are enough to go on with."
+
+"To go on to what?"
+
+"Why, to seeing her again--say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on
+all grounds, is no more than decent of you."
+
+He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had
+passed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but it
+had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in
+the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindling
+consequence. "Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes," said
+Densher, "her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
+independently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received."
+
+It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you see. I shall meet you
+there."
+
+"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why she should wish to
+receive you for it."
+
+"She receives me for myself--that is for _her_ self. She thinks no end
+of me. That I should have to drum it into you!"
+
+Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's beyond me."
+
+Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She regards me as
+already--in these few weeks--her dearest friend. It's quite separate.
+We're in, she and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that, as
+if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out
+at last her own real light. "She doesn't of course know I care for
+_you_. She thinks I care so little that it's not worth speaking of."
+That he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made quickly clear, and
+Kate hailed the effect with surprise. "Have you been supposing that she
+does know--?"
+
+"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you show
+me--and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her." She uttered at
+this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. "You
+_have_ denied it to her?"
+
+She threw up her arms at his being so backward. "'Denied it'? My dear
+man, we've never spoken of you."
+
+"Never, never?"
+
+"Strange as it may appear to your glory--never."
+
+He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs. Lowder have spoken?"
+
+"Very probably. But of _you_. Not of me."
+
+This struck him as obscure. "How does she know me but as part and
+parcel of you?"
+
+"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, to
+have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it.
+Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation--that is
+out of my being in danger from you--by not having so much as suspected
+or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it
+and sinking it--if she only does so hard enough. Therefore _she_, in
+her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise
+than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed
+either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say,
+distinguished you."
+
+"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that they must have made it out
+for themselves?"
+
+"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's so
+funnily bumping against us on Tuesday."
+
+"She doesn't see from _that_--?"
+
+"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that
+you regard me with a complacent eye--for you show it, I think, always
+too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too
+much; I don't perhaps--to please you completely where others are
+concerned--show it enough."
+
+"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher demanded.
+
+It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. "Not where
+_you_ are concerned. Beyond seeing that you're rather gone," she went
+on, "Milly only sees that I'm decently good to you."
+
+"Very good indeed she must think it!"
+
+"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate smiled, "as very good
+indeed."
+
+The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining."
+
+"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essential
+plea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she
+added, "I _will_ explain."
+
+"And what will I do?"
+
+"Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here in
+truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment,
+took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had
+returned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that,
+Aunt Maud's liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn't
+spoil their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they should
+probably find it would help them. But she came back to Milly too. "Mind
+you go to see her."
+
+Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. "Then I may come
+again?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud--as much as you like. But we can't again," said Kate,
+"play her _this trick_. I can't see you here alone."
+
+"Then where?"
+
+"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
+
+"And what good will that do me?"
+
+"Try it and you'll see."
+
+"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher asked. "Say you are, how
+will that give us privacy?"
+
+"Try it--you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage as
+we can."
+
+"That's precisely what _I_ feel. It strikes me we might manage better."
+His idea of this was a thing that made him an instant hesitate; yet he
+brought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to _me?_"
+
+It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarce
+generous in expecting her definitely to answer, and by looking to him
+to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him
+feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that he
+thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of
+his flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
+again on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. It
+might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her
+mind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it will
+make."
+
+Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was
+stupid--the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But he
+made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
+bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle but
+strong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that the
+difference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"
+
+Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her
+more marked shows of impatience; with which in fact she sharply closed
+their discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and she
+accompanied him to the top of the stairs with an air of having so put
+their possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubts
+perverse. "I verily believe I _shall_ hate you if you spoil for me the
+beauty of what I see!"
+
+
+III
+
+He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw;
+and the very next occasion had for him still other surprises than that.
+He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the
+telegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with
+them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate even
+though in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting American
+friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American
+friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to
+the last bitterness. This apprehension, however, we hasten to add,
+enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
+the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after
+his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came
+in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the
+hour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as he
+was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
+field. He had thus had with her several bewildering
+moments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
+him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
+he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
+supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
+achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
+herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
+you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
+the article required was what might especially have caused him to
+stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
+dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
+it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
+all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
+his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
+small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
+truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
+feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
+comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
+ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
+quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
+avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
+This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
+discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
+him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
+being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
+that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
+that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
+"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
+convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
+irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
+already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
+ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
+afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
+gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
+impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
+keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
+been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the
+world as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
+welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her
+few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the
+amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a
+plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of
+America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the
+idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred
+to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her
+favourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this
+helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and
+blameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
+absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by
+the beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support
+all round, for no young man could have been less formidable than the
+person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The
+ostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, as
+prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his
+own reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--a
+relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving nor
+lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess,
+the girl had to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from head
+to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again
+the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually
+and consummately reckoned.
+
+That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon,
+under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to
+the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this
+estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so
+that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
+plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in
+respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a
+person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way
+to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the
+character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
+was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things
+all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet
+criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
+last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
+Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
+performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
+parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
+the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
+actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
+performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
+jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
+accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
+as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
+much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
+point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
+almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
+having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
+he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
+at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
+came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
+_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
+mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
+expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
+fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
+the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
+as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
+intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
+double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
+sign to the person in the house she loved best.
+
+The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
+on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
+gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
+presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
+like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
+opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
+"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
+contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
+two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what now
+offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless
+and full of the compunction of having had to come alone. Her companion,
+at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough,
+and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
+regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was the
+first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,
+without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she called
+it--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if the
+young man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been
+wholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
+dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar
+to the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Any
+knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
+supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the most
+privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a manner
+invented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caught
+her in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her
+by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a
+friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp
+flashlight or two?
+
+He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with
+interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as
+he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his
+pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction. The ear of
+society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
+paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he
+appeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settled
+himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the
+full revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if
+he could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
+gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What
+touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air
+of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
+career. There was of course more said about the heroine than if she
+hadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range
+of Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two
+wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,
+professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
+to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
+obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
+been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
+of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
+smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
+benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
+she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
+would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
+in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
+to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
+indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
+He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
+them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
+came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
+a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
+they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
+striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
+keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
+himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
+that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
+and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
+than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
+scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
+New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
+complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
+relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
+perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
+of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
+if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
+country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
+herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
+the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
+with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
+The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that
+they saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in the
+States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taught
+the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native
+product. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she was
+weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that
+New York, in having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck. There
+_were_ plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were
+awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank
+goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the
+Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to be
+calculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
+without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
+announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her
+young friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no
+manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the
+moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
+good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at a
+certain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest
+approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left
+them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly
+addressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least little
+bit--about my friend."
+
+He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs.
+Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn
+meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
+couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,
+but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't know
+enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,
+as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously
+appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
+immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then
+present."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it
+expressed he failed at the time to make out.
+
+"You weren't present _then_, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
+"You don't know," she continued with mellow gaiety, "how far things may
+have gone."
+
+It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had
+more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
+it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
+foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
+foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
+affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
+produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
+as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
+already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
+perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
+precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
+opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
+long."
+
+It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
+for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
+that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
+wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."
+
+"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
+to keep well with him.
+
+He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
+knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
+endlessly more to see."
+
+"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
+archness.
+
+"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
+impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
+about her."
+
+"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
+firmness.
+
+"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
+often quite prove the depth of the impression?"
+
+He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
+they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
+deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
+for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
+authority about her."
+
+Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
+had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
+easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
+sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
+and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
+half so much."
+
+The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
+fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross
+circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
+companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
+old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
+the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
+fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
+for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
+communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
+determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
+though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
+thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
+things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
+Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
+own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
+feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
+of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
+happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
+don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
+followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
+this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
+was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
+than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
+in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
+little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
+harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
+it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
+by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
+gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
+had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
+There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
+the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
+and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
+characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
+scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
+in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
+feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
+nature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
+be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
+Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
+of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
+only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
+inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
+American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
+creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
+marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
+
+So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
+thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
+society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
+independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
+civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
+within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
+there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
+the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
+world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
+of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
+struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
+Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
+imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
+practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
+aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
+relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
+London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
+your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
+away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
+She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
+having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
+_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
+developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
+but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
+
+Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
+pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
+light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
+property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
+also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
+Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
+glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
+feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
+only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
+passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
+life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
+entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
+observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
+on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
+drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
+if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
+feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
+admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
+somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
+this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
+from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
+her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
+that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
+she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
+stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
+Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
+was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
+Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
+practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
+friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
+unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
+take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
+perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
+This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
+might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
+measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
+covered ground.
+
+
+IV
+
+The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
+element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
+upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
+this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight.
+Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room;
+he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
+foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this
+general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks
+to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that
+intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;
+whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs
+sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.
+Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small
+sofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,
+of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know each
+other--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; and
+she arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to put
+Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
+world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the
+profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;
+there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he
+could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other
+hand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see on
+the spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
+in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. I
+mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you
+she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
+
+He took this in such patience as he could muster. "What in the world's
+the matter with her?"
+
+But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here has
+been just a reason for her funking it."
+
+"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher asked again.
+
+"Why just what I've told you--that she likes you so much."
+
+"Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?"
+
+Kate cast about--it would take so long to explain. "And perhaps it's
+true that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
+
+"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visibly
+preoccupied and worried."
+
+"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be only for that."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. "Why, if it's
+anything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, and
+she has done all she need to be civil."
+
+"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite beautifully civil."
+
+It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was
+already, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on two
+different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other
+makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell Milly all about you."
+
+"Well then," said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, "I'm glad I
+felt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to
+her?"
+
+"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's all," Kate declared,
+"as it should be."
+
+"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically suggested, "that she
+isn't getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on _this?_"
+And then as Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On our present
+disregard for appearances."
+
+"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make
+them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged
+that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had
+indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instance
+another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to
+respond just in order to make that impression."
+
+"Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! I
+hope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean
+judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as
+thrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,
+Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do you
+mean she's as ill as she looks?"
+
+Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech
+deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her
+own--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
+Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could
+scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.
+She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing her
+too--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on
+the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled
+up. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the night
+before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
+farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a
+day or two later. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
+When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
+They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
+brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
+man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
+Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
+She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
+you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
+hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
+doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
+out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
+
+Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
+she has had?"
+
+"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
+
+"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"
+
+"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
+to lose. And she wants more."
+
+"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
+"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"
+
+"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
+somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
+oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
+all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
+certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
+success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
+she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
+a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
+of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
+facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
+Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
+_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
+"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
+assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
+plain."
+
+Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
+then on earth can I do her?"
+
+Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
+
+"And for what?"
+
+"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
+care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
+it made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
+there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
+compassion. "She has nothing."
+
+"Not all the young dukes?"
+
+"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
+does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
+"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
+life. Oh she has you arranged!"
+
+"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
+rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
+
+"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
+
+"Then why shan't I be?"
+
+"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
+_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."
+
+"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
+
+"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
+the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
+you're therefore what I use most."
+
+He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
+which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
+he asked.
+
+Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
+think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
+
+"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
+has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
+really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
+spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
+conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
+a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
+days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
+has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."
+
+"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
+her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."
+
+"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
+short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
+she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."
+
+Kate on her side did this justice. "No--that's the beauty of her."
+
+"The beauty--?"
+
+"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your
+watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you
+convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
+won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won't
+taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know."
+
+"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?
+In what extraordinary state _is_ she?"
+
+Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. "I
+believe that if she's ill at all she's very ill. I believe that if
+she's bad she's not a _little_ bad. I can't tell you why, but that's
+how I see her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll have it
+all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think she'll have it all."
+
+Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having
+thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid.
+"You 'think' and you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
+without an inkling of her complaint?"
+
+"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't want
+knowledge. She moreover herself doesn't want one to want it: she has,
+as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a
+kind of--I don't know what to call it--intensity of pride. And then and
+then--" But with this she faltered.
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for you, my dear,"
+Kate continued, "that you're as sound as a bell."
+
+"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather good then for yourself too
+that you're as strong as the sea."
+
+She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their
+young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at
+least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the
+personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that
+very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the
+poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good
+they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this. "How
+we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were
+the facts. "From illness I keep away."
+
+"But you don't--since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the
+midst of it."
+
+"Ah I'm only watching--!"
+
+"And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!"
+
+"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of
+what I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon."
+
+She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the
+hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning
+brought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a case
+for surgery?"
+
+"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come
+to that. Of course she's in the highest hands."
+
+"The doctors are after her then?"
+
+"She's after _them_--it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it
+now--she sees Sir Luke Strett."
+
+It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an
+instant: "One seems to guess."
+
+Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you."
+
+For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it
+before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl."
+
+"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You
+understand moreover just how much--and just how little."
+
+"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand."
+
+"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has
+been your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making up
+to her goes, plenty of others will."
+
+Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing
+their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown,
+amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility.
+"Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free."
+
+"But so are you, my dear!"
+
+She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had
+sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at
+her. "You're prodigious!"
+
+"Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave a
+further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby
+had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately
+finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the
+announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
+less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the
+visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly
+rose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And then
+for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back from
+America."
+
+"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as he
+mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He
+recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have
+appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, he
+knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficial
+resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was
+the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and
+experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a
+thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of
+curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to
+which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask
+Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs.
+Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.
+
+"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?--as I seemed to hear outside, from
+below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable voice."
+
+"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell," the girl explained,
+"and was compelled to disappoint us."
+
+"Ah 'disappoint'--rather!" And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on
+Densher. "She isn't really bad, I trust?"
+
+Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in
+Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with
+whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without
+visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was
+doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was
+aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I think not. I've
+just been reassuring Mr. Densher," she added--"who's as concerned as
+the rest of us. I've been calming his fears."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark again--and again it was just as good. That was for
+Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the
+others: "_My_ fears would want calming. We must take great care of her.
+This way?"
+
+She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave
+them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy.
+What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently
+with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time
+quite ready for her. "It's _he_ who's your aunt's man?"
+
+"Oh immensely."
+
+"I mean for _you._"
+
+"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There he is. Now you can judge."
+
+"Judge of what?"
+
+"Judge of him."
+
+"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked. "I've nothing to do with
+him."
+
+"Then why do you ask about him?"
+
+"To judge of you--which is different."
+
+Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. "To take the
+measure, do you mean, of my danger?"
+
+He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare say, of Miss
+Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her--?"
+
+"With his interest in me?"
+
+"With her own interest in you," Densher said while she reflected. "If
+that interest--Mrs. Lowder's--takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
+rather to look out for the forms _he_ takes?"
+
+Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh he takes them easily,"
+she answered. "The beauty is that she doesn't trust him."
+
+"That Milly doesn't?"
+
+"Yes--Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really."
+
+Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he
+cheats?"
+
+"Yes," said Kate--"that's the way people are. What they think of their
+enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with
+what they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind, however,"
+she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt Maud's security, though she doesn't
+yet fully recognise it--besides being Milly's own."
+
+"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?"
+
+She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. "You oughtn't to
+make me say too much. But I'm glad I don't."
+
+"Don't say too much?"
+
+"Don't care for Lord Mark."
+
+"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which
+he added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
+
+"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her again
+impatient.
+
+Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, I
+suppose, one of the dukes."
+
+"Mercy, no--far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities,
+'in' it. Milly, it's true," she said, to be exact, "has no natural
+sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
+or know who's who or what's what."
+
+"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason for liking _me_."
+
+"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate, "who at least know
+what I lose."
+
+Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "And
+Aunt Maud--why shouldn't _she_ know? I mean that your friend there
+isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
+
+"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's
+undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get."
+
+"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.
+
+"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this;
+"because perhaps in the line of that alone--as he has no money--more
+could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the
+sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his
+family and at the other end of the string. _The_ thing's his genius."
+
+"And do you believe in that?"
+
+"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had
+yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so
+that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in
+time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
+
+"Political?"
+
+"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it
+when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,
+without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an
+effect without his being in any traceable way a cause."
+
+"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality,
+"isn't agreeable--?"
+
+"Oh but it is!"
+
+"Not surely for every one."
+
+"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you may have reasons--and
+men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not."
+
+"Then there you are!"
+
+"Yes, precisely--that takes, on his part, genius."
+
+Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus
+promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been
+found, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
+suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and
+overflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the
+future she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you are
+stupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--and
+then you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--except
+that you're so much too good for what she builds _for_. Even 'society'
+won't know how good for it you are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond
+it. You'd have to pull it uphill--it's you yourself who are at the top.
+The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read?
+You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
+ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've a
+subscription!"
+
+She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in
+answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their
+essential wealth of life. "It's you who draw me out. I exist in you.
+Not in others."
+
+It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself
+pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "See
+here, you know: don't, _don't_--!"
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
+
+She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. "So you think
+you'll kill _me_ in time to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the
+next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she
+had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come
+back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely
+connected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a
+distance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him before
+they joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understand
+she meant his way with Milly.
+
+He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had
+brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this
+light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
+undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitely
+tell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"
+
+She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though
+quite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growing
+intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
+yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me."
+
+"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
+
+"She doesn't suppose it."
+
+"How then can she imagine you never named her?"
+
+"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her. I've told her everything.
+She's in possession of reasons that will perfectly do."
+
+Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you exactly as I take
+them?"
+
+"Exactly as you take them."
+
+"She's just such another victim?"
+
+"Just such another. You're a pair."
+
+"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we can console each other?"
+
+"Ah something _may_ indeed happen," she returned, "if you'll only go
+straight!"
+
+He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you mean
+by going straight?"
+
+"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, and
+you'll see. You'll have me perfectly, always, to refer to."
+
+"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
+
+It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her back. There you are.
+You won't be able to say I haven't made it smooth for you."
+
+He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the
+queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous
+silken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"
+
+He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had
+caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her
+attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and
+who was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by
+Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened before
+any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found
+time to say to him with furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another
+was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew
+near to him with an almost reproachful "Come and talk to _me!_"--a
+challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness of
+their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the
+same he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs.
+Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as
+looking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which he
+afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few
+words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This
+impression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
+something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps
+a slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her "Good-night,
+sir!" as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing
+more to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this
+time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personage
+had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently--with
+a view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs on
+Milly--proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred
+was that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word for
+himself. It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she both
+detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he
+hadn't yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal.
+
+"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really interesting."
+
+"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly not forget her.
+But you must remember that, so far as her 'interest' is concerned, I
+myself discovered, I--as was said at dinner--invented her."
+
+"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't taken out the
+patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press of other things, too much
+neglect her."
+
+Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate's, he
+asked himself quickly if it mightn't help him with her. He at any rate
+could but try. "You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
+you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to me. _She_ keeps me up--she
+has had so much to say about them."
+
+He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his
+passage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring to
+herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
+if her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw his
+intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance;
+she only said imperturbably: "Yes, she'll herself do anything for her
+friend; so that she but preaches what she practises."
+
+Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate's devotion
+went. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in face
+of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself
+of the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate's mastery of
+the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
+What might really _become_ in all this of the American girl was
+therefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose none
+of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so
+far as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all the
+same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming."
+
+Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a chance."
+
+"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's--naturally now--leaving
+town and, as I take it, going abroad."
+
+Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing
+with this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "till
+she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving him
+uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall go
+too."
+
+He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And what
+good will that do _me?_"
+
+"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll come out to us."
+
+"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
+
+"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
+
+"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed
+putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he
+rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make
+of it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "to
+consider."
+
+"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
+
+"And pray what's that?"
+
+"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I'm
+treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I can
+smooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And her
+fortune's a real fortune."
+
+Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he
+felt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funny
+if it hadn't been so grave--with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
+derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm much obliged to you
+for the handsome offer--"
+
+"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it
+does--but there's no reason it shouldn't to _you_. Mind you,
+moreover"--she kept it up--"I'm not one who talks in the air. And you
+owe me something--if you want to know why."
+
+Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her
+consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive
+an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that
+she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
+while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this
+light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of
+course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
+inviting me for instance to-night--!"
+
+"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," she
+added, "how far I've gone for you."
+
+He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he
+laughed again as he could. "I see how far you're going."
+
+"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for
+you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only
+made him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has the
+weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with
+surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you."
+Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which,
+speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see
+what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to
+make me right!"
+
+The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had
+left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,
+under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the
+square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his
+brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
+Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had
+affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He
+made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
+starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
+Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
+very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
+Milly was successfully deceived.
+
+
+V
+
+To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
+see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
+visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
+face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
+with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
+Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
+been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
+excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
+American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
+in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
+both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
+mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
+the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
+other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
+her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
+a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
+him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
+oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
+interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
+appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
+was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
+in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
+perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
+breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
+good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
+ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
+which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
+in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
+reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
+patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
+thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
+acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of
+this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one
+way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had
+not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the
+night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed of
+being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of
+man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor
+evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one
+concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He liked
+Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He
+liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the
+evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had never
+known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,
+whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff
+not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he
+find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea of
+working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise
+much interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
+positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
+
+Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a
+margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his
+burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
+involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for
+him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This was
+simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully
+recovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
+had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the
+world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class was
+from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_
+ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable
+than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her in
+Kate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to
+Densher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from the
+National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore
+scarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much for
+her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
+simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy
+acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
+been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
+was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
+rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
+with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
+her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
+see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
+that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
+enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
+of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
+thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
+expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
+might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
+mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
+hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
+_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
+if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
+surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
+perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
+want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
+of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
+his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
+apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
+of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
+within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
+understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
+which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
+couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
+acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
+could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
+It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
+let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
+explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
+she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
+the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for
+insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
+reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
+Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
+personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
+a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
+disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
+was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
+appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
+been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
+exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
+much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
+for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
+out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
+whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
+ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
+longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
+then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
+Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
+hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
+quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
+round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
+it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
+situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
+that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
+as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
+honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
+
+Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
+the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
+quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
+straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
+charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
+conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
+he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
+unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
+spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
+because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
+came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
+an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
+immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
+almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
+to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
+had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
+value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
+so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
+his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
+if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
+quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
+_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
+what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
+on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
+on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
+miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
+whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
+himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
+him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
+would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
+was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
+difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
+with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
+was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
+_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
+would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
+but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
+virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
+this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
+would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
+extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
+complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
+loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
+length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
+abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
+presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one
+nothing but good.
+
+Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the
+immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have
+wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
+Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She
+would absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shall
+ever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be less
+delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be free
+to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better
+reason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
+failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross than
+doing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the
+fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own,
+on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her
+with the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in the
+impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
+above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as
+she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Densher
+therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a
+pure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this pure
+pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things
+she seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not
+all the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant in
+the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the
+question of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she did
+that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for
+_you_--that's all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall
+never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worry
+about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in
+short, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even now
+while you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_
+justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was folded
+finely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions and
+her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings,
+but he wouldn't have that to-day. As he thought of the way in which,
+the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently "jawing," he
+accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
+apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
+events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
+London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
+as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
+and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
+Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
+this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
+the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
+fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
+interrupted encounter in New York.
+
+At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
+them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
+sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
+their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
+originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
+remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
+time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
+whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
+have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
+of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
+beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
+steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
+and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
+which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
+communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
+themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
+to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
+face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
+their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
+the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
+control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
+the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
+the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
+freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
+acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman
+could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experiment
+went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as
+the marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a word
+about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question
+for them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
+comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night before
+appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he
+fairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
+course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown
+him by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt
+with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
+conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before
+going further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite so
+much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came
+up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never
+renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument against
+that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little
+eloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.
+
+Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that
+she was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Over
+the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the merit
+of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the
+chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to her
+freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, _I?_
+Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was to do, it thus
+appeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was just
+what would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar
+brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
+heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She
+would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incur
+whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue to
+be exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. It
+wouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn't
+before him one of those rare cases of exaltation--food for fiction,
+food for poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
+care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if
+Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in my
+society, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to make
+my society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a different
+impression if she _had_ so reasoned. All of which, none the less,
+didn't prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to
+be whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do you
+begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
+
+She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she
+would, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed view
+of the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. They
+weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks
+somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we've
+only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's done
+and the wind's in our sails."
+
+"May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you come
+back?"
+
+She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the wind
+turns. And what do you do with your summer?"
+
+"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work
+in your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of the
+pleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."
+
+"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different time
+from ours. If you could but have worked while we've been working--"
+
+"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn't so great
+with me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, in
+either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--you
+all," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real
+physical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. My
+labour's comparatively light."
+
+"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like mine."
+
+"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
+
+"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested. Oh I could go far."
+
+He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?--since you've got here, as I
+learn, the whole place in your pocket."
+
+"Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed so
+what you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'm
+watching over its future, that I can't help being anxious and careful.
+I want--in the interest itself of what I've had and may still have--not
+to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again
+to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,"
+she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her
+statement--"I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ return? Can you promise one that?"
+
+Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if
+bargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"
+
+He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he
+checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to
+social life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of a
+mob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should you
+come here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear
+for us--if it isn't a question of climate."
+
+She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't a question--?"
+
+"Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going
+somewhere for that."
+
+"For better air?"--she remembered. "Oh yes, one certainly wants to get
+out of London in August."
+
+"Rather, of course!"--he fully understood. "Though I'm glad you've hung
+on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
+"once more."
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently asked.
+
+It pulled him up an instant--representing, as he saw it might have
+seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was
+proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
+was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll find ready to
+surround you with sympathy."
+
+It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him
+afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
+
+"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we _shall_ feel for you will be
+much nearer worship."
+
+"As near then as you like!" With which at last Kate's name was sounded.
+"The people I'd most come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
+for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me."
+
+"So she has to _me_," said Densher. "I feel," he added as she at first
+answered nothing, "that, quite contrary to anything I originally
+expected, I've made a good friend of her."
+
+"I didn't expect it either--its turning out as it has. But I did," said
+Milly, "with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I'd do anything"--she
+kept it up--"for Kate."
+
+Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might
+for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the
+ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together
+and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at
+that moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do for
+Kate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he
+felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness
+stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his
+silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for
+Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
+trying the next minute but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself.
+"Of course I know what friends you are--and of course I understand," he
+permitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person so
+charming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean her
+working for your return."
+
+"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm really on her hands."
+
+He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show
+he knew. "Ah she's very masterful."
+
+"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
+
+"No--that's not the way. At any rate it isn't hers," he smiled. He
+remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways
+was just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no further
+than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of
+representing a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to call
+know."
+
+"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The words
+gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for
+his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
+to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity.
+Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far--if it _was_
+too far--without being false. His observation was one he would
+perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and
+before Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how just
+here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up
+not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly put
+there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to
+turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have
+given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled
+for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August
+afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy
+carriage-wheels and of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great
+shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded
+by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a
+due display of diminished prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
+Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
+
+"It's only my own carriage; it does that--isn't it wonderful?--every
+day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our
+hearts, very amusing." She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
+of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on
+the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed
+a brave show. "Is it very awful?"
+
+It was to Densher's eyes--save for its absurd heaviness--only
+pleasantly pompous. "It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I
+know? You're mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
+wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your
+carriage--well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one."
+But she was going out, and he mustn't stand in her way. What had
+happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was going
+out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said
+she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive--that in fact
+there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her
+to-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why the
+carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these
+things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they
+found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompany
+her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the
+matter--on the basis, that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
+happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have
+described in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The
+system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought him
+headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now
+it was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or the
+other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
+him longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watching
+himself wait. He couldn't keep that up for ever; and since one thing or
+the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
+became conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settled
+itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a
+firm object in the stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure.
+It's a charming idea."
+
+She gave no look to thank him--she rather looked away; she only said at
+once to her servant, "In ten minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the
+man went out, "We'll go somewhere--I shall like that. But I must ask of
+you time--as little as possible--to get ready." She looked over the
+room to provide for him, keep him there. "There are books and
+things--plenty; and I dress very quickly." He caught her eyes only as
+she went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.
+
+Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have
+said; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing to
+oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that
+she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige
+_her;_ which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite
+round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he
+stood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more--remained
+with several very living little matters to think about. One of these
+was the phenomenon--typical, highly American, he would have said--of
+Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had sought
+refuge--refuge from another question--in the almost exclusive
+contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even
+to a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous for
+his young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone--since she
+hadn't mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more
+advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn't an American
+girl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate _would_ have
+done it, though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
+spontaneous. And then in addition Kate _had_ done it--or things very
+like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate--even if his ostensibly not
+being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any
+rate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate,
+was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to
+anything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
+herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved about
+the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at
+his disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
+whereas Kate was backward--backward still, comparatively, as an English
+girl--and yet advanced in a high degree. However--though this didn't
+straighten it out--Kate was of course two or three years older; which
+at their time of life considerably counted.
+
+Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander;
+yet without keeping at bay for long the sense of having rounded his
+corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option
+of taking advantage of Milly's absence to retrace his steps. If he
+might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he
+couldn't turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his
+consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue
+was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss
+Theale's servant had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had met,
+obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door,
+he loudly announced as Miss Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped
+short at sight of Densher--only, after an instant, as the young man saw
+with free amusement, not from surprise and still less from
+discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation--Miss Theale had
+gone to prepare to drive--on receipt of which the servant effaced
+himself.
+
+"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
+
+"Yes--with your approval; which I've taken, as you see, for granted."
+
+"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!" She was thoroughly
+consistent and handsome about it.
+
+"What I mean is of course," he went on--for he was sensibly affected by
+her gaiety--"at your so lively instigation."
+
+She had looked about the room--she might have been vaguely looking for
+signs of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aid
+in taking a decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you like."
+She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made
+a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. "So much so as that? Do
+you know I think I won't wait?"
+
+"Not to see her--after coming?"
+
+"Well, with you in the field--! I came for news of her, but she must be
+all right. If she _is_--"
+
+But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?" He was moved to say
+more. "It's not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to me
+it's you." She struck him as making light of a matter that had been
+costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't both be quite just.
+Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn't want at
+all events to feel a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing--and shall not,
+I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
+
+Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his
+words; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he really
+needn't get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked
+it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she better--if she's able to
+see you?"
+
+"She assures me she's in perfect health."
+
+Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On which she added: "It won't
+have been really for illness that she stayed away last night."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+"Well--for nervousness."
+
+"Nervousness about what?"
+
+"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the
+next moment. "I've told you that."
+
+He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it
+was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: "What have you told
+_her?_"
+
+She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered
+where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even
+stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
+feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying
+things--! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. "Ask _her_, if
+you like; you're free--she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
+trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have told. I'm all right
+with her," said Kate. "So there you are."
+
+"If you mean _here_ I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable. If you
+also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you're so
+far right as that she certainly does believe in you."
+
+"Well then take example by her."
+
+"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued. "She's driving me
+out for you."
+
+"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity, "you can do it a
+little for _her_. I'm not afraid," she smiled.
+
+He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it
+and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in
+this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
+relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, a
+question of words. "I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But
+for you I'll do anything."
+
+"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
+
+He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to it?"
+
+"To 'it'? To what?"
+
+"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that, you know, that I'm
+letting you do--well, God knows what with me."
+
+She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense of
+which she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in me
+then, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gone
+further?"
+
+"Break off with you?"
+
+"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay and
+explain to her why it is."
+
+He wondered--as if it struck him. "What would you say?"
+
+"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that there's nothing for me
+but to bear with you as I best may."
+
+He considered of this. "How much do you abuse me to her?"
+
+"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
+
+Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought to mind her attitude."
+
+"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."
+
+He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
+itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
+back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
+and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
+now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
+here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"
+
+Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
+But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."
+
+"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.
+
+"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
+many conditions."
+
+She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
+pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
+suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
+any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
+being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
+circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
+speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
+begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
+translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"
+
+She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
+than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
+
+"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled
+something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
+his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
+check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
+she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
+deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
+renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
+where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
+victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
+dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
+was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
+he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
+he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
+she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
+
+"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
+with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
+understand."
+
+She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
+before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
+enough, you know, without understanding too much."
+
+"You don't need to see."
+
+He required then a last injunction. "I must simply go it blind?"
+
+"You must simply be kind to her."
+
+"And leave the rest to you?"
+
+"Leave the rest to _her_," said Kate disappearing.
+
+It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three
+minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,
+so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
+throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for
+an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
+fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
+like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their
+friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he
+said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his
+corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.
+
+She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed
+over whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see
+_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
+Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it
+should now be wholly left.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH
+
+I
+
+When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her
+meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to
+face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the
+warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again
+feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the
+quarter of his courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the two
+women stood there showing each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd
+had received their great doctor's visit, which had been clearly no
+small affair for her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
+in place, against communication and betrayal, as she now practically
+confessed, the barrier of their invited guests. "You've been too dear.
+With what I see you're full of you treated them beautifully. _Isn't_
+Kate charming when she wants to be?"
+
+Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in a high fine spasm,
+with different dangers, had now quite let itself go. She had to make an
+effort to reach a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh she
+was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham added. "She knew."
+
+Milly braced herself--but conscious above all, at the moment, of a high
+compassion for her mate. She made her out as struggling--struggling in
+all her nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself, given her
+nature, could only be a torment. Milly gathered from the struggle how
+much there was of the pity, and how therefore it was both in her
+tenderness and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
+Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression instantly steadied
+the girl. Ruefully asking herself on what basis of ease, with the drop
+of their barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt the
+question met with a relief that was almost joy. The basis, the
+inevitable basis, was that she was going to be sorry for Susie, who, to
+all appearance, had been condemned in so much more uncomfortable a
+manner to be sorry for _her_. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow would hurt Mrs.
+Stringham, but how could her own ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at
+all events, on the spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
+the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture of an
+energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate knew," she asked, "that you
+were full of Sir Luke Strett?"
+
+"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice; she seemed to want
+to help me through." Which the good lady had no sooner said, however,
+than she almost tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly with
+a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she saw one had been taken up
+with something. When I say she knows I should say she's a person who
+guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side, heroic. "But _she_
+doesn't matter, Milly."
+
+The girl felt she by this time could face anything. "Nobody matters,
+Susie. Nobody." Which her next words, however, rather contradicted.
+"Did he take it ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
+just what he wanted--to have it out, so much more simply, with _you_?"
+
+"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs. Stringham delicately
+quavered.
+
+"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on, "and didn't he think you
+the most charming person I could possibly have referred him to for an
+account of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together and in fact
+fall quite in love, so that it will really be a great advantage for you
+to have me as a common ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end
+of a good thing of me."
+
+"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham pleadingly murmured; yet
+showing as she did so that she feared the effect even of deprecation.
+
+"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?--altogether, whatever he may
+say, a lovely acquaintance to have made? You're just the right people
+for me--I see it now; and do you know what, between you, you must do?"
+Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: "You
+must simply see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out together.
+I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and we'll be--the three of us,
+with whatever others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you
+like!--a sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying a
+feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence that her young
+friend almost saw her--and scarcely withheld the observation--as taking
+it for "a part of the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
+she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate awfully interesting,
+isn't he?--which is so much to the good. We haven't at least--as we
+might have, with the way we tumbled into it--got hold of one of the
+dreary."
+
+"Interesting, dearest?"--Mrs. Stringham felt her feet firmer. "I don't
+know if he's interesting or not; but I do know, my own," she continued
+to quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you could possibly
+desire."
+
+"Certainly--that's it. Like all the world."
+
+"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very much more deeply and
+intelligently."
+
+"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the way, Susie, I want you.
+So 'buck' up, my dear. We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't
+worry."
+
+"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face registered the
+sublimity of her lie.
+
+It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her companion went to her,
+met by her with an embrace in which things were said that exceeded
+speech. Each held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
+unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning the torment of
+helplessness, the woe for Milly of having _her_, at such a time, to
+think of. Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
+friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it
+more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing
+in fact came to the proof between them but that they could thus cling
+together--except indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of
+protection and support was all the younger woman's own. "I don't ask
+you," she presently said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what he
+told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that I had left him to
+you, nor what passed between you about me in any way. It wasn't to get
+that out of you that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
+freely--for there are things I don't want to know. I shall see him
+again and again and shall know more than enough. All I do want is that
+you shall see me through on _his_ basis, whatever it is; which it's
+enough--for the purpose--that you yourself should know: that is with
+him to show you how. I'll make it charming for you--that's what I mean;
+I'll keep you up to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
+you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me. There. It's
+understood. We keep each other going, and you may absolutely feel of me
+that I shan't break down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a dig
+of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
+
+"He told me I _can_ help you--of course he told me that," Susie, on her
+side, eagerly contended. "Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I
+come out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful--nothing, nothing,
+nothing," the poor lady passionately protested. "Only that you must do
+as you like and as he tells you--which _is_ just simply to do as you
+like."
+
+"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to time go to him. But
+that's of course doing as I like. It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I
+like going to him."
+
+Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave a clutch at the account
+of their situation that most showed it as workable. "That's what _will_
+be charming for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me--to help
+you to do as you like."
+
+"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed, "to save me from the
+consequences? Of course," she added, "there must first _be_ things I
+like."
+
+"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham more bravely said. "I
+think there _are_ some--as for instance just this one. I mean," she
+explained, "really having us so."
+
+Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable about _him_, and
+him the same about you? Yes--I shall get the good of it."
+
+Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a slight confusion.
+"Which of them are you talking of?"
+
+Milly wondered an instant--then had a light. "I'm not talking of Mr.
+Densher." With which moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you can
+be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better."
+
+"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you
+know," Susie continued, "whom he reminds me of? Of _our_ great man--Dr.
+Buttrick of Boston."
+
+Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she dropped him after a
+tributary pause. "What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr.
+Densher?"
+
+It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her
+friend's, that Susie produced her answer. "I think he's very handsome."
+
+Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of
+a teacher with a pupil. "Well, that will do for the first time. I
+_have_ done," she went on, "what I wanted."
+
+"Then that's all _we_ want. You see there are plenty of things."
+
+Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best is not to know--that
+includes them all. I don't--I don't know. Nothing about
+anything--except that you're _with_ me. Remember that, please. There
+won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's
+all right."
+
+The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain
+Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the reassuring. "Most
+certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees
+no reason--"
+
+"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly had taken it straight
+up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed
+of it otherwise. "Oh of course I know _that_." She spoke as if her
+friend's point were small.
+
+Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he
+didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."
+
+"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but
+she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited
+the word.
+
+It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"
+
+"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
+anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."
+
+It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
+am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
+it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
+more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
+what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
+her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
+was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
+begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
+special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
+descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
+star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
+cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
+twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
+the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
+watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
+and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
+fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
+oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
+contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
+greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
+during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
+in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
+the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
+it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
+capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
+the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
+
+The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
+imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
+with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
+passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
+yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
+had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
+certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
+silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
+however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
+the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
+Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
+account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
+she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
+give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
+might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
+herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
+behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
+herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
+she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
+inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
+it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
+that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
+observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
+purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
+She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
+the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
+intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
+as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
+contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
+vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
+least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
+she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
+be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
+to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."
+
+"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."
+
+"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
+There's something that will prevent her."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
+
+"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's
+doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent
+form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept
+_her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that
+these same things, at such times, made still more for business,
+arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of
+servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said,
+"if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for
+her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative
+margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would
+have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when
+Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her
+addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman
+summoned by the pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were
+sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given
+their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's
+interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her
+about Milly.
+
+"He had wished it himself?"
+
+"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter
+of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"
+said Mrs. Stringham.
+
+"Do you mean in her case?"
+
+"He says it _isn't_ a case."
+
+"What then is it?"
+
+"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed
+it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my
+knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something
+she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.
+She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."
+
+"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
+
+"He didn't tell me."
+
+"And you didn't ask?"
+
+"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He
+gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He
+_is_, thank God, interested."
+
+"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed
+with kindness.
+
+Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean
+that he sees what he can do with me."
+
+Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For _her_."
+
+"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to
+the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for
+her is to be happy."
+
+"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore," Mrs.
+Lowder handsomely asked, "should we cry so hard about it?"
+
+"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange, so beyond us. I mean
+if she can't be."
+
+"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. "She _shall_ be."
+
+"Well--if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we _can_ help."
+
+Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way, what Sir Luke Strett
+thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque
+ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
+dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by
+one, into her capacious apron. "But is that all he came to you for--to
+tell you she must be happy?"
+
+"That she must be _made_ so--that's the point. It seemed enough, as he
+told me," Mrs. Stringham went on; "he makes it somehow such a grand
+possible affair."
+
+"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
+
+"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as
+_my_ part. The rest's his own."
+
+"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
+
+"I don't know. _His_ business. He means to keep hold of her."
+
+"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must be very much of one."
+
+Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. "It's only
+that it isn't _the_ case she herself supposed."
+
+"It's another?"
+
+"It's another."
+
+"Examining her for what she supposed he finds something else?"
+
+"Something else."
+
+"And what does he find?"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from knowing!"
+
+"He didn't tell you that?"
+
+But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I mean is that if it's
+there I shall know in time. He's considering, but I can trust him for
+it--because he does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
+
+"He's in other words not sure?"
+
+"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he means. She's to get away
+now, but to come back to him in three months."
+
+"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he oughtn't meanwhile to scare
+us."
+
+It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled in the great
+doctor's cause. This came out at least in her glimmer of reproach.
+"Does it scare us to enlist us for her happiness?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it scares _me_. I'm always
+scared--I may call it so--till I understand. What happiness is he
+talking about?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you know!"
+
+She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the
+latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
+light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
+with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
+is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
+
+"The point is will it _cure?_"
+
+"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"
+
+"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
+declared.
+
+"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
+
+"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.
+
+"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
+
+Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
+which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
+spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
+something to know he thinks it good for us."
+
+"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
+him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
+have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
+see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
+for nothing."
+
+"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
+propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
+him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
+but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
+had from you night before last."
+
+"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
+
+"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
+now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
+
+"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
+anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
+Densher."
+
+"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
+fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
+
+"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
+all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
+to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
+returned."
+
+"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "till you've seen him."
+
+"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision.
+"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
+care for her?"
+
+Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
+put in the way of it."
+
+"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
+You have him, one feels, in your hand."
+
+Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
+impression of him?"
+
+"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."
+
+Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
+wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
+a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."
+
+It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
+her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
+mean Kate cares for _him?_"
+
+That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
+enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
+her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
+whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
+decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
+surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
+Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
+suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
+A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
+been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
+liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
+felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
+thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
+in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
+She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
+"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
+things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
+weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
+rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."
+
+"Deny that she cares for him?"
+
+"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
+absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."
+
+Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean--if she asks?"
+
+"To Milly, naturally. No one else _will_ ask."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, "Milly won't."
+
+Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
+
+"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for _me_. I lie badly."
+
+"_I_ lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, "when, as
+sometimes will happen, there's nothing else so good. One must always do
+the best. But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we can work it
+out." Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some
+minutes, more enrolled and inflamed--presently felt in her what had
+made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the
+time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason
+for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud
+too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying.
+What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a
+little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this
+appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth
+about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the
+state of her affections, which might be removed--this was apparently
+the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham
+saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate's delusion--by arts,
+however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it
+perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?--success in which
+indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately,
+her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones
+what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a
+dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present--a
+cloud of questions out of which Maud Manningham's large seated self
+loomed, however, as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact for
+the consultative relation something of the form of an oracle. From the
+oracle the sound did come--or at any rate the sense did, a sense all
+accordant with the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
+sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall
+be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"--a view into which Mrs. Stringham
+could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange to
+say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at least to Kate's
+good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself
+in short not caring what became of Kate--only convinced at bottom of
+the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't
+pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
+She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even
+beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough
+plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must
+stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at
+dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an
+instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to
+prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while
+you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
+
+"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me. Though it was nothing
+more," Susie did herself the justice to observe, "than what I too had
+quite felt."
+
+But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she wondered what she had
+said. "I suppose I ought to be edified at what you can so beautifully
+give up."
+
+"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I give up nothing--I cling."
+
+Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with some stiffness to her
+great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a push to an object or two
+disposed there. "I give up then. You know how little such a person as
+Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know what I've been thinking
+perfectly possible."
+
+"Oh you've been great"--Susie was perfectly fair. "A duke, a duchess, a
+princess, a palace: you've made me believe in them too. But where we
+break down is that _she_ doesn't believe in them. Luckily for her--as
+it seems to be turning out--she doesn't want them. So what's one to do?
+I assure you I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream now."
+
+Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so fully her meaning
+that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking it in. They sat a
+moment longer confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
+
+"If it _will_ do anything for her."
+
+Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but she spoke for the
+instant of something else. "It does provoke me a bit, you know--for of
+course I'm a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things. Yet it
+doesn't prevent the fact that we must be decent."
+
+"We must take her"--Mrs. Stringham carried that out--"as she is."
+
+"And we must take Mr. Densher as _he_ is." With which Mrs. Lowder gave
+a sombre laugh. "It's a pity he isn't better!"
+
+"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined, "you'd have liked him
+for your niece; and in that case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie
+added, "interfere with _you_."
+
+"She interferes with me as it is--not that it matters now. But I saw
+Kate and her--really as soon as you came to me--set up side by side. I
+saw your girl--I don't mind telling--you helping my girl; and when I
+say that," Mrs. Lowder continued, "you'll probably put in for yourself
+that it was part of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what I
+give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line," she further set
+forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs.
+Densher! Heavens!" she growled.
+
+Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher my girl will be
+somebody."
+
+"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs. Lowder, "we're talking
+in the air."
+
+Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving everything out."
+
+"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder had another thought.
+"_He's_ not quite nobody either." It brought her back to the question
+she had already put and which her friend hadn't at the time dealt with.
+"What in fact do you make of him?"
+
+Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was
+moved a little to caution. So she remained general. "He's charming."
+
+She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own
+to which people resort when they are not quite candid--a circumstance
+that had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
+
+The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost
+determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. "I thought you
+didn't like him!"
+
+"I don't like him for Kate."
+
+"But you don't like him for Milly either."
+
+Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. "I like
+him, my dear, for myself."
+
+"Then that's the best way of all."
+
+"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for my niece, and he's not
+good enough for you. One's an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
+
+"Oh _I'm_ not--not either," Susie declared.
+
+But her companion kept on. "One lives for others. _You_ do that. If I
+were living for myself I shouldn't at all mind him."
+
+But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find him charming it's
+however I'm living."
+
+Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving
+herself away with a laugh. "Of course he's all right in himself."
+
+"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve; and the note in
+question--what Merton Densher was "in himself"--closed practically,
+with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
+
+
+II
+
+It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an
+informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to
+take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to
+himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs.
+Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a
+spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come
+back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of
+his reckoning. If what they had talked of _could_ happen--if Milly,
+that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself--it wouldn't do any
+harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn't happen--if,
+anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could
+do nothing to contribute to it--they would be in no worse a box than
+before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range
+for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the
+sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man,
+would--besides having more to show him--find him more ready to go on
+with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd--as well as being
+ground for a second report to her old friend--that Milly did her part
+for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned
+frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke
+Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for,
+his having been so easy about her behaviour.
+
+"You see I didn't know that--for the liberty I took--I shouldn't
+afterwards get a stiff note from him."
+
+So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her a trifle rash. "Oh
+you'll never get a stiff note from him in your life."
+
+She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her young friend's question.
+"Why not, as well as any one else who has played him a trick?"
+
+"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick. He could understand
+your action. It's all right, you see."
+
+"Yes--I do see. It _is_ all right. He's easier with me than with any
+one else, because that's the way to let me down. He's only making
+believe, and I'm not worth hauling up."
+
+Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare, poor Susie grasped
+at her only advantage. "Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
+of trifling with you?"
+
+She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion gave her--a
+strange half-amused perception of what she made of it. "Well, so far as
+it's trifling with me to pity me so much."
+
+"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned. "He just--the same as
+any one else--likes you."
+
+"He has no business then to like me. He's not the same as any one else."
+
+"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
+
+Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful smile. "Ah there
+you are!" Mrs. Stringham coloured, for there indeed she was again. But
+Milly let her off. "Work for me, all the same--work for me! It's of
+course what I want." Then as usual she embraced her friend. "I'm not
+going to be as nasty as this to _him_."
+
+"I'm sure I hope not!"--and Mrs. Stringham laughed for the kiss. "I've
+no doubt, however, he'd take it from you! It's _you_, my dear, who are
+not the same as any one else."
+
+Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her the last word. "No,
+so that people can take anything from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did
+indeed resignedly take after this was the absence on her part of any
+account of the visit then paid. It was the beginning in fact between
+them of an odd independence--an independence positively of action and
+custom--on the subject of Milly's future. They went their separate ways
+with the girl's intense assent; this being really nothing but what she
+had so wonderfully put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
+encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the idea that Susie had or
+was to have other encounters--private pointed personal; she favoured
+every idea, but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on as
+if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be worked for that would
+be her way; and though her companions learned from herself nothing of
+it this was in the event her way with her medical adviser. She put her
+visit to him on the simplest ground; she had come just to tell him how
+touched she had been by his good nature. That required little
+explaining, for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood he
+could but reply that it was all right.
+
+"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that clever lady. You've got
+good friends."
+
+"So each one of them thinks of all the others. But so I also think,"
+Milly went on, "of all of them together. You're excellent for each
+other. And it's in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
+
+There came to her on this occasion one of the strangest of her
+impressions, which was at the same time one of the finest of her
+alarms--the glimmer of a vision that if she should go, as it were, too
+far, she might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not of
+value. Going too far was failing to try at least to remain simple. He
+would be quite ready to hate her if she did, by heading him off at
+every point, embarrass his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt,
+rather constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't hate her,
+since Susie positively wanted to suffer for her; Susie had a noble idea
+that she might somehow so do her good. Such, however, was not the way
+in which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected to wish to
+do it. He wouldn't have time even should he wish; whereby, in a word,
+Milly felt herself intimately warned. Face to face there with her
+smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment quite such
+another lift of feeling as she had known in her crucial talk with
+Susie. It came round to the same thing; him too she would help to help
+her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't possibly be she would
+assist also to make this right.
+
+It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the basis in question,
+almost to reverse for her their characters of patient and physician.
+What _was_ he in fact but patient, what was she but physician, from the
+moment she embraced once for all the necessity, adopted once for all
+the policy, of saving him alarms about her subtlety? She would leave
+the subtlety to him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
+doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went so far as to imagine
+that the inward success of these reflexions flushed her for the minute,
+to his eyes, with a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
+and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour to the
+presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"--he noticed
+good-humouredly her harmless sally. "But, help or no help, you're
+looking, you know, remarkably well."
+
+"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was as if already she saw
+his line. Only she wondered what he would have guessed. If he had
+guessed anything at all it would be rather remarkable of him. As for
+what there _was_ to guess, he couldn't--if this was present to
+him--have arrived at it save by his own acuteness. That acuteness was
+therefore immense; and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
+leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad. Neither, for that
+matter, would hers be--which she was even actually enjoying. She
+wondered if really then there mightn't be something for her. She hadn't
+been sure in coming to him that she was "better," and he hadn't used,
+he would be awfully careful not to use, that compromising term about
+her; in spite of all of which she would have been ready to say, for the
+amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I _must_ be," for he had this unaided
+sense of something that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided,
+because who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain,
+hadn't yet seen him again, and there were things it was impossible she
+could have told him the first time. Since such was his penetration,
+therefore, why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept
+the new circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate
+her on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it
+might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of
+nursing. "You gave me the other day," she went on, "plenty to think
+over, and I've been doing that--thinking it over--quite as you'll have
+probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat," she
+smiled, "since you've already done me so much good."
+
+The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance
+so closely related to all one's possibilities that one missed the
+pleasure of really improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
+treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my wit."
+
+"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile a bit believed in his
+answer, convinced as she was that if she _had_ been difficult it would
+be the last thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said, "as I
+like."
+
+"Then it's as _I_ like. But you must really, though we're having such a
+decent month, get straight away." In pursuance of which, when she had
+replied with promptitude that her departure--for the Tyrol and then for
+Venice--was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with
+alacrity. "For Venice? That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a
+dream of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks off; three
+weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person
+who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I
+heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice."
+
+"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in
+advance or in any way, I can do for you--!"
+
+"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be
+capital to find you there."
+
+"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after a moment, "that I
+_am_ easy to treat."
+
+But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it. "You've not come to
+that _yet_."
+
+"One has to be so bad for it?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it--to 'ease' of treatment. I
+doubt if it's possible. I've not, if it is, found any one bad enough.
+The ease, you see, is for _you_."
+
+"I see--I see."
+
+They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on
+it; after which Sir Luke asked: "And that clever lady--she goes with
+you?"
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with me, I hope, to the end."
+
+He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of what?"
+
+"Well--of everything."
+
+"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end of everything is far
+off. This, you know, I'm hoping," said Sir Luke, "is only the
+beginning." And the next question he risked might have been a part of
+his hope. "Just you and she together?"
+
+"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've seen more here than of
+any one and who are just the right people for us."
+
+He thought a moment. "You'll be four women together then?"
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans. But I think," she added as
+if to say what she saw would reassure him, "that we shall not be
+unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of 'life' I
+suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
+
+"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a moment during which he
+might have been appreciating her raciness--"when I talk of life I think
+I mean more than anything else the beautiful show of it, in its
+freshness, made by young persons of your age. So go on as you are. I
+see more and more _how_ you are. You can't," he went so far as to say
+for pleasantness, "better it."
+
+She took it from him with a great show of peace. "One of our companions
+will be Miss Croy, who came with me here first. It's in _her_ that life
+is splendid; and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me. But
+she's above all magnificent in herself. So that if you'd like," she
+freely threw out, "to see _her_--"
+
+"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to you, for clearly it
+will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that if she's to be at Venice I _shall_
+see her?"
+
+"We must arrange it--I shan't fail. She moreover has a friend who may
+also be there"--Milly found herself going on to this. "He's likely to
+come, I believe, for he always follows her."
+
+Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
+
+"_He_ is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't care for him."
+
+Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter with him?"
+
+"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
+
+Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
+
+"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
+
+"And he's to be in Venice?"
+
+"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll be constantly
+about with her."
+
+"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
+
+"As we're great friends--yes."
+
+"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four women alone."
+
+"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen. But he won't," Milly
+pursued in the same wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
+
+"No--I see. But can't you help him?"
+
+"Can't _you?_" Milly after a moment quaintly asked. Then for the joke
+of it she explained. "I'm putting you, you see, in relation with my
+entourage."
+
+It might have been for the joke of it too, by this time, that her
+eminent friend fell in. "But if this gentleman _isn't_ of your
+'entourage '? I mean if he's of--what do you call her?--Miss Croy's.
+Unless indeed you also take an interest in him."
+
+"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
+
+"You think there may be then some chance for him?"
+
+"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
+
+"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke next asked, "have I
+to do with him?"
+
+"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to be there, so may he
+be. And also that we shan't in that case be simply four dreary women."
+
+He considered her as if at this point she a little tried his patience.
+"_You're_ the least 'dreary' woman I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you
+know? There's no reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
+
+"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
+
+"The conviction--strong already when I had seen you once--is
+strengthened in me by having seen your friend. There's no doubt about
+it. The world's before you."
+
+"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
+
+"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure. We talked about
+you--and freely. I don't deny that. But it shows me I don't require of
+you the impossible."
+
+She was now on her feet. "I think I know what you require of me."
+
+"Nothing, for you," he went on, "_is_ impossible. So go on." He
+repeated it again--wanting her so to feel that to-day he saw it.
+"You're all right."
+
+"Well," she smiled--"keep me so."
+
+"Oh you'll get away from me."
+
+"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with her gentle eyes on him.
+
+She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he thus for a moment did
+keep her. Something then, while he seemed to think if there were
+anything more, came back to him; though something of which there wasn't
+too much to be made. "Of course if there's anything I _can_ do for your
+friend: I mean the gentleman you speak of--?" He gave out in short that
+he was ready.
+
+"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
+
+"Mr. Densher--is that his name?"
+
+"Yes--but his case isn't so dreadful." She had within a minute got away
+from that.
+
+"No doubt--if _you_ take an interest." She had got away, but it was as
+if he made out in her eyes--though they also had rather got away--a
+reason for calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can do--?"
+
+She looked at him while she thought, while she smiled. "I'm afraid
+there's really nothing one can do."
+
+
+III
+
+Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into
+possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was
+still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool
+pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun
+on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played
+over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of
+purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old
+reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all
+flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded
+and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of
+the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller
+lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with
+the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
+eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,
+though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count as
+effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she had
+been alone--really to call alone--since she had left London, it
+ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the great
+Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
+and Americans, had entered her service during the last hours of
+all--had crossed from Paris, after multiplied _pourparlers_ with Mrs.
+Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on
+purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had
+dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures
+of his experience. She had judged him in advance--polyglot and
+universal, very dear and very deep--as probably but a swindler finished
+to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian
+hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket,
+which, as she had instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
+glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common
+consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed
+the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely,
+grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them
+and what most expressed it.
+
+She had seen quickly enough what was happening--the usual thing again,
+yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of five minutes,
+understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so
+much of the care with which she must be taken up as of the care with
+which she must be let down. All the world understood her, all the world
+had got hold; but for nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
+close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender. Gracefully,
+respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and
+the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black
+professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too
+old to make love, but with an art still to make money--did he on
+occasion convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious
+career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal.
+The others had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment
+was special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:
+there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between them
+every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on
+the surface. He had taken his place already for her among those who
+were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in the constant
+perspective, for the final function, side by side with poor Susie--whom
+she was now pitying more than ever for having to be herself so sorry
+and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact of a
+residuary legatee--which was a character that could be definitely worn;
+whereas she could see Susie, in the event of her death, in no character
+at all, Susie being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
+makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,
+with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked to
+believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he probably
+knew--he didn't after all know everything--in having, for the wind-up
+of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly
+established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At
+Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it
+can be at all managed--you know what I mean--some fine old rooms,
+wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the
+more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
+picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves,
+with a cook, don't you know?--with servants, frescoes, tapestries,
+antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement."
+
+The proof of how he better and better understood her was in all the
+place; as to his masterly acquisition of which she had from the first
+asked no questions. She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
+and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the transaction that
+mainly concerned her she would soon enough become acquainted, and his
+connexion with such values as she would then find noted could scarce
+help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming people,
+conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her,
+and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes
+alike over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what
+they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated,
+and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed.
+Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a
+painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about
+with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable
+character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us
+back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this
+October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly
+to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the
+sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;
+always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
+penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid
+voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she
+had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these
+had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent
+her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or
+threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a
+multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett
+as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a
+rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
+Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the
+Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;
+improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers
+waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends
+in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the
+addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more
+insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by
+Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at
+Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
+Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"
+to which they had opened the door.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.
+Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the
+concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of
+the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so
+different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising
+them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once
+sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
+many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly
+fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the
+acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the
+eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,
+possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own
+sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of
+her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she
+mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such
+a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence
+induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the
+light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good
+time, and yet too rich and too befriended--an intuitive cunning within
+her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in
+short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert
+wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
+compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
+things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't
+have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw
+that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York
+what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a
+series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on
+Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it
+had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a
+century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool
+controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her
+particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the
+person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,
+aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
+simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,
+like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too
+that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this
+young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,
+on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made
+up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily
+put off the mask.
+
+These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken
+by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and
+not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side
+whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They
+flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have
+flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but
+the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been
+suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we
+say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by
+either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
+relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing
+to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in
+the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly to Kate's
+advantage: Milly didn't quite see what her friend could keep back, was
+possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas
+it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a
+treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, an abject
+affection--concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase
+of such states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively bold
+and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the
+lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was
+the truth about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus was a
+wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the
+far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of
+the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight
+that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a
+Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk,
+of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
+that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung
+about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and
+that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who
+exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening
+gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick dark
+braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train,
+makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief
+and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense.
+This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
+they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their
+words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be
+tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled
+to a care of what they said.
+
+There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular, of the
+probability that if she wasn't so proud she might be pitied with more
+comfort--more to the person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
+sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate attitude, that
+this marvellous mixture of her weakness and of her strength, her peril,
+if such it were, and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly
+interesting. Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much
+Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our
+Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
+moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
+about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate
+imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good
+conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to
+be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of
+their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as
+Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be
+explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt
+contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have
+contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:
+to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived
+so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;
+though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of
+the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With
+so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
+withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a
+nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of
+chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they
+took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to
+face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of
+harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,
+in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness
+need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.
+
+She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for
+weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her
+companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed
+and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
+wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a
+word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the
+beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care
+where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:
+so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was
+conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
+as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for
+her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased
+respites. Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
+strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all
+the same--weren't they?--those experiments tried with the truth that
+consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now
+playing with the thought that Eugenio might _inclusively_ assist her:
+he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really
+quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete
+use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It
+had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she
+should just stupidly and awkwardly _want_--any more want a life, a
+career, a consciousness, than want a house, a carriage or a cook. It
+was as if she had had from him a kind of expert professional measure of
+what he was in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
+thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could closely compare with
+a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's part that--at least in Palazzo
+Leporelli when mornings were fine--showed as almost amateurish. Sir
+Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and leave the rest to
+_me_"--which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared
+indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference to a
+different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor
+reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn't sure of having at her
+command. Eugenio--this was the difference--could name, could reckon,
+and prices of _his_ kind were things she had never suffered to scare
+her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for anything,
+for everything, and here was simply a new view of the sufficient
+quantity. She amused herself--for it came to that, since Eugenio was
+there to sign the receipt--with possibilities of meeting the bill. She
+was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to
+pay too much. What else--if such were points at which your most trusted
+servant failed--was the use of being, as the dear Susies of earth
+called you, a princess in a palace?
+
+She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful
+while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer
+blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
+it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was _in_ it, as in the ark
+of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why
+shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,
+never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than
+to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the
+real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the
+positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she
+had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a
+little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started
+on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
+Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was
+following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.
+He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never
+before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with
+patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
+though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd
+thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what
+had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five
+minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to
+see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,
+as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.
+He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him
+very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude
+more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was
+neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for
+the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to
+her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so
+thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the
+great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the
+high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears
+themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her
+consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf
+of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His
+presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how
+kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,
+unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for
+such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she
+hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
+receive him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly,
+as delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil
+it--these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they might
+have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge. She gave an
+account of her companions while he on his side failed to press her
+about them, even though describing his appearance, so unheralded, as
+the result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been shivering at
+Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing
+where they all were, he had simply caught the first train. He explained
+how he had known where they were; he had heard--what more
+natural?--from their friends, Milly's and his. He mentioned this
+betimes, but it was with his mention, singularly, that the girl became
+conscious of her inner question about his reason. She noticed his
+plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently
+noticed also that it didn't affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had
+written to him, Kate apparently--and this was interesting--had written
+to him; but their design presumably hadn't been that he should come and
+sit there as if rather relieved, so far as _they_ were concerned, at
+postponements. He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!" when she sketched
+their probable morning for him, under Eugenio's care and Mrs.
+Stringham's--sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he should
+overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would leave him
+temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a little, operated
+for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
+had known where they all were from the others, but it was not for the
+others that, in his actual dispositions, he had come. That, strange to
+say, was a pity; for, stranger still to say, she could have shown him
+more confidence if he himself had had less intention. His intention so
+chilled her, from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just
+for the pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of
+their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax of
+her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to
+reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten minutes,
+with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this clearly
+pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even though he
+couldn't know it--amends for her not having been originally sure, for
+instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
+human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at
+Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present
+benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
+that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the
+charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the
+pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for
+his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she
+mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general
+prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced
+her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find
+her susceptible.
+
+
+IV
+
+She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the
+whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful
+hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her
+visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection
+of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state
+in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in
+its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke
+with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled
+afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,
+yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as
+in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
+remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but
+the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they
+moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not
+to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her
+friend.
+
+"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase
+in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and
+bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
+
+She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not
+understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that
+the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"
+she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you
+happily found me."
+
+Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go
+about?"
+
+She looked over the place, the storey above the apartments in which she
+had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting
+the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the
+arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the
+canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
+white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But
+there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to
+anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her
+adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of
+not stirring. "I go about just here."
+
+"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"
+
+They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded
+palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a
+minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
+saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on
+the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the
+window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her
+forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
+answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She
+would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible
+for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even
+on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that
+from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless
+really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him
+thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the
+relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of
+relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with
+the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been
+determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be
+mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed
+within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
+herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what
+might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't
+her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage
+of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in
+whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be
+most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on
+her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive
+attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,
+appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the
+doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,
+disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:
+she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the
+handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.
+
+She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits
+her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush
+should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had
+early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact
+as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the
+present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of
+imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's
+cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her
+imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified
+itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her
+companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
+her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was
+that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and
+humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to
+be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as
+threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,
+making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
+probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what
+remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper
+incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
+had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?
+If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to
+raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better
+service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
+strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
+sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she
+wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would
+keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for
+himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded
+them within and without did so much toward making appreciative
+stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she
+hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she
+were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of
+it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,
+"and I don't want in the least to give it up."
+
+"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's
+_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"
+
+"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die
+here."
+
+Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a
+person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of
+darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.
+But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you
+in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and
+you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself
+here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion
+for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."
+
+"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"
+
+"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
+
+"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.
+England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my
+form."
+
+"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy
+it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for
+money enough."
+
+"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I
+shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking
+sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my
+great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and
+hunt me up."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.
+
+"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;
+rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."
+
+"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better
+for you than that."
+
+"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"
+
+He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of
+some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression
+of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the
+view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you remember
+something I said to you that day at Matcham--or at least fully meant
+to?"
+
+"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It's another life."
+
+"Certainly it will be--I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it
+to represent for you. Matcham, you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I
+think I tried to rub that into you a little."
+
+She met him with the full memory of what he had tried--not an inch, not
+an ounce of which was lost to her. "What I meant is that it seems a
+hundred years ago."
+
+"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember
+it," he pursued, "is that I was quite aware of what might have been
+said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I
+should perhaps be able to look after you--well, rather better. Rather
+better, of course, than certain other persons in particular."
+
+"Precisely--than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark promptly amended.
+
+It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could
+show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she
+had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
+made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the
+tears it had started at the time. "You could do so much for me, yes. I
+perfectly understood you."
+
+"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained, "to _fix_ your
+confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place."
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, you did--it's just exactly now, my confidence, where
+you put it then. The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now
+to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel
+you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."
+
+He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said
+them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are
+you _really_ in any trouble?"
+
+To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a
+little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything
+that's impossible. There are much better things you can do."
+
+He looked straight at it and then straight over it. "It's too monstrous
+that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know."
+
+"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a
+slight hardness. "Do you want to know if I'm badly ill?"
+
+The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested
+the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark
+winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude
+together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can
+see you suffer and not say a word?"
+
+"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public
+nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in
+itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
+anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And
+you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the
+remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for
+_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been
+unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm
+very badly ill."
+
+"And you don't do anything?"
+
+"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.
+One can't do more than live."
+
+"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why
+haven't you advice?"
+
+He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty
+things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most
+absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in
+the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in
+talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
+
+"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
+
+"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;
+now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself
+as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There
+she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she
+added, "have missed everything."
+
+"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,
+to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person
+in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call
+it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely
+require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you
+believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."
+
+Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or
+almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much
+worried."
+
+"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry
+you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.
+"You're not loved enough."
+
+"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
+
+"Why to get the full good of it."
+
+Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full
+good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in
+return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I
+might find myself forced to love _you?_"
+
+"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the
+least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion
+somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had
+absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single
+intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such
+shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,
+and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of
+existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is
+it inconceivable to you that you might try?"
+
+"To be so favourably affected by you--?"
+
+"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.
+
+Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"
+
+"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
+however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
+expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
+almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
+which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
+healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
+do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
+And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
+of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
+the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
+she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
+itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
+against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
+own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
+encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
+gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
+eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
+find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
+dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
+speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no
+decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
+practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
+only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
+alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
+wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
+about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
+disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
+in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
+like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
+brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
+having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
+her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
+to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
+innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
+some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
+meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
+it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
+couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
+fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
+had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
+her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
+quite ceased to be so.
+
+By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
+walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
+the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
+independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
+one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
+in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
+of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
+that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
+was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
+not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
+was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
+native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
+assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
+him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like
+another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the
+rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of
+his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said,
+reappeared for her--breaking out moreover, with an effect of
+strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of
+health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in
+the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a
+charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. "It's true, you know, all
+the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up."
+He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared.
+"Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference
+doesn't notice. And that's why I know that _I_ notice."
+
+"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather
+that affection was supposed to be blind."
+
+"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
+
+"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic
+complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of--are
+they beauties?"
+
+"Yes, for those who care for you--as every one does. Everything about
+you is a beauty. Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the
+seriousness of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should have _any_
+trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right
+thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know? You're the
+first young woman of your time. I mean what I say." He looked, to do
+him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear--simply so
+competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
+the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all
+in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
+if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
+simply to torment us--you were born to make us happy. Therefore you
+must listen to us."
+
+She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her
+mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you--that's just what I mustn't do.
+The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
+to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I
+give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be--"
+And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give--there you are;
+stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't
+listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
+can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
+say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
+
+He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
+because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
+"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
+in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
+if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
+
+She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
+point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
+events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
+being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
+his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
+nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
+wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
+usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
+convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
+first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
+allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
+you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
+listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
+listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
+you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
+older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
+at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
+honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
+in the world."
+
+When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
+more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
+had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
+apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
+coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
+asked.
+
+It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
+Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
+attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
+the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
+
+Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do you want me to marry
+Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar! But she
+wouldn't in any way have that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
+isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There's no cold
+world for you at all, I think," she went on; "nothing but a very warm
+and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment
+you choose to take it up."
+
+He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete and he
+had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you
+want me to marry Kate Croy?"
+
+"Mrs. Lowder wants it--I do no wrong, I think, in saying that; and she
+understands moreover that you know she does."
+
+Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it; and it wasn't obscure
+to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman.
+"It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But what's
+the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
+
+Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point out. "Because she's
+the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and
+because if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact I do as it
+is." It was a luxury of response.
+
+"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But that can't further
+the case of _all._"
+
+"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If the case of one's bad,
+the case of another's good. I don't see what you have to fear from any
+one else," she said, "save through your being foolish, this way, about
+_me_."
+
+So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making of
+what she didn't see. "Is it your idea--since we're talking of these
+things in these ways--that the young lady you describe in such
+superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But don't be humble." She
+was almost gay.
+
+It was this apparently, at last, that was too much for him. "But don't
+you really _know?_"
+
+As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence she could
+pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that
+a particular person's very much in love with her."
+
+"Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with
+a particular person."
+
+"Ah I beg your pardon!"--and Milly quite flushed at having so crude a
+blunder imputed to her. "You're wholly mistaken."
+
+"It's not true?"
+
+"It's not true."
+
+His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very sure?"
+
+"As sure as one can be"--and Milly's manner could match it--"when one
+has every assurance. I speak on the best authority."
+
+He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
+
+"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
+
+"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
+about her's so good."
+
+"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
+her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
+you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
+from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
+emphasis, pulled up.
+
+"You take it from Kate?"
+
+"From Kate herself."
+
+"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
+
+"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
+given me her word for it."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
+word?"
+
+It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
+instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
+little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
+_you_ call her word?"
+
+"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
+
+Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
+especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
+that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
+things."
+
+Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
+of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
+
+Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
+sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
+the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
+saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
+Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
+
+"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
+interest--"
+
+"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
+
+Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
+again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."
+
+At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
+thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
+had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
+couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
+signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further;
+he fell back on the spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
+rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should
+she be swearing to you?"
+
+She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to herself; which
+disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the
+aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
+part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you, we're such
+tremendous friends."
+
+"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have
+stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as
+if he had in a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
+Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to leave-taking, that
+she had given rather more than she intended or than she should be able,
+when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
+Strange enough in fact that he had had from her, about herself--and,
+under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight--what no
+one else had had: neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor
+Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was
+aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take
+himself off, so that she might either recover it or bear the loss
+better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time
+saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
+sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed
+for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most
+decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the
+theory that she might whimsically want him--which she never, in her
+caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes
+over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
+could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too noiseless almost for
+her nerves, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a
+ship--Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
+held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card. Lord Mark--and as
+if also for admiration of him--delayed his departure to let her receive
+it; on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her
+presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that
+even for dealing with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its
+disappearance. The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had
+asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
+come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
+the staircase.
+
+"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
+while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
+great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
+judgement of his identity heard and noted once before
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
+more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
+discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
+polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
+mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
+touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
+but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
+it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
+made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
+at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
+been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
+pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
+notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
+and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
+lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
+tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
+should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
+shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
+end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
+independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
+occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
+with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
+humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
+befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
+in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
+his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
+figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
+his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he
+responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
+arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
+weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
+home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
+museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
+something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
+for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
+subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
+lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
+white papers.
+
+He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
+there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
+the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
+and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
+Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
+two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
+even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
+had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
+sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
+taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
+parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
+that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
+especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
+up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
+him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
+whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
+of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
+landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
+such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
+intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
+alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
+strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
+easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
+when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
+made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
+with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
+much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
+her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
+his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
+angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
+complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
+star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
+American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
+certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
+was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
+in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
+always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
+least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
+admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
+wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
+palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
+a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
+therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
+the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
+they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
+through space.
+
+Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
+suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
+his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
+see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
+image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
+the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
+his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
+Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
+been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
+difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
+which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
+of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
+make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
+even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
+across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
+past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
+general necessity of which he was conscious? That necessity of making
+the best was the instinct--as he indeed himself knew--of a man somehow
+aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he
+took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
+the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute
+and admit the light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly
+because he was nervous that he _could_ go straight; yet if that
+condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in
+short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the
+proprieties--once he could face at all remaining there--reduced
+themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him,
+and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one
+foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
+management of him. It wasn't that she had put him in danger--to be in
+real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
+him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having; an exasperation, a
+resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
+to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It
+was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless
+that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from
+the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called
+it, _bon prince_ with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity,
+the contempt, in the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
+savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There
+were things enough, goodness knew--for it was the moral of his
+plight--that he couldn't afford; but what had had a charm for him if
+not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way?
+of not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap
+edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
+actually as present as ever--how he had admired and envied what he
+called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from his
+own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only
+it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now, ever so
+characteristically, standing out in her.
+
+It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily, that he was just
+where he was and that he was above all just _how_ he was. The proof of
+a decent reaction in him against so much passivity was, with no great
+richness, that he at least knew--knew, that is, how he was, and how
+little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was,
+for the moment, wistful--that above all described it; that was so large
+a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him,
+on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question
+connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered
+soreness, his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame
+were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
+regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
+conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved,
+had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously--ridiculously
+so far as just complacently--exposed to. How little it _could_ be
+complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had
+moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it,
+was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. How
+could he know--that was the point--without putting the matter to the
+test? It had been right to be _bon prince,_ and the joy, something of
+the pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now
+compatible with the impulse to look into their account; but he held his
+breath a little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that,
+whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
+done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea of
+the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself,
+in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
+night--"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of--to the glimmer,
+more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers
+on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had
+been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and
+reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he had found his answer
+to the idea that had grown so importunate. Since a proof of his will
+was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him--it lurked there
+on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little pier had from
+time to time accosted him; but it was a part of the play of his
+nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he
+walked, very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto.
+The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
+with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
+ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
+their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
+veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
+in on the morrow.
+
+He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
+first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
+merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
+he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
+in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
+gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
+evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
+in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
+high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
+this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
+his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
+as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
+go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
+autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
+It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
+things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
+as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
+soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
+view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
+company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
+to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
+foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
+gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
+response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
+instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
+shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
+failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
+planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
+She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
+her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
+announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing
+and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
+two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
+by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
+his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
+she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
+friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
+there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
+point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
+would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
+Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
+recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
+in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
+was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
+was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
+impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
+appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
+gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
+motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
+it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
+before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
+dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
+in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
+of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
+hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
+game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
+one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
+him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
+advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
+himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
+possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
+already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
+beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
+things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
+but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
+would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple were for
+_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
+admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
+to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.
+
+That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
+came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
+plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
+hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
+act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
+in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
+supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
+the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
+the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
+familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
+after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
+insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
+idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
+that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
+how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
+reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
+hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
+written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
+his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
+find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
+ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
+as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
+Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
+had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
+had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
+remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
+attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
+were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
+little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
+off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
+solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
+simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
+with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she
+had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate
+declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his
+general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits,
+to be a mode of life like another--certainly better than some, and
+particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he
+had really come for--this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the
+style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high
+wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when
+there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
+wrong.
+
+In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing,
+the interest of seeing--and quite for the first time in his
+life--whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to
+happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never
+doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure--he who had never
+thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was
+able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his
+hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was
+finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
+_campi_, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
+at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the
+enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall
+deserted--during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to
+the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are
+the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but
+as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of
+Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as
+painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that
+departure wouldn't curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and
+that above all, as he hadn't really "begun" anything, had only
+submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
+beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
+superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications
+was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman--to which
+was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that
+complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of
+the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten
+to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
+women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
+never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
+had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
+a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
+from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
+to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
+brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
+suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
+brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
+was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
+gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
+poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
+dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
+conditions, than any ever known to him.
+
+This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
+scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
+himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
+frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
+he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
+her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
+observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
+effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
+imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
+dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
+ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
+well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
+off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
+that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
+advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
+even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
+in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
+really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
+were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
+effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
+his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
+propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
+breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
+passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
+himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
+state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
+produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
+which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
+her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
+at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
+influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
+had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
+from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
+it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
+with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
+more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
+at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
+in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
+Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
+as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
+in New York.
+
+
+II
+
+There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
+he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
+answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
+His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
+Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
+chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
+the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
+rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
+grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
+note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
+visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
+of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
+expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
+very much out of our meetings?"
+
+"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
+I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
+Maud."
+
+"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand what Aunt Maud
+gets."
+
+"Exactly so--and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so
+fascinated with the question. _She_ gives me no light; she's
+prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural--!"
+
+"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate I shall be making my
+reflexions about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on,
+"that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that
+what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The
+very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for
+yourself, is that when she adopts a view she--well, to her own sense,
+really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any
+other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've
+often thought success comes to her"--Kate continued to study the
+phenomenon--"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to
+prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of
+everything, become the right one."
+
+Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response.
+"Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn't not
+'understand.' I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently
+explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he
+pursued: "Does she think she terrorises _us?_" To which he added while,
+without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
+believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He
+knew now that he was probing the girl deep--something told him so; but
+that was a reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that you
+dislike me?"
+
+To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong. "You could yourself
+easily put it there!"
+
+He wondered. "By telling her so?"
+
+"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; "I don't ask that
+of you."
+
+"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask, you know, so little--!"
+
+There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist
+the impulse to take up. "I'm perfectly justified in what I've asked,"
+she quietly returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their eyes
+again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. "You're
+not a bit unhappy."
+
+"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
+
+"It doesn't practically show--which is enough for Aunt Maud. You're
+wonderful, you're beautiful," Kate said; "and if you really want to
+know whether I believe you're doing it you may take from me perfectly
+that I see it coming." With which, by a quick transition, as if she had
+settled the case, she asked him the hour.
+
+"Oh only twelve-ten"--he had looked at his watch. "We've taken but
+thirteen minutes; we've time yet."
+
+"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
+
+Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of
+the Square. "They're still in their shop. They're safe for half an
+hour."
+
+"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
+
+This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco,
+always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber
+of amenity, favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
+middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse
+after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and
+pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast
+empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement
+and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice
+of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the
+parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual
+feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions
+hadn't yet been, and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
+by the lace-shop, in one of the _loggie_, where, shortly before, they
+had left them for a look-in--the expression was artfully Densher's--at
+Saint Mark's. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought
+this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn't
+been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that
+could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
+in presence--in presence of every one; every one consisting at this
+juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly.
+But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become
+special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of
+their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had
+assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the least
+the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the
+fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace,
+Milly had not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom and use
+had hitherto seemed fairly established; on his coming round, day after
+day--eight days had been now so conveniently marked--their friends,
+Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her
+till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he
+had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there
+was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He
+_had_, for Mrs. Lowder--he couldn't help it while sitting there--the
+air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
+sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess
+each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that
+she hadn't been well enough to see him.
+
+That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which,
+gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all
+bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
+they--the rest of them--simply looked at each other. It was
+lurid--lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately--that they
+had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above
+all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to _that_ degree, the hush of
+gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the
+most the case--that of the guests--could permit itself. The hush, for
+that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the
+gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she
+hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had
+produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one
+quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for
+the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
+his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
+pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs.
+Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any
+of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in
+exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure,
+approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at
+home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the
+slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a
+preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond
+dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
+away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had,
+the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality in her own
+failure of real acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
+sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had by this time a
+corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at
+Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action,
+ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the
+most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest.
+They were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there were too
+many persons, at least three, and too many things, between them; but
+meanwhile something was preparing that would draw them closer. He
+scarce knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when
+it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood
+him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the
+understanding of every one else would fail and this deep little
+person's alone survive.
+
+Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that
+hung about our young friends; these had been the small accidents and
+quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some
+sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they
+stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so
+notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than
+any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from
+earshot, with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession,
+they could say what they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence
+of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It
+was most of all for them, moreover, as if this very quantity, seated on
+their lips in the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
+ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each a fear.
+There might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the
+silence resting on her last words. "What did you mean just now that I
+can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you will,
+I don't see, from the moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
+lying."
+
+Well, she could tell him. "You can say something both handsome and
+sincere to her about Milly--whom you honestly like so much. That
+wouldn't be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an effect. You
+don't, you know, say much about her."
+
+And Kate put before him the fruit of observation. "You don't, you know,
+speak of her at all."
+
+"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told you so?" Then as the girl,
+for answer, only seemed to bethink herself, "You must have
+extraordinary conversations!" he exclaimed.
+
+Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary conversations."
+
+His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed to hear more
+about them; but there was something in her own, apparently, that
+defeated the opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a different
+matter, which had been in his mind a week, yet in respect to which he
+had had no chance so good as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such
+wonderful things pass between you, what she makes of the incident, the
+other day, of Lord Mark's so very superficial visit?--his having spent
+here, as I gather, but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
+friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off by the same
+night's train, for seeing any one else. What can she make of his not
+having waited to see _you_, or to see herself--with all he owes her?"
+
+"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He came to make Milly his
+offer of marriage--he came for nothing but that. As Milly wholly
+declined it his business was for the time at an end. He couldn't quite
+on the spot turn round to make up to _us_."
+
+Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of taste on such an
+adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't see it. But Densher was lost in
+another thought. "Do you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
+leaving her, that was what had been taking place between them?"
+
+"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
+
+"What sort of a blundering weathercock then _is_ he?" the young man
+went on in his wonder.
+
+"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled. "Do you pretend that
+Milly didn't tell you?"
+
+"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
+
+Kate continued to smile. "You _are_ in love with her, you know."
+
+He gave her another long look. "Why, since she has refused him, should
+my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think
+well of him for such treatment of the other persons I've mentioned, and
+I feel I don't understand from you why Mrs. Lowder should."
+
+"She doesn't--but she doesn't care," Kate explained. "You know
+perfectly the terms on which lots of London people live together even
+when they're supposed to live very well. He's not committed to us--he
+was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied man," she asked, "always have
+his try?"
+
+"And come back afterwards, with confidence in a welcome, to the victim
+of his inconstancy?"
+
+Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of as a victim. "Oh but
+he has _had_ his try at _me_. So it's all right."
+
+"Through your also having, you mean, refused him?"
+
+She balanced an instant during which Densher might have just wondered
+if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped
+on the right side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
+discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on--now as lucid as
+ever--"considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him in respect
+to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
+As the case stands that makes no difference."
+
+Densher laughed out. "It isn't _his_ merit that he has failed."
+
+"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark. He's just what he
+was, and what he knew he was. It's not for me either to reflect on him
+after I've so treated him."
+
+"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated him beautifully."
+
+"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be jealous." But before he
+could take it up she had more to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle
+you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
+else can displease her. What does she see but that Milly herself
+recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a
+recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
+your own recognition. Out of which she therefore gets it that the more
+you have for Milly the less you have for me."
+
+There were moments again--we know that from the first they had been
+numerous--when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her
+mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at
+once to conviction and to reaction. And this effect, however it be
+named, now broke into his tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have
+for you--!"
+
+It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. "Luckily for us we may
+really consider she doesn't. So successful have we been."
+
+"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what you give me, and I
+suppose that, to be consistent--to stand on my feet where I do stand at
+all--I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to
+me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It
+seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me. It never
+seems to me somehow what I may expect of _you_. There's so much you
+_don't_ give me."
+
+She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I don't--?"
+
+"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me none."
+
+"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment ventured to ask.
+
+"Your doing something for me."
+
+She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing _this_ for you? Do you
+call this nothing?"
+
+"Nothing at all."
+
+"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
+
+They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. "I
+thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you
+risk nothing!"
+
+It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he
+had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant moreover that she
+didn't like it--either the being so or the being seen, for she soon
+spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that
+produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of
+indulgence. "What then do you wish me to risk?"
+
+The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would
+have said, worse. "What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this
+rate that I _am_?" Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely
+disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't.
+Deep, always, was his sense of life with her--deep as it had been from
+the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two
+winters ago they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for
+unguarded, ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
+intenser faith between them this was because he believed it could reach
+her and she could meet it. "I can go on perhaps," he said, "with help.
+But I can't go on without."
+
+She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. "We
+ought to be there--I mean when they come out."
+
+"They _won't_ come out--not yet. And I don't care if they do." To which
+he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that
+his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make:
+"Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?" It broke
+from him in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only _take_ me!"
+
+It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after
+all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than
+bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her
+an instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less pulled herself
+together to reply. "Do you want to kill her?"
+
+He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt
+Maud?"
+
+"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."
+
+Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"
+
+He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had
+naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank
+you very much."
+
+Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already
+risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance
+of it I'll go this very night."
+
+"Then go," said Kate Croy.
+
+He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what
+was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but
+much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They
+walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had
+become of a sudden, in all truth, a split--as if the basis of his
+departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
+recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the
+arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that
+produced for them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any your
+idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
+
+"Come to you?"
+
+"Come to me."
+
+"How? Where?"
+
+She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in
+her being so equal to him. "To my rooms, which are perfectly possible,
+and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt,
+in view. We can arrange it--with two grains of courage. People in our
+case always arrange it." She listened as for the good information, and
+there was support for him--since it was a question of his going step by
+step--in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had
+in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence
+of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
+possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to
+_see_ her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
+light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
+listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet
+done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
+beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a
+fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. _With_
+you I can do it--I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself.
+Without you--I'll be hanged! And I must be sure."
+
+She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased
+to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing her close, and though
+they had again, for the time, stopped walking, his talk--for others at
+a distance--might have been, in the matchless place, that of any
+impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. On
+possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
+afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of which his eyes moved
+while she twiddled her parasol. She now, however, made a motion that
+confronted them finally with the opposite end. Then only she
+spoke--"Please take your hand out of my arm." He understood at once:
+she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others
+from their place of purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
+was all right. The others had seen them as well and waited for them,
+complacent enough, under one of the arches. They themselves too--he
+argued that Kate would argue--looked perfectly ready, decently patient,
+properly accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse--always
+by Kate's system--than a pair of the children of a supercivilised age
+making the best of an awkwardness. They didn't nevertheless hurry--that
+would overdo it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
+felt, ever so distinctly--it was with this he faced Mrs. Lowder--that
+he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted. There was more
+to come--everything; he had by no means, with his companion, had it all
+out. Yet what he was possessed of was real--the fact that she hadn't
+thrown over his lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
+this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled was in itself
+of the nature of bliss. The danger had dropped--it was behind him there
+in the great sunny space. So far she was good for what he wanted.
+
+
+III
+
+She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening,
+and with further ground for it, the next sharpest question that had
+been on his lips in the morning--which his other preoccupation had
+then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity was again
+made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as
+usual, with the close of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them
+again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down
+later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where
+even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
+daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
+it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
+with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
+illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
+candles.
+
+"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"
+
+He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
+glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
+was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
+ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
+everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
+him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
+as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
+practically been none, that morning, on her explained
+non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
+awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
+licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
+the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
+function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
+against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
+was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
+himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
+curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
+have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
+have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
+was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
+established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
+feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
+deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
+interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
+cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
+have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
+represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
+the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
+his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
+wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
+terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
+fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
+no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
+rest was fully to come.
+
+He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
+of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
+experience."
+
+"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
+feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
+should like to say to you."
+
+"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.
+
+"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
+seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."
+
+He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
+was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
+of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
+with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."
+
+"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
+better."
+
+"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
+been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."
+
+"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
+only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
+point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
+
+Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
+You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
+little party."
+
+"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."
+
+"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
+for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
+mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
+It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
+dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
+effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
+should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
+charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
+thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
+Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
+the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
+attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
+everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
+few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
+respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
+ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
+_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
+see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
+too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
+was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
+her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
+
+He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
+into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
+
+"Well, that you'll stay on."
+
+"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
+he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
+
+"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
+songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
+arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
+in the picture."
+
+"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
+
+"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
+his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
+that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
+few days."
+
+Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
+comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
+had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
+smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
+pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
+unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
+acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
+explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
+partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
+for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
+would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
+of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
+infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
+these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
+on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
+thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
+breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
+floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very
+tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
+pinch, the pressure in London."
+
+But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the
+pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. "Oh the
+daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
+knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious
+deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've
+given up all to follow _her_. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't
+you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
+
+He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did;
+and he smiled for her kindly. "Do _you_ write about Venice?"
+
+"No; but I would--oh wouldn't I?--if I hadn't so completely given up.
+She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess--"
+
+"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
+
+"Precisely. There you are!"
+
+It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places
+at once. "I quite understand that she's yours. Only you see she's not
+mine." He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the
+moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder,
+who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he
+liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave
+him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in
+itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent
+and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could
+see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
+was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate
+wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
+way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then
+Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly
+what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the
+midst. Such perceptions made occasions--well, occasions for fairly
+wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to _be_
+the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in
+it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no
+male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a
+man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke
+Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of
+Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a
+distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
+vision of great London surgeons--if this one was a surgeon--as incisive
+all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
+ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was
+not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a
+train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
+Mark had caught him twice in the fact--the fact of his absurd posture;
+and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind
+Lord Mark.
+
+His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm
+her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess. "Of
+course she's not. You must do something first."
+
+Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be rather _she_ who must?"
+
+It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. "I
+see. No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in
+eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the
+wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
+
+It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course she has. No one could
+be more charming. She has treated me as if _I_ were somebody. Call her
+my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you
+altogether. Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see
+that it's quite court life."
+
+She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. "That's
+all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of
+the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
+vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
+
+"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you
+know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
+
+"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty
+here; it's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her
+court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
+settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
+
+He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. "I think you
+were right just now. One must do something first."
+
+"Well, you've done something."
+
+"No--I don't see that. I can do more."
+
+Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
+everything, you know."
+
+"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
+modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
+different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
+if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
+
+"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
+"He has wanted to come."
+
+"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"
+
+"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
+these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
+him easy."
+
+"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
+"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"
+
+"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
+one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."
+
+"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."
+
+"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."
+
+"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
+large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."
+
+It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
+him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
+showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
+he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
+Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."
+
+"And why should he get at me?"
+
+"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."
+
+All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
+immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
+sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
+to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
+half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
+ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
+call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
+Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
+opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
+of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
+a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
+some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
+seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
+no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
+together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
+the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
+the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
+care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
+without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
+had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
+the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
+differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
+let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
+into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
+if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
+not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
+traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
+almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
+accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
+yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
+him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
+the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
+challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
+having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
+reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
+change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
+was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
+amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
+visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
+Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
+perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
+the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
+couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
+himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
+put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
+cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
+a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
+nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
+between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
+ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
+consciousness brushed by him.
+
+She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
+some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
+inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
+that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
+appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
+display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
+her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
+at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
+he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
+company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
+her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
+world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
+in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
+most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
+was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
+word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
+introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
+toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
+affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
+what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
+done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
+done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
+interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
+from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
+him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
+getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
+could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
+or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
+herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
+that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
+pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
+her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
+such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that
+her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave
+him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted
+him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
+minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived
+long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to
+be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was
+a liking greater than Milly's--or it would be: he felt it in him to
+answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that
+Kate was somehow--for Kate--wanting in lustre. As a striking young
+presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly
+diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
+dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
+indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
+perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
+wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes--he had never forgotten
+it--the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She
+was, in her accepted effacement--it was actually her acceptance that
+made the beauty and repaired the damage--under her aunt's eyes now; but
+whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the
+less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an
+exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
+
+"Don't you think her good enough _now?_" Almost heedless of the danger
+of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
+renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little
+orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference
+enlivened by native humours--things quite in the line of old Venetian
+comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy--a real solvent of
+shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
+general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good
+manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but
+of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at
+all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
+
+"But she's _too_ nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything
+suits her so--especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll
+trouble you really to look at them." Densher, though aware he had seen
+them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
+done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
+kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
+face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
+wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
+wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
+of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
+presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
+somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
+the ground."
+
+"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
+her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
+companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
+figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
+that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
+under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
+power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
+one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
+well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
+such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
+he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
+that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
+Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
+nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
+a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
+presently going on.
+
+"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
+
+"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
+
+"Oh yes, I see myself!"
+
+As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
+and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
+ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
+character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
+was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
+well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
+Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
+difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
+represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was
+nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
+married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
+little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
+afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
+only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
+come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
+good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
+better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
+me about it. She evidently believes her better."
+
+"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"
+
+"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"
+
+"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
+Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
+be taught.
+
+"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
+
+It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
+nothing to do with it."
+
+"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
+
+But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
+doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
+watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
+kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
+inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
+been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
+
+"It's beautiful indeed."
+
+He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
+no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
+Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
+can't deceive him."
+
+Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
+you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
+sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"
+
+Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
+doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
+direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
+precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
+and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
+to you."
+
+"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
+
+"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
+to the previous question, "to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's
+necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can
+see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to
+do with me."
+
+"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
+
+"For not caring for _you?_ Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven
+by it into your relation with Milly--as all _that_ I leave you to him."
+
+"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for
+leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
+
+She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her
+place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of
+introducing him. "All the more reason why I should commit you then to
+Lady Wells."
+
+"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from
+afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at
+the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of
+whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when
+they were married. It was furthermore that the consciousness of
+something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically
+much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments--to
+say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of
+opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud,
+over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might
+pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to
+confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
+now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
+immediately to show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any
+finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're
+right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs.
+Lowder's being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued,
+"can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't
+deceive other people--not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He
+won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest
+friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud,
+who's her own."
+
+Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth
+his having kept her for. "Why will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing
+your way so little."
+
+Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick,
+its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to
+a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
+his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
+turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
+see it!"
+
+"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
+nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
+you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
+
+"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
+
+"To please you."
+
+"And how in the world can it please me?"
+
+Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
+density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
+Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
+there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
+
+He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
+corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
+queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
+But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
+on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
+so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
+
+"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
+
+Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
+difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
+yours does serve me."
+
+"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
+gains you time."
+
+"Time for what?"
+
+"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
+as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
+
+Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
+cryptic, love!"
+
+It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
+those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
+a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
+he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
+dreamed I should take for any human creature."
+
+Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
+reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
+can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
+again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
+make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. There need be nothing
+but our sense of each other."
+
+It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took
+up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. "You can tell
+her anything you like, anything whatever."
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? I _have_ nothing to tell her."
+
+"You can tell her about _us_. I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that
+you do still like me."
+
+It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still
+like me."
+
+She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat
+it."
+
+"I see. To Aunt Maud."
+
+"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate
+then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he
+was; and she showed it again as she went on. "_There_, accordingly, is
+your time."
+
+She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke,
+though not quite all at once. "You must let me say I _do_ see. Time for
+something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time
+too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
+
+"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of
+concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully
+made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll
+do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them."
+
+He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was
+only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly
+fitted. "Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
+
+It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no
+wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to
+their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
+bravely moved. "To marry her."
+
+"So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course
+have money?"
+
+It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had
+only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all
+along--to his stupidity, his timidity--it had been, it had been only,
+what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn't
+forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't
+pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as
+if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. "You'll in
+the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free."
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to Lady Wells."
+
+He never budged--there was too much else. "I'm to propose it
+then--marriage--on the spot?"
+
+There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he
+spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof.
+"Oh I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash
+your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act as you
+like and as you can."
+
+He thought again. "I'm far--as I sufficiently showed you this
+morning--from washing my hands of you."
+
+"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
+
+"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll come?"
+
+But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant.
+"You'll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance--well, quite ideal."
+
+"Your descriptions"--her "ideal" was such a touch!--"are prodigious.
+And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
+
+"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I
+don't like."
+
+It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into
+this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled
+his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the
+greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too,
+moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what _he_ did. But
+something else on his lips was uppermost. "What I don't make out then
+is how you can even bear it."
+
+"Well, when you know me better you'll find out how much I can bear."
+And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many
+implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually,
+"better" after his long sacrifice to knowledge--this for instance was a
+truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had
+mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own
+generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she
+might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying
+him on. "All you'll have to do will be to stay."
+
+"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
+
+"Oh dear no--we shall go."
+
+"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
+
+"In a day or two--straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now."
+
+It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then what becomes of
+Miss Theale?"
+
+"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her."
+
+He stared. "All alone?"
+
+She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. "You're old
+enough--with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
+
+Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it,
+as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these
+successive cues, that he was essentially "seeing what she would
+say"--an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a
+need to know her better to which she had a moment before done
+injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams that she would
+somewhere break down, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she
+wasn't breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. "Is
+your going Mrs. Lowder's idea?"
+
+"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I
+don't," she added, "refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of
+the general propriety of it."
+
+"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment. "It makes
+everything fit."
+
+"Everything."
+
+The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the
+while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he
+had in fact been looking at something else. "You leave her here then to
+die?"
+
+"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay. I mean," Kate
+explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
+
+"And that's all that's necessary?"
+
+Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we long ago agree that what
+she believes is the principal thing for us?"
+
+He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. "Oh yes.
+I can't deny it." Then he added: "So that if I stay--"
+
+"It won't"--she was prompt--"be our fault."
+
+"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
+
+"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
+
+Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing
+more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn't
+presently found: "But what if she doesn't accept me?"
+
+It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her
+tone the next moment touch him. "You can but try."
+
+"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard
+to propose to a dying girl."
+
+"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined in Kate the
+flash of _justesse_ he could perhaps most, on consideration, have
+admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the
+fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her
+eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
+literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to
+where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so
+that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side,
+happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them
+in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the
+value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together
+again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their
+plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
+only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out
+afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last
+spoke it was under cover.
+
+"I might stay, you know, without trying."
+
+"Oh to stay _is_ to try."
+
+"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?"
+
+"I don't see how you can have the appearance more."
+
+Densher waited. "You think it then possible she may _offer_ marriage?"
+
+"I can't think--if you really want to know--what she may _not_ offer!"
+
+"In the manner of princesses, who do such things?"
+
+"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
+
+Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be for me then to
+accept. But that's the way it must come."
+
+Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: "You'll,
+on your honour, stay then?"
+
+His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. "Without
+you, you mean?"
+
+"Without us."
+
+"And you yourselves go at latest--?"
+
+"Not later than Thursday."
+
+It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay, on my honour, if
+you'll come to me. On your honour."
+
+Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigour out of
+which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigour was more to
+him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the
+woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a "dodge."
+She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain.
+Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady Wells is
+tired of waiting: she's coming--see--to _us_."
+
+Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to
+cross, and he still had time. "If you decline to understand me I wholly
+decline to understand you. I'll do nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
+
+"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
+
+He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase
+was--and for vulgar triumphs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
+Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
+understand?"
+
+"I'll do everything."
+
+She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
+playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
+relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
+sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
+conflict. "Well, I understand."
+
+"On your honour?"
+
+"On my honour."
+
+"You'll come?"
+
+"I'll come."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK NINTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
+most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
+the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
+within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
+that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
+it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
+hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
+risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
+engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
+name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
+come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
+importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
+memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
+itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
+watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
+with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
+futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
+not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
+bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
+yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
+survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
+have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
+there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
+a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
+had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
+ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
+this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
+directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
+historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
+convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
+present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
+and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
+in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
+and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
+value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
+possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
+round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?
+
+It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
+treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
+finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
+key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
+and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
+other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
+hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
+whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
+as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
+be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
+play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
+remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
+orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
+slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
+importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
+occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
+acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
+sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
+approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
+third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
+profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
+broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
+anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
+up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
+engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
+the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
+way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been
+magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
+items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
+outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
+fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
+spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
+chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
+was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
+warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
+it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
+it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
+still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
+him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
+which the other name was careful action.
+
+Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
+immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
+faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
+straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
+time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
+was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
+as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
+always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
+had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
+after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
+free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
+_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
+it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
+left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
+made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
+inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
+what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
+virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
+there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
+Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
+that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
+case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
+well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He
+then fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at its
+highest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
+Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
+neither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged it
+was. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he was
+concerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
+and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more than
+anything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed
+a little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask
+himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for
+them--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
+and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,
+however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not to
+profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go
+directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered
+in Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go
+directly against Milly.
+
+To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,
+from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was
+possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on
+the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactly
+why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of
+the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach
+out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It
+was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be
+almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and
+call it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,
+of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
+couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered
+about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe
+it; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, he
+could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he
+was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet
+Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never
+took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none
+the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving
+them alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
+with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
+supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
+pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
+three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
+degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
+incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
+Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
+some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
+last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
+induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
+lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
+respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
+only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
+palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
+in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
+
+Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
+ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
+creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
+relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
+very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
+to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
+young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
+truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
+way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
+didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
+following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
+which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
+him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
+have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
+sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
+token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
+had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
+sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
+London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
+appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,
+out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
+uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
+meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
+everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
+by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
+their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
+would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
+so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
+for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
+half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
+hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
+mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
+thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
+letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
+inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
+yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
+
+These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
+whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
+on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
+Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
+felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
+sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
+the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
+to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
+inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
+scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
+letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
+of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
+Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
+difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
+explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.
+
+The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"
+
+"I hope to begin it."
+
+"It's something you haven't begun?"
+
+"Well, only just."
+
+"And since you came?"
+
+She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
+easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
+ground."
+
+Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper.
+"I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."
+
+"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to
+repair that ravage."
+
+"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
+
+"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mind
+anything."
+
+"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your
+days."
+
+He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh
+I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."
+And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he
+visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for
+comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
+also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
+effort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was so
+interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he
+found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
+answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
+particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea
+with him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
+on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--the
+extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.
+Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,
+he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though
+it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
+top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,
+deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not been
+modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
+likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.
+It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; that
+glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
+sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it would
+serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten
+Milly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less
+wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
+casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put
+his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it be
+safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"
+
+"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
+he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
+soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
+she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
+her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
+not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
+saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
+the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
+life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
+couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
+Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
+bad?"
+
+He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
+mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
+believe whatever you tell me."
+
+"Well then, I'm splendid."
+
+"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
+
+"I mean I'm capable of life."
+
+"I've never doubted it."
+
+"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"
+
+"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
+
+"Well, that I know I _can_."
+
+"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
+
+"Whatever I do. If I want to."
+
+"If you want to do it?"
+
+"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
+
+He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
+pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
+
+"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
+turned for him to mere light and sound.
+
+He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"
+
+It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
+why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
+
+"Will it help you to live?"
+
+"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
+general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"
+
+"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
+
+"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
+
+It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
+him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
+inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
+when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
+
+What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
+of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
+face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for
+something else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about it
+and that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's no
+matter."
+
+"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
+
+"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
+
+It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at
+any rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."
+
+"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
+
+"You mean you won't come to me?"
+
+"No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart from
+that," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm
+not forced to."
+
+"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at
+all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the least
+coercible of creatures."
+
+"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
+
+"The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."
+
+"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
+
+On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you
+don't complain."
+
+As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His
+telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas
+his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
+gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well
+have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the
+way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she
+took him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one sees
+one's way."
+
+"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
+
+"I mean to keeping what one has."
+
+"Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,
+"it's enough to try for."
+
+"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she added
+with a change: "And now about your book."
+
+"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
+
+"The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie
+or me to run the risk of spoiling."
+
+He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not doing a book."
+
+"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"
+
+He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm
+doing."
+
+It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was
+afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he
+feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
+didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of
+the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly
+wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps
+able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,
+she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see
+her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
+
+"Then if it's not for your book--?"
+
+"What _am_ I staying for?"
+
+"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it rather
+empty for you?"
+
+"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose
+marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally
+begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a
+loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the
+vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
+
+"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could
+protest. "You stay because you've got to."
+
+He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have
+said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It
+gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
+Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
+He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission
+from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either
+niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the
+girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he
+was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he
+thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's
+other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
+
+"Oh you must judge."
+
+He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too
+restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that
+was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
+kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was
+staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against
+her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
+didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or
+worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_
+judging!"
+
+
+II
+
+He didn't go home, on leaving her--he didn't want to; he walked
+instead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, to
+a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more
+than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with
+solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
+It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
+leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror
+and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might
+have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
+because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen
+his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took
+sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
+When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly
+on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on
+the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
+seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
+mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pass
+everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
+a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her
+deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have
+close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his
+hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on
+the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the
+cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made
+him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for
+three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more
+cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him
+had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action
+itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference
+even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep
+from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil
+lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might
+have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
+
+What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the
+perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to
+destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his
+really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing
+so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another a
+catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
+be better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion might
+either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these
+considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously
+amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all
+with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without
+the girl's leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,
+whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to this
+his wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. That
+was the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum of
+vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall
+of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step
+would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
+when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn't at this
+juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was
+wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the
+idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap,
+and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported
+him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to
+dinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he should
+probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should
+be able to be still enough through everything.
+
+He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not
+having failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't
+trying--quite the contrary--to be either distant or dull. That would
+not have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.
+That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; so
+that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as
+it were, to let himself go--go in the direction, that is to say, of
+staying. It depended on where he went; which was what he meant by
+taking care. When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreat
+without betraying the manoeuvre. Perfect tact--the necessity for which
+he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised--was to keep all
+intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus
+for instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
+well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the
+relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,
+at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
+of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't
+diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as
+possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping
+her, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for want
+of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many words
+speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to
+intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was
+an impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he was
+careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all
+was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
+elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not
+stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within
+bounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much
+disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the
+queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,
+even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
+in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of
+facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have
+to be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, without
+prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as
+doing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judge
+where it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other at
+the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,
+and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and
+yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the
+line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for
+us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what
+figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above
+and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
+been felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not the
+national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,
+in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he could
+unlimitedly take for granted.
+
+He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the
+undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his
+nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to
+mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. All
+women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but
+the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,
+practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character
+that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual
+non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days
+had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the
+information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." The
+announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the
+gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the
+knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,
+could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli
+among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among
+the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he
+recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of
+the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not
+prepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared to
+say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher
+mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in
+whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but a
+place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always
+ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour
+the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, any
+cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health
+was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
+taken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
+carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio,
+whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
+protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led
+from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in
+meditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would
+have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which
+required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for
+each--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything
+but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from
+occult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely
+formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't
+himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;
+it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
+court.
+
+The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first
+sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought him
+down the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of the
+court, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the one
+chance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,
+_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by the
+obvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him for
+the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young
+lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
+attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a
+connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious
+to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of
+the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,
+had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic
+sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of
+politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's
+servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third
+was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him after
+all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that
+might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to
+fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that
+came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"
+because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him
+see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever
+so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as
+insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the
+pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in the
+augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established
+between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to Miss
+Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he could
+also bethink himself that, so long as the word never came--and it was,
+on the basis he had arranged, impossible--he enjoyed the imagination of
+mounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as
+during these minutes in the damp _loggia_ where the storm-gusts were
+strong; and there came in fact for our young man, as a result of his
+presence, a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to the
+dismal. Something had happened--he didn't know what; and it wasn't
+Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought
+the ladies--as if their liability had been equal--were a "leetle"
+fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it.
+It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a
+profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's
+Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
+slightly smiled at him in the process--but ever so slightly this time,
+his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,
+whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.
+
+This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other over all
+they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Densher's
+protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for
+them alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they really
+could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black
+sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and
+interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled,
+stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges.
+Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such
+a depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly
+prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equally
+weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash of
+mutual suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility, they were
+more united than disjoined. But it was to have been a moment for
+Densher that nothing could ease off--not even the formal propriety with
+which his interlocutor finally attended him to the _portone_ and bowed
+upon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the air
+had made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew of
+course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to return
+was not what he missed; yet he knew at the same time that what had
+happened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond
+the _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out
+where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled
+his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
+enough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,
+just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acute
+person in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
+scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no
+disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to a
+queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
+mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had
+been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that the
+vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
+
+Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the more
+impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite
+of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the
+Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the
+high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the
+limit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the
+Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for
+him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if the
+difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of
+a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh
+note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,
+and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at
+a stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
+margin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had held
+out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and he
+wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as
+himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There
+were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
+now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the
+grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than
+ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
+and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with
+brown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendent
+jackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs
+that overflowed from the cafés were gathered, still with a pretence of
+service, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, with
+his coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These were
+impressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit thrice
+before he stopped short, in front of Florian's, with the force of his
+sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the café--he had spotted an
+acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused long
+enough to look at twice was seated, well within range, at a small table
+on which a tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still
+remained; and though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of a
+French newspaper--the heading of the _Figaro_ was visible--he stared
+straight before him at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
+for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity
+produced, however quickly, all the effect of establishing
+connexions--connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were
+the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of the
+head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being
+noticed. This wider view showed him _all_ Lord Mark--Lord Mark as
+encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
+to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out,
+on that occasion, as he came in--he had felt it, in the hall, at the
+time; and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
+seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface, the same
+potential quantity.
+
+It was a matter, the whole passage--it could only be--but of a few
+seconds; for as he might neither stand there to stare nor on the other
+hand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, this
+time to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause,
+as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had
+simply faced him--as he had faced _him_, not placed by him, not at
+first--as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging
+fire, had then clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struck
+from these certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for
+neither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what
+now mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
+place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher, as inevitably
+a haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that case have seen him
+before. He paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for him
+even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come back
+for something--as a sequel to his earlier visit; and whatever he had
+come back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived but
+last night or that morning; he had already made the difference. It was
+a great thing for Densher to get this answer. He held it close, he
+hugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept him
+going and going--it made him no less restless. But it explained--and
+that was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in
+the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weather
+had changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible,
+_because_ of Lord Mark. It was because of him, _a fortiori_, that the
+palace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he found the visitor
+each time as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
+before him; the next time he was looking over his _Figaro_, which he
+had opened out. Densher didn't again stop, but left him apparently
+unconscious of his passage--on another repetition of which Lord Mark
+had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would be off that night;
+he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were as
+plain to Densher as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
+cleared for him--if cleared it was; there was something he didn't see,
+the great thing; but he saw so round it and so close to it that this
+was almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what he
+had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man
+had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit
+would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was
+the reason why he himself had found her door shut.
+
+He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that
+he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could
+now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
+as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he asked himself why it
+should prevent this that he could feel, in connexion with the crisis,
+so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all the
+benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn't
+feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had
+touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability
+so to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a
+kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
+by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark's
+return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there
+were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even to
+his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing
+it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about it
+than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop
+on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a
+visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely
+one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to
+spare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
+reflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
+straight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating a
+person in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.
+With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of the
+contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,
+and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and he
+drew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.
+Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it
+straight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled into
+just the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the very
+person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative
+innocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wished
+to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To
+keep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, to
+keep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
+consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.
+
+The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,
+extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed
+but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the
+better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the
+particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either of
+the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
+impossible--the being again denied; for it made him practically
+answerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglect
+either in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didn't get in, the
+one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health.
+Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him
+he had only to wait--which he was actually helped to do by his feeling
+with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in
+themselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted,
+the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about
+was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and
+listened to the wind--listened also to tinkles of bells and watched for
+some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never
+came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he
+wasn't at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hour
+of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd of
+refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafés on the chance the
+brute, as he now regularly imaged him, _might_ be still there. He could
+only be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and that--one had but to
+think of it--would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however--it was
+proved; though Densher's care for the question either way only added to
+what was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came
+round to what he was doing for Milly--spending days that neither relief
+nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject
+for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but
+sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
+and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find
+himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible
+meeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of
+everything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the
+third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he
+wouldn't have budged for the world.
+
+He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all
+events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely
+wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
+else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her
+wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,
+stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the
+pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified
+though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be
+accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a
+proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it
+were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have
+been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium
+as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.
+These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what
+she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a
+qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such
+things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she
+had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
+he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
+intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
+talk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
+deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?
+Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently
+caught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strange
+inconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in the
+breach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, done
+justice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
+in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have written
+had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and
+her idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only
+it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,
+in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on
+the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
+with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,
+for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the grinning padrona threw
+open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a
+difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It
+appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she
+allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without
+consciousness or care, and that her face, under her veil, richly rosy
+with the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if the
+rain were her tears.
+
+
+III
+
+They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
+fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+"You mean she's worse?"
+
+The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
+instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
+of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
+relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
+veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
+to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
+know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."
+
+"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
+feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
+
+She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
+"Have you been wretched?"
+
+Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
+him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
+visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
+draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
+had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
+above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
+seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
+been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
+
+This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
+his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
+been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
+
+"Yet it has done no good?"
+
+"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
+headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"
+
+"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
+
+"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
+
+"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
+
+She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
+taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
+themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
+him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
+had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
+in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
+conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
+Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
+you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"
+
+"Only nothing now matters?"
+
+She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
+expressed. "Then you know?"
+
+"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
+was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
+
+"Not for three days?"
+
+"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
+the faintest allusion."
+
+"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
+_me?_"
+
+"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
+
+"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."
+
+"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
+waterproof.
+
+It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
+it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
+but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
+mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
+impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
+withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
+
+It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
+pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"
+
+"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
+do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
+
+"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
+
+"Everything?"
+
+Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
+That's why I've come."
+
+"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
+affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
+him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
+was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
+possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
+it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
+so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
+an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
+it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
+far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
+abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
+of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened
+when she met his groan with an attenuation.
+
+"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."
+
+It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
+feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
+he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
+his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
+something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
+had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
+her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
+measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
+in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
+which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
+me?"
+
+And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
+effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
+believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
+helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
+
+It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
+She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
+accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
+ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
+she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
+consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
+rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
+meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
+larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
+they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
+don't mean not of me."
+
+"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
+as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
+age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
+Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
+to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
+inconsequence.
+
+He wondered. "You thank God--?"
+
+"That she's so quiet."
+
+He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"
+
+"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So
+you see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It would
+kill me if she _were_ to tell me."
+
+"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
+
+"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."
+
+"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a
+long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they
+could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought
+out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to
+him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been
+waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and
+talk of her here with you."
+
+It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"
+
+"I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."
+
+"She'll never tell?"
+
+"She'll never tell."
+
+Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
+
+"She _is_ magnificent."
+
+His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he
+could, all over. "Would she see me again?"
+
+It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"
+
+"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him
+some time. "No."
+
+"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
+
+"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
+
+She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don't
+see what you can do."
+
+"I don't either. But _she_ might."
+
+Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."
+
+"Too late for her to see--?"
+
+"Too late."
+
+The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled in
+him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"
+
+"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved
+and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that
+I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly
+enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
+events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has
+told him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that he
+may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
+only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to
+entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and
+meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an
+agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of
+her."
+
+"By her request?"
+
+"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of
+provisions."
+
+"By her request too?"
+
+"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first
+time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we
+liked."
+
+Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"
+
+"None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing's
+any comfort."
+
+"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, _I'm_ not."
+
+"No. But I didn't come for that."
+
+"You came for _me_."
+
+"Well then call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyes
+filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper
+still. "I came at bottom of course--"
+
+"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as
+you say, too late for me to do anything?"
+
+She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow
+in her, from the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"--and
+she turned her vision again strangely about her--"with you here, and
+with everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her."
+
+"God forbid we should abandon her."
+
+"Then you _won't?_" His tone had made her flush again.
+
+"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons _me?_ What can I do if she
+won't see me?"
+
+"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
+
+"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I
+shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I
+could help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "she
+would have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to make
+out, "is the devil of it. She _won't_ want it herself. She _can't!_"
+
+He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he
+helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and
+even for that there are difficulties. But there _is_ that." He stood
+before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from
+her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave
+to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on
+the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but,
+as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really
+know yourself what it is."
+
+He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said--rather!--there
+were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment;
+he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider,
+like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood
+at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in
+fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first
+again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer
+to her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came back
+to her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if he
+had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
+where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
+Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the one
+least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without
+him?"
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the
+first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only
+he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
+
+"Well then that's something."
+
+She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."
+
+"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
+October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
+and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
+both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
+him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
+said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
+
+"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
+
+"Ah I know nothing about that."
+
+"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
+saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
+will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
+he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
+
+"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
+_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
+her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."
+
+He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
+saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
+distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
+confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
+
+There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
+dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
+was here, we all liked him."
+
+"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
+with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,
+"yourself."
+
+Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
+of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
+nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
+
+Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
+plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
+professional propriety."
+
+"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
+something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
+couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"
+
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"I can't talk to any one about her."
+
+"Except to _me_," his friend continued.
+
+"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
+waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
+honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
+sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
+visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
+him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
+precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
+She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
+statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
+nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
+was impossible for us, and--"
+
+"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
+more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
+straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
+there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
+
+"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
+
+"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
+together."
+
+Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
+back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
+of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
+which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
+perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
+could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
+believe that he thinks she's gone."
+
+She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."
+
+"Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More and
+more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something
+with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to
+postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he
+was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
+wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of
+Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of
+Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
+swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast on
+it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent
+to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
+absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
+first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility
+so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,
+and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.
+"Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for me
+to see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have
+conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she
+had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness
+would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for
+insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,
+she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.
+Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? I
+mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh she
+was earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"
+
+"The opportunity to put what?"
+
+"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
+
+Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarter
+of an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,
+however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
+his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of
+his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If I
+deny what to her?"
+
+Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along been
+letting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."
+
+"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenly
+perverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was she
+who now blushed deep.
+
+It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things.
+"Then _you_ know--"
+
+"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's what has done it."
+
+"Yes--I understand that. But you also know--"
+
+He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. "I'm
+speaking," she said soothingly, "of what he told her. It's _that_ that
+I've taken you as knowing."
+
+"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
+
+It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality of
+relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else.
+Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
+it for _true!_"
+
+Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayed
+himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still
+better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there
+was no postponing. They were left with her idea--the one she was
+wishing to make him recognise. He had expressed ten minutes before his
+need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
+he was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even than
+as yet appeared.
+
+He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; he
+mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of course
+she could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly,
+without delay, see it; on which her sense of having "caught" him became
+as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What I mean
+is that he told her you've been all the while engaged to Miss Croy."
+
+He gave a jerk round; it was almost--to hear it--the touch of a lash;
+and he said--idiotically, as he afterwards knew--the first thing that
+came into his head. "All _what_ while?"
+
+"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness. "I only repeat to
+you what he told her."
+
+Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caught
+himself up. "Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you're talking
+about. I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained, "in the
+Piazza; only just saw him--through the glass at Florian's--without any
+words. In fact I scarcely know him--there wouldn't have been occasion.
+It was but once, moreover--he must have gone that night. But I knew he
+wouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over--what he would
+have come for."
+
+Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
+
+Densher approved. "He came to let her know that he knows better than
+she for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool's
+paradise, refused him."
+
+"How you _do_ know!"--and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.
+
+"I know that--but I don't know the good it does him."
+
+"The good, he thinks, if he has patience--not too much--may be to come.
+He doesn't know what he has done to her. Only _we_, you see, do that."
+
+He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him--what she felt?"
+
+"She was able--I'm sure of it--not to show anything. He dealt her his
+blow, and she took it without a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain,
+spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of what
+she related. "She's magnificent."
+
+Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
+
+"And _he_," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
+
+"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom in
+it, they looked at each other. "Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
+
+"So awfully--it's Maud Lowder's own view. And he was nice, in London,"
+said Mrs. Stringham, "to _me_. One could almost pity him--he has had
+such a good conscience."
+
+"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
+
+"Yes, but it wasn't--I could see from the only few things she first
+told me--that he meant _her_ the least harm. He intended none whatever."
+
+"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned. "He only of
+course meant harm to me."
+
+"And good to himself--he thought that would come. He had been unable to
+swallow," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "what had happened on his other
+visit. He had been then too sharply humiliated."
+
+"Oh I saw that."
+
+"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while he
+was turned away."
+
+"Perfectly," Densher said--"I've filled it out. And also that he has
+known meanwhile for _what_ I was then received. For a stay of all these
+weeks. He had had it to think of."
+
+"Precisely--it was more than he could bear. But he has it," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "to think of still."
+
+"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point,
+was having more to think of even than he had yet had--"only, after all,
+how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
+
+"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
+
+"He can only have acted--it would have been his sole safety--from full
+knowledge."
+
+He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as they
+were, something had none the less passed between them. It was this
+that, after an instant, made her again interrogative. "What do you mean
+by full knowledge?"
+
+Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?"
+
+"I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason to
+believe, straight from there."
+
+"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
+
+"Well, to try again--with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make
+himself possibly right with her--a different attempt from the other. He
+had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
+opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half
+an hour would be just what was most effective. It _has_ been!" said
+Susan Shepherd.
+
+Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as she
+lighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quite
+dared--putting the absent dots on several i's--he saw new questions
+swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; and
+they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was
+at any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder."
+
+"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly."
+
+He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally, upon news of _me?_"
+
+His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
+
+"I've given her none that hasn't been decently good. This will have
+been the first."
+
+"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
+
+"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as she is."
+
+He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs. Lowder written about him?
+Has she written that he has been with them?"
+
+"She has mentioned him but once--it was in her letter before the last.
+Then she said something."
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well it was in reference to
+Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I
+should say rather that he was thinking of _her_--only it seemed this
+time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him."
+
+Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised
+them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of
+a queerness in his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged to
+_propose_ to her niece?"
+
+"I don't know what she means."
+
+"Of course not"--he recovered himself; "and I oughtn't to seem to
+trouble you to piece together what I can't piece myself. Only I
+'guess,'" he added, "I _can_ piece it."
+
+She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I dare say I can piece
+it too."
+
+It was one of the things in her--and his conscious face took it from
+her as such--that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark
+for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
+They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep
+down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it
+wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful--at
+least this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so,
+most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been
+feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all _such_
+petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that,
+in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his
+putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark.
+"Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?"
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "_her_ friend also. But not a single word
+that I know of."
+
+He had taken it for certain she hadn't--the thing being after all but a
+shade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for six
+weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter but
+a shade more strange than Milly's not having mentioned her. In spite of
+which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
+He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he
+could get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been
+judging. "How did he manage to get _at_ her? She had only--with what
+had passed between them before--to say she couldn't see him."
+
+"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier," the good lady
+explained with a slight embarrassment, "than at the other time."
+
+"Easier?"
+
+"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
+
+"Yes. But exactly not _the_ difference."
+
+"Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. She
+could afford to be the opposite." With which, as he said nothing, she
+just impatiently completed her sense. "She had had _you_ here for six
+weeks."
+
+"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
+
+"Besides, I think he must have written her first--written I mean in a
+tone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then on
+the spot--"
+
+"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked? The horrid little beast!"
+
+It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for
+hope, the intensity of her look at him. "Oh he went off without an
+alarm."
+
+"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
+
+"Ah that, certainly."
+
+"Then it _was_ mere base revenge. Hasn't he known her, into the
+bargain," the young man asked--"didn't he, weeks before, see her, judge
+her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than a
+few months to live?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; and
+it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. "He has doubtless
+been aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware."
+
+"He has wanted her, you mean, just _because_--?"
+
+"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with a
+hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in
+his visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more
+taken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion.
+"Shall we have lights--a lamp or the candles?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a
+thought. "He _will_ have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has
+happened."
+
+Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."
+
+"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poor
+lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Densher
+continued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
+
+"And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"
+
+"Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact
+to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has
+believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at
+Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in
+Venice."
+
+Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to
+what?"
+
+"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some
+duplicity."
+
+"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous
+supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long for
+each--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,
+which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
+This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it
+even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
+left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their
+further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an
+advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the
+absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she
+addressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had already
+used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for
+_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so
+dreadfully to believe?"
+
+Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely
+certain then that she does believe it?"
+
+"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"
+
+He took his time again to judge. "Do _you_ believe it?"
+
+He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a
+little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered
+none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
+will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly
+settle it--if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if,
+to save her life, you consent to a denial."
+
+"But a denial, when it comes to that--confound the whole thing, don't
+you see!--of exactly what?"
+
+It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged.
+"Of everything."
+
+Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. "Oh!"
+he simply moaned into the gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought
+also blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the
+stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,
+but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an
+almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
+bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and
+called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
+scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of
+vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this
+on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
+He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at
+present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where
+the event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed him
+before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more
+than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of
+them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
+almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,
+as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
+other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
+had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
+nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
+would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
+to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
+of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
+going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
+Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
+of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
+had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
+he possibly _could_.
+
+It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
+station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
+turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
+and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
+as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
+proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
+life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
+afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
+prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
+current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
+aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
+prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
+great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
+brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
+brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
+Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
+made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
+was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
+it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
+went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
+platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
+presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
+that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
+anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
+hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce
+have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
+might have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in
+presence of the fact.
+
+Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkable
+young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up
+again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt
+himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof
+of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now
+connected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.
+The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as
+he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
+him. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, the
+remarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of his
+face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred
+its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
+suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
+now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a
+symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,
+of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,
+in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble to
+sink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densher
+began wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
+make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been
+on the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the
+palace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching
+mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
+together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity
+refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the
+palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this
+susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All
+he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,
+the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
+headshake, "go there now."
+
+"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that the
+thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite
+inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it
+that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
+moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
+craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
+the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
+a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
+hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
+Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
+swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
+of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
+Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
+time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
+him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
+he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
+about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
+instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
+and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
+personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
+of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
+only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
+within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
+smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
+all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
+now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
+interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
+really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
+_cliché_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
+of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
+in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
+reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
+had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
+of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
+outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
+been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
+been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
+befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
+had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quite
+on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,
+absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on
+this occasion moved away.
+
+The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance
+grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was to
+be the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
+making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left to
+be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should
+one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
+It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or two
+that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That he
+couldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this was
+as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact
+of the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
+taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
+gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
+meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time
+nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless the
+great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densher
+further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's
+having decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend as
+well--for there would be practically some difference to her--on her
+actually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke
+would make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his own
+view of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of response
+it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
+personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be
+prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked
+himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the
+worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man
+should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him
+for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and
+consequently there was nothing to hope.
+
+It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to all
+probability; but it pressed on him that there were few possible
+diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was
+so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
+Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
+taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
+The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
+tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
+the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
+difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
+Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
+as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
+quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
+value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
+the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
+phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
+did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
+Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
+his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
+tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
+made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
+mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
+he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
+original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
+his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
+time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
+this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
+knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
+no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
+described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
+on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
+to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
+
+That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
+saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
+stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
+gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
+himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
+days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
+sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highest
+medical lights in the world; so that really when the personage in
+question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the
+doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
+like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the
+magnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.
+The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her
+immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some
+hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with
+his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
+at once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_
+still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and
+quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now to
+be prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not
+only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't
+dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that
+during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in
+sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The
+demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous
+acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him
+come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but
+there were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. It
+was for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity of
+Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he
+had looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon as
+the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined
+itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing
+could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher was
+well aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period in
+the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
+nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor's
+entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the
+fact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to say
+he had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she
+might _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
+was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all
+their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
+as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
+wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
+have said, quiet.
+
+The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
+a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
+superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
+he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
+stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
+they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
+Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
+wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
+all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
+Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
+them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
+his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
+He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
+all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
+to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
+in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
+it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
+response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
+held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
+spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
+it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
+because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
+him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
+aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
+system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
+man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
+Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
+man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
+man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
+He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
+and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
+the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
+concerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
+he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
+have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
+way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
+odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
+exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
+complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
+have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
+abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
+station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
+would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
+doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
+dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.
+
+That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
+three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
+wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
+term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
+Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
+friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
+naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
+was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
+personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
+that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
+errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
+call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
+had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
+with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
+proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
+Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
+companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
+as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
+authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
+affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
+awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
+the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
+short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
+was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,
+though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
+prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
+involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
+only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
+right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
+and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
+questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
+now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
+knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
+Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
+habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
+it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
+farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
+his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
+looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
+one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
+shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
+ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
+last spoken made him start.
+
+"I shall come back."
+
+"Then she's better?"
+
+"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
+the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
+still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
+hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
+see her."
+
+Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
+betrayed. "She asks me?"
+
+Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
+closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
+but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
+as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
+
+Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
+the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
+Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"
+
+"She can receive you."
+
+"And you're coming back--?"
+
+"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
+
+"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
+friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had
+announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
+come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
+colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
+world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
+but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
+remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
+"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
+his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
+slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
+the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
+"Then she's better?"
+
+Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
+the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
+to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
+successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
+to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
+reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
+him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
+observation of Eugenio.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TENTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your
+making a sign?"
+
+Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate
+and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it
+straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her
+instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility
+between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general
+trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh
+sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,
+something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still
+more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had
+been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on
+either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
+had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her
+as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed
+of taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere first
+look--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the
+firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the London
+fog, as the flower of her difference; just as her difference
+itself--part of which was her striking him as older in a degree for
+which no mere couple of months could account--was the fruit of their
+intimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosen
+together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their
+wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened--of what in
+fact, for the spirit of each, was still happening--been showing it to
+him for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, so
+still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to
+tackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast of
+it in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his present
+visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it would
+doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write
+to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him--he had come up slowly; but
+it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That was
+exactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to
+her feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. He
+had come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them;
+and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits,
+his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, so
+the inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of
+intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell
+her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he felt on the spot, he
+couldn't have brought it all with him before this afternoon. He _had_
+brought it, to the last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't
+be hard--as he in fact found--to produce, for Kate's understanding, his
+first reason.
+
+"A fortnight, yes--it was a fortnight Friday; but I've only been
+keeping in, you see, with our wonderful system." He was so easily
+justified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her saying
+she didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid for
+her; and such a gage of its equal vividness for himself was precisely
+what she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
+remark that on the very face of it, she would remember, their wonderful
+system attached no premium to rapidities of transition. "I couldn't
+quite--don't you know?--take my rebound with a rush; and I suppose I've
+been instinctively hanging off to minimise, for you as well as for
+myself, the appearances of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I
+knew you'd understand." It was presently as if she really understood so
+well that she almost appealed from his insistence--yet looking at him
+too, he was not unconscious, as if this mastery of fitnesses was a
+strong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struck
+her as expert for contingencies in the very degree of her having in
+Venice struck _him_ as expert. He smiled over his plea for a renewal
+with stages and steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and
+graduated; though--finely as she must respond--she met the smile but as
+she had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at that
+moment--which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
+charged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow--had not
+qualified her welcome; what had done this being much more the presence
+in the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman who had introduced
+him and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea-table.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to appoint the tea-hour,
+five o'clock on Sunday, for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired
+him, without a signature, "Come on Sunday _before_ tea--about a quarter
+of an hour, which will help us"; and he had arrived therefore
+scrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room and
+hadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily gathered,
+was to be, for the interval--not long but precious--engaged with an old
+servant, retired and pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
+was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to have
+the scrap of time, after the withdrawal of the footman, to themselves,
+and there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
+spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety of shades, it
+proclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice--that was
+what kept it noble--to Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful
+self-command. If he had his discretion she had her perfect manner,
+which was _her_ decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he had, to finish with the
+question of his delay, furthermore observed, Mrs. Stringham would have
+written to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so that it
+wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longer
+there.
+
+"Yes, we've known it."
+
+"And you continue to hear?"
+
+"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I mean Aunt Maud does."
+
+"Then you've recent news?"
+
+Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day or two I believe. But
+haven't _you?_"
+
+"No--I've heard nothing." And it was now that he felt how much he had
+to tell her. "I don't get letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder
+does." With which he added: "Then of course you know." He waited as if
+she would show what she knew; but she only showed in silence the dawn
+of a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for him
+to ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
+
+Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you _know?_"
+
+"How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himself
+stared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she
+slowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
+
+It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her
+lips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"
+
+"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had to
+think a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--so
+far as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"
+he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,
+what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," he
+explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
+
+She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so
+far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the
+wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
+unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect
+for misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felt
+her closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitude
+would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling
+uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew
+in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the
+quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too
+far, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
+the sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out
+himself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of
+everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would
+confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
+or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that she
+wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
+that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
+to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
+at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
+Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
+She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
+That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
+handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
+dreadful for you much of it must have been."
+
+He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
+first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
+I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
+little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"
+
+"She's dying."
+
+It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
+could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
+Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
+present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
+Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
+
+"I believe he's there now."
+
+"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
+
+She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
+otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
+him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
+
+"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
+
+"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
+
+"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
+
+"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
+three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
+gone. He had started I believe some days before."
+
+"And won't then by this time be back?"
+
+Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."
+
+"He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while she
+lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."
+
+"I think _she_ is," said Kate.
+
+It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from
+him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"
+
+"Well, she's after all my friend."
+
+It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least
+expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,
+his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.
+You _were_ sure of it."
+
+"Of course I was sure of it."
+
+And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however,
+presently broke. "If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what
+do you think of Lord Mark's?"
+
+She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
+
+"You haven't seen him?"
+
+"Not since he saw her."
+
+"You've known then of his seeing her?"
+
+"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"
+
+Kate wondered. "What rest?"
+
+"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't stand--it was what
+then took place that simply killed her."
+
+"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw
+that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't
+put on. "Mrs. Stringham hasn't said _that_."
+
+He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then taken
+place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. "The way
+it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
+all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
+
+"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him
+pursue.
+
+"One can see now that she was living by will--which was very much what
+you originally told me of her."
+
+"I remember. That was it."
+
+"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse
+was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke. He told her, the
+scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."
+
+Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know it!"
+
+"That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"
+Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last see
+him?"
+
+But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what made
+her worse?"
+
+He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he
+spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
+
+"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
+
+Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he
+continued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since of
+course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
+And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there not
+being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she
+need regard as a warning."
+
+She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_
+did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It was
+by the conviction she got from me."
+
+"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
+
+"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
+
+Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
+which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
+absolutely of what they would have called between them her
+straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
+ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
+suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
+responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
+for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
+impressions as it was our idea to give."
+
+"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.
+
+He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
+character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
+
+It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
+born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
+been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
+Mark's."
+
+Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
+
+"Why for you."
+
+"To tell her he lied?"
+
+"To tell her he's mistaken."
+
+Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at by
+Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to
+put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference
+in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,
+my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."
+
+"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"
+
+He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to
+be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense
+of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many
+things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to
+admiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear about
+it--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question
+of it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; but
+to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+
+"You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She had
+spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;
+but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she
+meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
+
+"I hadn't even a chance."
+
+Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it
+all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn't
+see you?"
+
+"Not after your friend had been with her."
+
+She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
+
+It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her face
+to the wall."
+
+This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now
+for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the
+minimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
+
+"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitively
+ill."
+
+"Well, that was what she had been before."
+
+"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don't
+pretend that she's not magnificent."
+
+"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
+
+He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"
+he wound up; "and there we are."
+
+His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more
+deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had
+fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,
+as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the
+same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to
+hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
+of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if
+her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had
+fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on
+Milly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.
+But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such
+things were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure
+on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general
+that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then
+that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"
+
+It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--so
+far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."
+
+"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
+
+"Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.
+She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."
+
+His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"
+
+"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I had
+wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."
+
+"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not just _because_ she was
+dying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know that
+seeing her you could judge."
+
+"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied
+you moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to
+it."
+
+She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that to
+convince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"
+
+"I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"
+
+Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"
+
+"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
+back afterwards."
+
+With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
+flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
+You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
+conscience?"
+
+"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
+how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
+it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
+remember what I say."
+
+Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
+pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."
+
+"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
+it matter?"
+
+It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
+relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
+from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
+gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
+Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
+different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
+
+"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
+moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
+say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
+to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
+she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
+truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
+for it."
+
+"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted
+_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been
+glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her
+from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it
+was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and
+clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear
+man--that she loves you with passion."
+
+"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
+
+"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
+then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
+once more to look at you?"
+
+"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
+longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
+first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
+taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
+another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
+Densher, "affected her."
+
+"Of course it affected her."
+
+Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
+for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
+know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
+wished herself to tell me so."
+
+"And she did tell you so?"
+
+"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
+
+"And as _you_ of course did."
+
+"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
+did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
+
+"You only went to oblige her?"
+
+"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
+
+"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
+
+"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
+
+"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
+stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
+
+"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
+
+"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
+such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
+added--"to see her die."
+
+"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
+
+"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
+
+He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
+visit--just like another."
+
+"Like another person?"
+
+"Like another visit."
+
+"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
+his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
+indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
+had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
+room?"
+
+"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
+glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
+inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
+the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what you
+originally said to me of her?"
+
+"Ah I've said so many things."
+
+"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.
+Well, she didn't."
+
+"So that it was really almost happy?"
+
+It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling
+how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone
+that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "I
+don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.
+For it would be worth it for us."
+
+"Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke
+again abruptly. "She'll recover."
+
+"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
+
+She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of her
+feeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having been
+misled."
+
+She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would
+have rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and her
+strength."
+
+"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"
+
+He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given
+it up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."
+
+"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was ever
+alienated."
+
+"I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."
+
+"But she was ill."
+
+"That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--during
+the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no
+difference with her."
+
+"She would still have received you?"
+
+"She would still have received me."
+
+"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"
+
+"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"Because you've told her?"
+
+"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a
+person who does see."
+
+Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious.
+You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you
+needn't be afraid."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
+
+Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked
+five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge
+silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not
+soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. "Well, it's all most
+wonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign her
+friend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
+this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming
+water. "You'll have some?"
+
+He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their old
+law, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
+done it!"
+
+"Humbugged her?"
+
+"Squared her. You've pleased her."
+
+Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something
+else, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a brute then I must
+be!"
+
+"A brute--?"
+
+"To have pleased so many people."
+
+"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please
+_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What I
+don't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "is
+what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you
+up for days and days, what brought her back to you?"
+
+She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him
+ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going
+into it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
+back. His visit, his presence there did it."
+
+"He brought her back then to life."
+
+"Well, to what I saw."
+
+"And by interceding for you?"
+
+"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."
+
+Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
+
+"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak of
+her."
+
+Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
+
+"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"
+
+"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
+
+"He understood," said Densher.
+
+"But understood what?"
+
+He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."
+
+"Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing.
+"But how did he convince her?"
+
+Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."
+
+He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "The
+great thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," she
+continued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."
+
+"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
+
+"Well, at peace with you."
+
+"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.
+
+"The peace of having loved."
+
+He raised his eyes to her. "Is _that_ peace?"
+
+"Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound
+up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_
+she wanted."
+
+Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority
+that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look
+at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he
+intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so
+take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think it
+hideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point of
+the word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."
+
+"Oh!" he only again murmured.
+
+She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came
+to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and
+enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing
+that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that
+knowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
+"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but she
+insisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."
+
+
+II
+
+He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this
+inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but
+interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
+Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of
+the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his
+intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder
+alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate
+gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them
+was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him
+to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had
+fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard
+fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to
+his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare
+alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been
+uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,
+and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she
+resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my
+dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to
+leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this
+extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the
+protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their
+tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their
+hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his
+scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed
+for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been
+entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had been
+at one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come back
+to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the
+fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic
+turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.
+Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an
+awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he
+marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the
+fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was
+but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for
+consideration, melted into it and out of sight.
+
+He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of the
+remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice
+had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of
+their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not
+sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that
+were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without
+her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish
+them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking
+place had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him from
+poor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they would
+have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the
+scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by which
+she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the
+memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him for
+unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the
+guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth
+in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She
+treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
+and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness
+with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches
+to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;
+it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile
+to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,
+he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freely
+for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.
+Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a
+week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.
+Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him
+on--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had
+private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
+others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of
+candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely
+sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
+himself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not false
+that he _had_ been through a mill.
+
+It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to
+him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I
+want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"
+his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was
+with him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even if
+it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just
+brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her
+in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in
+the world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest
+reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two
+or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--two
+and a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now
+that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn
+of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that
+when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come
+up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
+queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He
+liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to
+himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met
+_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than
+her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy
+her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course
+the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which
+he was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have
+come about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be free
+with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being
+alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had
+been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in
+fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy
+moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed
+herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to the
+end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all
+to his help.
+
+"You simply couldn't stand it?"
+
+"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.
+
+"Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;
+luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--men
+haven't, in many relations, the courage of women."
+
+"They haven't the courage of women."
+
+"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come away
+for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."
+
+Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behaviour
+since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--he
+couldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy
+would have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was
+Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothing
+but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth
+she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that
+compromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as a
+change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even
+without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal
+it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for
+all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.
+Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,
+shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
+leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.
+She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but this
+was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had
+taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as
+already dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable way
+to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited
+her, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;
+which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
+interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have
+nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious
+of her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
+for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in
+London while the pain went on--what would that do but make his days
+impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by some
+art about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed.
+"What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
+it? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment may
+be--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'm
+good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." He
+consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly
+about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be
+guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The
+days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the
+suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was
+the taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottom
+of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that
+if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just
+for that reason.
+
+She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle
+enough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insist
+on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was
+thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one
+better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together
+that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in
+the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_
+stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't for
+Densher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.
+It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came
+to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in
+particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
+as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed
+the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he
+couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
+might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the
+family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl
+must have wanted to live.
+
+"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with
+everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if
+it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"
+
+Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly
+giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have
+been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had
+her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,
+and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about
+them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to
+herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,
+the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep
+it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so
+naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its
+vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
+shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she
+was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully
+silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,
+in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object
+clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the
+case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make
+him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had
+been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud
+by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had
+let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received
+on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so
+perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of
+princely state.
+
+Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,
+all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth
+of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and the
+situation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite London
+gossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at Lancaster
+Gate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
+the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He
+himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the
+page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation
+inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half
+understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding
+himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these
+moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
+and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He
+had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious
+of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
+lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gathered
+all--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of their
+associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far
+as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the
+essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too
+beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
+sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherently
+express. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder's
+faith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
+scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence
+within--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their association
+deepened by it, they turned together away.
+
+That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of a
+week the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morning
+with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to
+gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a
+haunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but the
+degree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his new
+aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he
+hadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; it
+was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.
+There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plain
+honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper
+corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year
+was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the
+still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked
+empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep
+browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks
+lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it
+fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and
+then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a
+telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,
+for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
+to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion
+of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made
+his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
+for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a
+good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich
+impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
+later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of
+their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be
+reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he
+had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at
+hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller
+now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he
+was graver as he lingered and looked out.
+
+Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if
+she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that
+was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,
+even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return
+to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
+begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might
+be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with
+ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,
+other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special
+danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he
+had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all
+that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.
+The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
+place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the
+days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This
+and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over
+the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--for
+they really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness of
+their prime. It was to all intents however this very reference that
+showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward
+him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
+nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him
+afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he
+certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,
+at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these for
+instance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's
+eyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
+from America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundays
+ago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from
+Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got it
+the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune
+of the moment.
+
+Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred to
+him, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect produced
+for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much
+intensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of
+the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of
+response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't
+possibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she had
+beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of
+studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.
+Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were living
+under; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,
+distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by her
+own air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herself
+though it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,
+could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of her
+superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alone
+that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming
+courage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he had
+presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined
+him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her
+hand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that he
+wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he
+should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
+whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in high
+happiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing at
+the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only
+make-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that they
+couldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering at
+no point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished the
+present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great
+wintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.
+
+"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,
+we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not to
+wait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't you
+see?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my
+impatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."
+
+"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,
+though she had listened to him without confusion.
+
+"To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce it
+as done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. We
+shall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
+wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a
+bad dream."
+
+She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought at
+his call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dear
+man, what has happened to you?"
+
+"Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.
+Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I am
+that you must have me."
+
+He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also
+not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, with
+her clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, you
+know, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've been
+going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"
+
+It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,
+upon my soul--!"
+
+"I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where I
+was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for
+_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only
+right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't
+think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talked
+her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
+to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He
+had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--which
+was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood
+everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,
+the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of all
+her strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really
+_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he
+could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he
+only looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "You
+do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to
+me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in
+hearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"
+
+"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.
+
+"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that case
+wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I
+don't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with your
+moral certainty."
+
+By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. The
+point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he
+recognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
+
+"You've not an idea?"
+
+"I've not an idea."
+
+"I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd go
+home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an
+idea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.
+There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meeting
+you."
+
+If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he
+could but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in high
+passion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made it
+all out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,
+and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, and
+his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her
+lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but
+that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to
+something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
+she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,
+between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,
+when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she
+leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
+irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an
+advantage with his passion now.
+
+
+III
+
+He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
+"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
+her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
+return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
+had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
+preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
+Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
+night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
+first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
+with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
+quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
+him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
+next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
+wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
+distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
+hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
+sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
+difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
+and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
+other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
+and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
+monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
+the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
+him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
+his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
+for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
+event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of
+convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
+stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
+Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
+determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
+doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
+commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
+life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
+another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
+his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
+felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
+state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
+Christmas day.
+
+Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
+certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
+final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
+Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
+urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
+once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
+sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
+earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
+reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
+dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
+walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
+to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
+before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
+mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
+assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
+drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
+for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
+enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
+his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
+Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
+back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
+and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
+himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
+that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
+that what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness
+who had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in his
+presence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of his
+consciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on the
+spot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He became
+aware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the brougham
+had a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to his
+knowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
+nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the face
+that, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely have
+noticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
+Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,
+presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearly
+getting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--only
+Mrs. Lowder was with him.
+
+It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher again
+delayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred to
+him. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a case
+of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,
+might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this event
+she might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had had
+the effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range of
+the window. It wasn't there he had wished to see her; yet if she _was_
+there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
+made out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,
+with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a
+conscious face from behind the clear plate of a café in Venice. The
+great glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with the
+window down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,
+none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could
+occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedly
+remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as
+his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched
+the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by
+Kate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for
+the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
+young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the
+disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more
+than he had looked from his bench at his café. Densher was thinking
+that _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was
+thinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--more
+ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of
+the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,
+associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside
+Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient
+identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and
+Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_
+wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with
+presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the
+brougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
+word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her
+passage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; you
+needn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the
+steps.
+
+"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not come
+to learn."
+
+"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "to
+Lancaster Gate."
+
+"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was
+attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and
+he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
+functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and
+that yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"
+
+He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_
+had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallest
+hesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."
+
+"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."
+
+"Yes--folded them."
+
+It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and
+she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it's
+more true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."
+
+He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words
+fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread them
+the wider."
+
+"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"
+
+"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,
+that did a little warn her off.
+
+"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled to
+direct news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise I
+shouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"
+
+He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of
+the brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching him
+moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest.
+"Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just
+now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they
+stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage
+might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,
+understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
+you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the
+image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.
+It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
+exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since the
+night before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper
+reserve.
+
+But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I should
+otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"
+Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
+with which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dear
+friend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be
+still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Or
+wouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with
+me _tête-à-tête?_"
+
+It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making the
+difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather
+mystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall
+you mind if I don't tell you at once?"
+
+"Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you
+needn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of all
+days, I shall otherwise sit there alone."
+
+Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
+
+"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs. Lowder, "is spending her
+Christmas in the bosom of her more immediate family."
+
+He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his face might show. "You
+mean she has left you?"
+
+Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the enquiry with a
+consciousness in which he saw a reflexion of events. He was made sure
+by it, even at the moment and as he had never been before, that since
+he had known these two women no confessed nor commented tension, no
+crisis of the cruder sort would really have taken form between them:
+which was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered her boat. The
+situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's present expression lighted up by
+contrast that superficial smoothness; which afterwards, with his time
+to think of it, was to put before him again the art, the particular
+gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed, so intimately familiar
+for him, as her talent for life. The peace, within a day or two--since
+his seeing her last--had clearly been broken; differences, deep down,
+kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as deep, had been shaken to
+the surface by some exceptional jar; with which, in addition, he felt
+Lord Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season vaguely
+associated. The talent for life indeed, it at the same time struck him,
+would probably have shown equally in the breach, or whatever had
+occurred; Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a strain rather than a
+stroke. Of these quick thoughts, at all events, that lady was already
+abreast. "She went yesterday morning--and not with my approval, I don't
+mind telling you--to her sister: Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean,
+who lives somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs--that I
+should have to say such things to-day!--are a constant worry; so that
+Kate, in consequence--well, of events!--has simply been called in. My
+own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with _such_ events she need have,
+in her situation, next to nothing to do."
+
+"But she differed with you?"
+
+"She differed with me. And when Kate differs with you--!"
+
+"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point in the scale of hypocrisy
+at which he could ask himself why a little more or less should signify.
+Besides, with the intention he had had he _must_ know. Kate's move, if
+he didn't know, might simply disconcert him; and of being disconcerted
+his horror was by this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
+allude to events at all calamitous."
+
+"No--only horrid and vulgar."
+
+"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered in
+free speech to him a momentary balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I
+suppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."
+
+"Oh!" said Densher again.
+
+"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marian
+has shrieked for help."
+
+Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromised
+for an instant with his discretion. "Come upon her--for money?"
+
+"Oh for that of course always. But, at _this_ blessed season, for
+refuge, for safety: for God knows what. He's _there_, the brute. And
+Kate's with them. And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the
+steps, "is her Christmas."
+
+She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer.
+"Yours then is after all rather better."
+
+"It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But why
+do I talk of _our_ troubles? Come if you can."
+
+He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
+
+"And now--I dare say--you'll go to church?"
+
+She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by way
+of sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little more
+to the purpose than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
+finishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself to
+all appearance receiving her hint as happy. "Why yes--I think I will":
+after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had opened
+from within, he was free to turn his back. He heard the door, behind
+him, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another direction
+than his own.
+
+He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he
+was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the
+south. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
+there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally
+talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing was
+open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the
+influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that
+possessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everything
+else, an awful sound--what were they, a thousand times over, but his
+own? His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hour
+longer taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would have
+held his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just lied
+to Mrs. Lowder--a term it perversely eased him to keep using--even more
+than was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, in
+such a state of his nerves, _could_ he go?--he pulled up short again,
+as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And
+yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. He
+was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he
+bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He
+had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before
+it. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really--as it
+struck him--consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid
+service--the flocking crowd told of it--which glittered and resounded,
+from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of
+organ and choir. It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of a
+discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory in
+short, to make him right, would do.
+
+
+IV
+
+The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from an
+early hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
+gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in
+Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt
+independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
+achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club
+library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,
+closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the
+night. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thing
+he did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,
+he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
+He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to
+trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return
+with a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face with
+Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that
+his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent
+prepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,
+counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of
+his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp
+and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen
+her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's
+pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied
+ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as
+the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a
+still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with
+her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.
+Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
+flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
+Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
+stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
+best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
+was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
+stranger in it than she.
+
+A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
+from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
+the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
+for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
+case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
+curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
+circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
+florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
+mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
+Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
+Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
+blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
+of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
+asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
+having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
+reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
+him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
+He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
+him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
+sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
+the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
+might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
+wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
+anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
+make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
+is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
+what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
+took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
+she was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made
+for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
+same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
+companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
+assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
+her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
+her and how above all must she not feel them?
+
+Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
+tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
+the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
+left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
+and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
+So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
+conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
+nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
+be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
+her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
+reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
+explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
+gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
+It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
+did tell me, so suddenly come here."
+
+"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
+firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
+He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
+door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
+what _you_ mean."
+
+"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
+after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
+that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
+But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
+taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
+and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
+Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
+bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
+stay."
+
+Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
+he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"
+
+"No--I've had no telegram."
+
+She wondered. "But not a letter--?"
+
+"Not from Mrs. Stringham--no." He failed again however to develop
+this--for which her forbearance from another question gave him
+occasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confronted
+with her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that she
+respected this impulse she made her enquiry different. "Should you like
+to go out to her--to Mrs. Stringham?"
+
+About that at least he was clear. "Not at all. She's alone, but she's
+very capable and very courageous. Besides--!" He had been going on, but
+he dropped.
+
+"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembers
+Eugenio."
+
+She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender;
+and he showed equally every reason to assent. "One remembers him
+indeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value to
+her--he's capable of anything. What I was going to say," he went on,
+"is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive."
+
+On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. "Mr.
+Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly's
+affairs--her first trustee, I suppose--had just got there at Mrs.
+Stringham's last writing."
+
+"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me--I mean the last
+time before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said,
+"they'll do."
+
+"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as if it wasn't what each
+was most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that.
+"But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning had
+taken you to Sir Luke?"
+
+"Oh something else--which I'll presently tell you. It's what made me
+instantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. But
+in a minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at seeing you in
+this place." He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectly
+still. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with
+his back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confined
+himself to his point. "Is it anything very bad that has brought you?"
+
+He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; so
+that, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. "Do you
+mean, if I may ask, that _she_, dying--?" Her face, wondering, pressed
+it more than her words.
+
+"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said. "What has come to me
+is what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting
+you know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me last
+night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And
+he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her
+as mechanical.
+
+She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went
+with her. "You didn't want to come?"
+
+"It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if it
+had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,
+I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and
+portentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for my
+happiness."
+
+This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it.
+"You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."
+
+"Oh--well enough!"
+
+But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."
+
+"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
+so simple even as that."
+
+She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
+with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
+still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
+at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
+then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
+explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
+_haven't_ decided what to do."
+
+She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
+say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
+Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
+you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
+part of the room to another.
+
+"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
+
+It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
+you've had to come?"
+
+"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
+Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
+whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
+And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
+little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."
+
+"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
+suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
+a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
+as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
+oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
+
+She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
+very awful?"
+
+"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
+you find my idea--"
+
+He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
+impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
+anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
+
+It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
+making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
+turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
+recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
+storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
+Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
+might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
+the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
+stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
+possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
+The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
+anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
+she'd understand.
+
+It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
+instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
+the world like her?"
+
+"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
+never any one in the world like her."
+
+Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
+unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
+she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
+communication is?"
+
+"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.
+
+"Do you mean a letter?"
+
+"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."
+
+Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
+
+"Oh perfectly."
+
+It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
+next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"
+
+"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
+very short ones."
+
+"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
+enough if you're sure you remember."
+
+"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
+in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
+Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then she
+once copied me something."
+
+"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of
+your reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as if
+precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:
+"And the writing has its usual look?"
+
+Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's
+beautiful."
+
+"Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further
+remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's
+possible."
+
+"Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's
+what I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle
+vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
+
+She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his
+pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the
+room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. He
+looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid
+London street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--as
+he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of
+the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness
+that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of
+his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so
+driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him
+to say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the
+inanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
+minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly
+presented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to
+things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try
+to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she
+again took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"
+
+It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by an
+hour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But my
+eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I
+recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
+
+"One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however was
+so singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this while
+you _hadn't_ touched it."
+
+"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching
+nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took
+hold of it."
+
+"Then where is it?"
+
+"Oh I have it here."
+
+"And you've brought it to show me?"
+
+"I've brought it to show you."
+
+So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,
+almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.
+She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his
+own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought.
+"But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
+
+"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."
+
+She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable
+child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You
+haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you
+require don't come from your document itself." Then as he answered
+nothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"
+
+"I haven't read it."
+
+She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"
+
+Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and
+again he was before her. "By telling me _this_. It's something, you
+know, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."
+
+She was vague. "The other day?"
+
+"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he
+doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What
+does his having been with her there mean?"
+
+"Of whom are you talking?"
+
+"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
+
+"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
+
+"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;
+and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the
+question."
+
+Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any
+hour."
+
+"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his
+second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a
+matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact
+remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
+
+Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly
+than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked
+just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something
+back."
+
+"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.
+All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a
+connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was
+practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what
+has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
+for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
+
+
+V
+
+Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
+down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
+that I must have told him?"
+
+She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
+he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
+anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
+What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
+
+"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
+
+She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
+allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
+really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
+often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
+him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
+knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
+stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
+her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
+to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
+none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
+Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"
+
+"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--since
+when?"
+
+"Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And then
+she explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--like
+Aunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn't
+after all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,
+she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for
+the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."
+
+"You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"
+
+"Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfully
+added--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."
+
+He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,
+"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"
+
+"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has
+some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
+let--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of
+money, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at."
+
+Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything? In spite of
+what?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to
+do that sort of thing."
+
+"To try to get money?"
+
+"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has
+had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days'
+notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud,
+who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come then
+to Lancaster Gate--to sleep at least--till, like all the world, you go
+to the country.' He was to have gone to the country--I think to
+Matcham--yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was."
+
+Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement,
+beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. "Told you, you mean, so that
+you needn't leave the house?"
+
+"Yes--so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was
+part of my reason."
+
+"And _was_ it part of your reason?"
+
+"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here--as I knew there would
+be--without it. So that," she said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad
+I am here: even if for all the good I do--!" She implied however that
+that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as you tell me, get off then to
+Matcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going this
+afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable--and it's really, I'm
+bound to say, quite amiable of him--is that he has declined to leave
+Aunt Maud, as I've been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone.
+If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it's a _procédé_ that won't
+please her less. It's small wonder therefore that she insists, on a
+dull day, in driving him about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
+"what may happen between them; but that's all I see in it."
+
+"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher returned,
+"something that, while I'm with you at least, I always take from you as
+the truth itself."
+
+She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the
+sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that
+seemed to show how fine she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
+everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and,
+yielding to the impulse to which he hadn't yielded just before, he laid
+his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
+little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled
+things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he
+applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an
+instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all
+passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn't
+prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was
+enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid
+connexion and as she made it sat down again. "I've been trying to place
+exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were
+in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me--spoke out."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled round.
+
+"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it, by having refused
+to meet him as he wanted--as he pressed--I plead guilty to being so.
+Would you have liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
+would have kept him from going?"
+
+It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you know he was going?"
+
+"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that--even if it doesn't fit your
+strange suppositions--I should have given him just the same answer if I
+had known. If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust upon
+you, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which I
+find a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," she
+continued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
+
+"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the next
+moment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."
+
+"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he was unfortunately the
+one person we hadn't deceived, I can't contradict you."
+
+"No--of course not. But _why_," Densher still risked, "was he
+unfortunately the one person--? He's not really a bit intelligent."
+
+"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in
+anything so unnatural as--all things considered and when it came to the
+point--my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his
+conviction he acted."
+
+Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's conviction as if it
+were a blot on the face of nature. "Do you mean because you had
+appeared to him to have encouraged him?"
+
+"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where _were_ we?"
+
+"'Where'--?"
+
+"You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn't mattered. What
+mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
+that he has had all along his impression of _you_. You can't help it,"
+she said, "but you're after all--well, yourself."
+
+"As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and
+kept myself there--what," Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
+
+"Your being in Venice and liking to be--which is never on any one's
+part a monstrosity--was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite
+capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
+
+"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before
+what you call his second descent, hadn't convinced him--all the more
+that my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back convinced." And
+then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: "I mean after he
+had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
+
+"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
+
+"That you were sincere. That it was _her_ you loved." It came to him
+from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found
+himself yet again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return here," she
+meanwhile continued, "had it from him. And that's why you're now so
+well with Aunt Maud."
+
+He only for a minute looked out in silence--after which he came away.
+"And why _you_ are." It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect
+between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps
+rather if it hadn't been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp
+because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
+so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while
+they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of
+everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word
+might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he
+drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his
+waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her
+eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place
+and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and
+unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he
+thus finally spoke of was a different matter. "Did I understand from
+Mrs. Lowder that your father's in the house?"
+
+If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was
+not to take her so now. "In the house, yes. But we needn't fear his
+interruption"--she spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in bed."
+
+"Do you mean with illness?"
+
+She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill. He's a marvel. He's
+only--endless."
+
+Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you with him?"
+
+"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. "By our
+making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him--and for
+Marian too."
+
+"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't--could I?--not have
+come."
+
+"No, you couldn't not have come."
+
+"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?"
+
+Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day, put ugly words into my
+mouth. I've enough of my trouble without it."
+
+"I know--I know!" He spoke in instant pleading. "It's all only that I'm
+as troubled _for_ you. When did he come?"
+
+"Three days ago--after he hadn't been near her for more than a year,
+after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her
+existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in."
+
+Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such want--?"
+
+"No, not of food, of necessary things--not even, so far as his
+appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he
+was--well, in terror."
+
+"In terror of what?"
+
+"I don't know. Of somebody--of something. He wants, he says, to be
+quiet. But his quietness is awful."
+
+She suffered, but he couldn't not question. "What does he do?"
+
+It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
+
+Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. "What _has_ he done?"
+
+It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face.
+Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. "If you love
+me--now--don't ask me about father."
+
+He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because I love you that I'm
+here. It's because I love you that I've brought you this." And he drew
+from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
+
+But her eyes only--though he held it out--met the offer. "Why you've
+not broken the seal!"
+
+"If I had broken the seal--exactly--I should know what's within. It's
+for _you_ to break the seal that I bring it."
+
+She looked--still not touching the thing--inordinately grave. "To break
+the seal of something to you from _her?_"
+
+"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by whatever you think
+of it."
+
+"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you yourself think?" And then
+as he didn't answer: "It seems to me _I_ think you know. You have your
+instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
+
+Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an
+accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to
+face. "I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it
+out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour." He held up
+his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. "This thing
+had been timed."
+
+"For Christmas Eve?"
+
+"For Christmas Eve."
+
+Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season of gifts!" After which,
+as he said nothing, she went on: "And had been written, you mean, while
+she could write, and kept to _be_ so timed?"
+
+Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn't reply. "What do
+_you_ mean by the proof?"
+
+"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved. But I won't," she
+said, "break your seal."
+
+"You positively decline?"
+
+"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly: "I know without."
+
+He had another pause. "And what is it you know?"
+
+"That she announces to you she has made you rich."
+
+His pause this time was longer. "Left me her fortune?"
+
+"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But money to a large
+amount. I don't care," Kate went on, "to know how much." And her
+strange smile recurred. "I trust her."
+
+"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
+
+"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought. "That wouldn't, on my
+part, have been playing fair with her. And I did," she added, "play
+fair."
+
+Densher, who had believed her--he couldn't help it--continued, holding
+his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had
+somehow passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and that's why--since
+we talk of proofs--I want to give _you_ one. I've wanted to let you
+see--and in preference even to myself--something I feel as sacred."
+
+She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
+
+"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can
+peculiarly recognise--"
+
+"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he dropped.
+
+"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice
+of an act of splendid generosity."
+
+"And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?"
+
+He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol of my attitude."
+
+She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraid
+of yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to do
+yourself violence."
+
+"So it is then you meet me?"
+
+She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand
+still stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"
+
+"I absolutely desire you to take it."
+
+"To do what I like with it?"
+
+"Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon my
+making the point--between you and me."
+
+She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."
+Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes
+again rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
+before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."
+
+"Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.
+
+"Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearer
+to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing
+into the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: his
+arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,
+with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'll
+have it all," Kate said, "from New York."
+
+It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that
+she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as she
+had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need
+recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the
+prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a
+note from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed him
+by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he
+had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,
+and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale's
+copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the
+gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the
+girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act on
+receipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to the
+bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted in
+strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what
+Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair
+since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little
+vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had
+at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention
+of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when
+they met again the subject was made present to them--at all events till
+some flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutely
+expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
+often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of
+February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's
+stay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt
+which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at
+Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of
+them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she
+really despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with my
+own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
+_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proud
+as the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--having
+nothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. She
+calls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holiday
+to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the
+scullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
+not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quite
+decent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has been
+good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I
+don't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one
+hoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,
+after all, you clever creature, what that was."
+
+It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that
+Densher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, after
+Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on
+his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent
+was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then
+acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been
+painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of
+which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite
+high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.
+Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on
+her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was
+prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger
+passed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he
+would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away
+westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in
+this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
+which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
+answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
+again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
+post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
+question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
+companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
+a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
+might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
+current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
+it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
+that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
+as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
+same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
+even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
+wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
+image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
+bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
+several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
+was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
+say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
+him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
+within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
+these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
+none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
+publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
+good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
+to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
+view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
+delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
+Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
+in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
+and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
+world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
+that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
+impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness
+of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't
+undo.
+
+Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of
+arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which
+they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made
+everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.
+Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered
+alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on
+her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for
+them at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time an
+appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--though
+he didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, for
+a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster
+Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
+It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
+which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of
+cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way
+of a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to
+helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion
+that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful
+warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under
+their feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.
+He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
+Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying
+his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she
+admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in
+the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--she
+was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about
+misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and all
+unconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that they
+didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point
+for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the
+river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was
+mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together
+to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never
+been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--he
+scarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk of
+what they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as
+if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They
+concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;
+they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come
+of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
+off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their
+change--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being so
+damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
+point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What
+danger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had long
+since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he
+asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
+
+Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being the
+interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such
+different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a
+difference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;
+she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been
+more agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: he
+felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which he
+even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at
+all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people
+she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have
+something fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top of
+a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a
+person she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for the
+so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,
+what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at
+once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
+She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck
+him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,
+but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the
+impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
+She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out
+of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look
+with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
+prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
+That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
+sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
+to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
+really _do_ anything it would be another matter."
+
+He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
+a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
+her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
+might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
+objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
+consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
+day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
+contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
+are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
+actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
+to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
+something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
+thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
+precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
+thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
+he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
+left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
+the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
+of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
+handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
+handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
+else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
+words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
+letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
+only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
+part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
+given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
+about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
+It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
+of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save
+it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice
+of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual
+ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he
+cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and
+guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the
+inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,
+should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which
+they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one
+with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't
+complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.
+
+The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion
+we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.
+This would have marked immediately the difference--had there been
+nothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their other
+terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been
+_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they
+had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,
+almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
+around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air
+in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in
+the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the
+way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil
+symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,
+she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these
+things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her
+after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of
+reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
+who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very
+prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your
+seal."
+
+She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long
+envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in
+another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--his
+belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had
+happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and
+it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any
+approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my
+intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
+as not mine."
+
+"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
+
+"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
+New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
+and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
+back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
+his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
+
+Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
+signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
+touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
+sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
+possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
+for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"
+
+"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
+_know_--!"
+
+"But you don't know," she said very gently.
+
+"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
+handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
+one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
+the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."
+
+She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
+mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
+
+Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
+"Well yes--something of that sort."
+
+"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
+spoils the beauty?"
+
+"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
+confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
+received it."
+
+"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
+
+"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
+if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."
+
+"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
+
+He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
+air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
+wanted--in so good a case--to test you."
+
+She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
+good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
+"has ever been known."
+
+"The better the case then the better the test!"
+
+"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
+
+"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
+sooner."
+
+"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
+you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
+
+"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
+correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
+
+She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
+Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"
+
+He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"
+
+"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not
+accepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such
+cases? Not taking up the bequest."
+
+"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My
+asking you to join with me in doing so."
+
+Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her
+less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
+
+"How? By a single word."
+
+"And what word?"
+
+"Your consent to my giving up."
+
+"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."
+
+"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.
+
+She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I
+_don't_ consent?"
+
+"Yes. I do nothing."
+
+"That, as I understand, is accepting."
+
+Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
+
+"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
+
+"I won't touch the money."
+
+It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
+"Who then in such an event _will?_"
+
+"Any one who wants or who can."
+
+Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
+time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
+you?"
+
+"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
+you."
+
+"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
+
+"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
+he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
+must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
+you 'have' me."
+
+"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
+thoroughly up to it!"
+
+"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
+as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.
+Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
+
+It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
+and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
+dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
+in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
+each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
+before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
+said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
+further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
+them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
+air.
+
+There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
+intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."
+
+She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
+she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
+absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
+interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
+done for you?"
+
+"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"
+
+"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"
+
+"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
+Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."
+
+She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
+facts be published?"
+
+"'Published'?"--he winced.
+
+"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
+
+"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
+
+It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
+insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
+help you to renounce?"
+
+"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
+that the amount of money's not small."
+
+"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
+inevitably not be meagre."
+
+Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
+was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."
+
+He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
+of them. "Stupendous?"
+
+"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
+face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
+uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but that
+made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really
+is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're
+afraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
+indeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in
+love with her."
+
+"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
+
+She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for
+the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.
+But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she
+died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you
+_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_
+us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "I
+used to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove.
+Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached.
+They cover us."
+
+"They cover us," Densher said.
+
+"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done
+for you."
+
+His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,
+his tears. "Do I understand then--?"
+
+"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll
+marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
+consent _you_ don't."
+
+"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of
+her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every
+penny."
+
+Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare.
+"Precisely--so that I must choose."
+
+"You must choose."
+
+Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,
+while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath
+come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save
+you from my choice."
+
+"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
+
+"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your
+surrender of that."
+
+"What is it then?"
+
+"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
+
+"Oh--her memory!"
+
+"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't
+be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her
+memory's your love. You _want_ no other."
+
+He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then
+he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
+
+"As we were?"
+
+"As we were."
+
+But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We
+shall never be again as we were!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Wings of The Dove, by Henry James</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume II
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2009 [EBook #30059]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOLUME II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Adcock. Special thanks to The Internet
+Archive: American Libraries, and Project Gutenberg Australia
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">BY</h3>
+<h2 align="center">HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">VOLUME II</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">NEW YORK</h3>
+<h2 align="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h2>
+
+<h3 align="center">1909</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5 align="center">Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons</h5>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+
+
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK SIXTH</h2>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p>
+"I say, you know, Kate&mdash;you <i>did</i> stay!" had been
+Merton Densher's punctual remark on their adventure
+after they had, as it were, got out of it; an observation
+which she not less promptly, on her side, let
+him see that she forgave in him only because he was a
+man. She had to recognise, with whatever disappointment,
+that it was doubtless the most helpful he could
+make in this character. The fact of the adventure
+was flagrant between them; they had looked at each
+other, on gaining the street, as people look who have
+just rounded together a dangerous corner, and there
+was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
+to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal
+in her action. But the amount of light men <i>did</i>
+need!&mdash;Kate could have been eloquent at this moment
+about that. What, however, on his seeing more,
+struck him as most distinct in her was her sense that,
+reunited after his absence and having been now half
+the morning together, it behooved them to face without
+delay the question of handling their immediate
+future. That it would require some handling, that
+they should still have to deal, deal in a crafty manner,
+with difficulties and delays, was the great matter he
+had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
+consciousness of their personal need of each other.
+This need had had twenty minutes, the afternoon
+before, to find out where it stood, and the time was
+fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration.
+He had arrived at Euston at five, having wired
+her from Liverpool the moment he landed, and she
+had quickly decided to meet him at the station, whatever
+publicity might attend such an act. When he had
+praised her for it on alighting from his train she had
+answered frankly enough that such things should be
+taken at a jump. She didn't care to-day who saw her,
+and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow, inevitably,
+she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
+would become a baser creature, a creature of
+alarms and precautions. It was none the less for to-morrow
+at an early hour that she had appointed their
+next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
+obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six
+o'clock. She had given, with imprecations, her reason&mdash;people
+to tea, eternally, and a promise to Aunt
+Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot
+and had suggested the National Gallery for the morning
+quite as with an idea that had ripened in expectancy.
+They might be seen there too, but nobody
+would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in
+the refreshment-room to which they had adjourned,
+they would incur the notice but, at the worst, of the
+unacquainted. They would "have something" there
+for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
+come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
+</p>
+<p>
+He found himself on English soil with all sorts of
+feelings, but he hadn't quite faced having to reckon
+with a certain ruefulness in regard to that subject as
+one of the strongest. He was aware later on that there
+were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby
+it actually rather smote him, for want of preparation
+and assurance, that he had nowhere to "take" his
+love. He had taken it thus, at Euston&mdash;and on
+Kate's own suggestion&mdash;into the place where people
+had beer and buns, and had ordered tea at a small
+table in the corner; which, no doubt, as they were
+lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It
+perhaps did as well as her simply driving with him
+to the door of his lodging, which had had to figure as
+the sole device of his own wit. That wit, the truth
+was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision
+that once at his door they would have to hang back.
+She would have to stop there, wouldn't come in with
+him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able to
+ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
+deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced
+stage, respect for her: that again was all that
+was clear except the further fact that it was maddening.
+Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
+single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for
+him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head
+as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting
+sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow&mdash;he
+scarce knew what to call it&mdash;a fifth wheel to
+the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an
+outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make
+happiness less. They had met again for happiness,
+and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment
+or two, how he must keep watch on anything that
+really menaced that boon. If Kate had consented to
+drive away with him and alight at his house there
+would probably enough have occurred for them, at
+the foot of his steps, one of those strange instants between
+man and woman that blow upon the red spark,
+the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
+She would have shaken her head&mdash;oh sadly,
+divinely&mdash;on the question of coming in; and he,
+though doing all justice to her refusal, would have yet
+felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible
+word at such a time could reach. This would have
+meant the suspicion, the dread of the shadow, of an
+adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case that
+the scant minutes took another turn and that by the
+half-hour she did in spite of everything contrive to
+spend with him Kate showed so well how she could
+deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
+him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to
+leave her, now and henceforth, to treat them in her
+own way.
+</p><p>
+She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their
+early convenience, one of the great museums; and
+indeed with such happy art that his fully seeing where
+she had placed him hadn't been till after he left her.
+His absence from her for so many weeks had had such
+an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had
+grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed,
+beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he
+had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He
+hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was
+on his way to say to her that really their mistake must
+end. Their mistake was to have believed that they
+<i>could hold out</i>&mdash;hold out, that is, not against Aunt
+Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and
+exasperated, made a man ill. He had known more
+than ever, on their separating in the court of the station,
+how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel
+from such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing
+that he had already suffered Kate to begin finely
+to apply antidotes and remedies and subtle sedatives.
+It had a vulgar sound&mdash;as throughout, in love, the
+names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were,
+compared with love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was
+as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself
+"put off," though it would take him of course a
+day or two to see. His letters from the States had
+pleased whom it concerned, though not so much as he
+had meant they should; and he should be paid according
+to agreement and would now take up his money.
+It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he
+hadn't in the least come back flourishing a cheque-book;
+that new motive for bringing his mistress to
+terms he couldn't therefore pretend to produce. The
+ideal certainty would have been to be able to present
+a change of prospect as a warrant for the change of
+philosophy, and without it he should have to make
+shift but with the pretext of the lapse of time. The
+lapse of time&mdash;not so many weeks after all, she might
+always of course say&mdash;couldn't at any rate have
+failed to do something for him; and that consideration
+it was that had just now tided him over, all the more
+that he had his vision of what it had done personally
+for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour
+that almost scared him even in their small corner
+of the room at Euston&mdash;almost scared him because
+it just seemed to blaze at him that waiting was
+the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature
+he had originally seen; not yet had he felt so
+soundly safely sure. It was all there for him, playing
+on his pride of possession as a hidden master in a
+great dim church might play on the grandest organ.
+His final sense was that a woman couldn't be like
+that and then ask of one the impossible.
+</p><p>
+She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and
+so for the hour they had been able to float in the mere
+joy of contact&mdash;such contact as their situation in
+pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
+for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty
+small signs of unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate;
+so little could a decent interest in the interesting place
+presume to remind them of its claims. They had met
+there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
+with an equal want of invention and of style, at a
+railway-station; not again, either, in Kensington
+Gardens, which, they could easily and tacitly agree,
+would have had too much of the taste of their old
+frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning
+in the pictured halls, had been a variation; yet
+Densher had at the end of a quarter of an hour fully
+known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled
+him for their awkwardness, as if he had been
+watching it affect her. She might be as nobly charming
+as she liked, and he had seen nothing to touch her
+in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
+as those she herself <i>believed</i> it enough to appease him.
+She couldn't pretend she believed he
+would believe it enough to render her a like service.
+It wasn't enough for that purpose&mdash;she as good as
+showed him it wasn't. That was what he could be
+glad, by demonstration, to have brought her to. He
+would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
+the spot: "<i>Now</i> am I to understand you that you consider
+this sort of thing can go on?" It would have
+been open to her, no doubt, to reply that to have him
+with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
+still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in
+their yearning interval, was a sort of thing that he
+must allow her to have no quarrel about; but that
+would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport
+of her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they
+wanted; in spite of which indeed he scarce could have
+said how beautifully he mightn't once more have
+named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
+blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon
+seated themselves for better talk, and so they had remained
+a while, intimate and superficial. The immediate
+things to say had been many, for they hadn't
+exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them
+freely now, and Kate appeared quite to forget&mdash;which
+was prodigiously becoming to her&mdash;to look
+about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and
+try in vain, to remember what speech or what silence
+of his own, what natural sign of the eyes or accidental
+touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in the
+midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had
+got up, with inconsequence, as if to break the charm,
+though he wasn't aware of what he had done at the
+moment to make the charm a danger. She had
+patched it up agreeably enough the next minute by
+some odd remark about some picture, to which he
+hadn't so much as replied; it being quite independently
+of this that he had himself exclaimed on the
+dreadful closeness of the rooms. He had observed
+that they must go out again to breathe; and it was as
+if their common consciousness, while they passed
+into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely
+engaged together, had been startled and were trying
+to look natural. It was probably while they were so
+occupied&mdash;as the young man subsequently reconceived&mdash;that
+they had stumbled upon his little New
+York friend. He thought of her for some reason as
+little, though she was of about Kate's height, to which,
+any more than to any other felicity in his mistress, he
+had never applied the diminutive.
+</p><p>
+What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to
+him was the process by which he had become aware
+that Kate's acquaintance with her was greater than
+he had gathered. She had written of it in due course
+as a new and amusing one, and he had written back
+that he had met over there, and that he much liked,
+the young person; whereupon she had answered that
+he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the
+event, however, had not returned to that, and he had
+of course, with so many things to find out about, been
+otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's individual
+history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
+moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss
+Theales. They even went so far as to impose themselves
+as one of the groups of social phenomena that
+fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
+group in especial perhaps&mdash;the irrepressible, the
+supereminent young persons&mdash;his best pen was
+ready. Thus it was that there could come back to him
+in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with
+the American pair, the sense of a situation for which
+Kate hadn't wholly prepared him. Possibly indeed
+as marked as this was his recovered perception that
+preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly
+what, both yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having
+in hand. That appearance in fact, if he dwelt on it,
+so ministered to apprehension as to require some
+brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some
+extent, on their separating first from their hostesses
+and then from each other, by the aid of a long and
+rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office later,
+but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave
+himself as a pretext that he had eaten much too much.
+After Kate had asked him to put her into a cab&mdash;which,
+as an announced, a resumed policy on her
+part, he found himself deprecating&mdash;he stood a
+while by a corner and looked vaguely forth at his
+London. There was always doubtless a moment for
+the absentee recaptured&mdash;<i>the</i> moment, that of the
+reflux of the first emotion&mdash;at which it was beyond
+disproof that one was back. His full parenthesis was
+closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort,
+in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
+street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print
+that somehow managed to be crowded without being
+"fine." The grey, however, was more or less the blur
+of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
+there would be colour enough to come out. He was
+back, flatly enough, but back to possibilities and
+prospects, and the ground he now somewhat sightlessly
+covered was the act of renewed possession.
+</p><p>
+He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion,
+quite in the direction his little New York
+friend, in her restless ramble, had taken a day or two
+before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park;
+and though he moved further and faster he finally
+sat down, like Milly, from the force of thought. For
+him too in this position, be it added&mdash;and he might
+positively have occupied the same bench&mdash;various
+troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more
+yet said what he really wanted than Kate herself had
+found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple
+of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
+what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern
+them during these first hours but to hold each
+other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate
+was palpable, that there were at present more things
+rather than fewer between them. The explanation
+about the two ladies would be part of the lot, yet
+could wait with all the rest. They were not meanwhile
+certainly what most made him roam&mdash;the
+missing explanations weren't. That was what she
+had so often said before, and always with the effect of
+suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good
+cab." Their previous encounters, the times when they
+had reached in their stroll the south side of the park,
+had had a way of winding up with this special irrelevance.
+It was effectively what most divided them,
+for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been
+able to jump in with her. What did she think he
+wished to do to her?&mdash;it was a question he had had
+occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless&mdash;since,
+when it came to that, they didn't depend on
+cabs good or bad for the sense of union: its importance
+was less from the particular loss than as a kind
+of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness,
+under providence, had been great from the first, so
+far as joining him was concerned; and he was critical
+only because it had been still greater, even from the
+first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
+question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition
+of her appeal&mdash;had asked her once more what she
+supposed he wished to do. He recalled, on his bench
+in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy, funny and
+pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
+itself, while the usual hansom charged them,
+during which he felt himself, disappointed as he was,
+grimacing back at the superiority of her very "humour,"
+in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
+solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been
+at all events by that time made, and he should see
+what her choice in respect to it&mdash;a surprise as well as
+a relief&mdash;would do toward really simplifying. It
+meant either new help or new hindrance, though it
+took them at least out of the streets. And her naming
+this privilege had naturally made him ask if Mrs.
+Lowder knew of his return.
+</p><p>
+"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall
+speak to her now." And she had argued, as with
+rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be quite
+easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that
+I've margin surely for my mention of you. You'll
+come to see <i>her</i>, and she'll leave you with me; she'll
+show her good nature, and her lack of betrayed fear,
+in that. With her, you know, you've never broken,
+quite the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever.
+We're leaving town; it will be the end; just now
+therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask to-night," Kate
+had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me&mdash;my
+cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal&mdash;I'll
+make it all right."
+</p><p>
+He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering
+more about it now than he had wondered there
+in Brook Street. He repeated to himself that if it
+wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of
+muddle. This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his
+wonder for still other questions. Kate had really got
+off without meeting his little challenge about the
+terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her
+dear Milly, it was sensible, <i>was</i> somehow in the picture.
+Her dear Milly, popping up in his absence, occupied&mdash;he
+couldn't have said quite why he felt it&mdash;more
+of the foreground than one would have expected
+her in advance to find clear. She took up room, and it
+was almost as if room had been made for her. Kate
+had appeared to take for granted he would know why
+it had been made; but that was just the point. It was
+a foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion
+with Kate, scarce enjoyed a space to turn
+round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at the present
+juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened,
+if not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of
+her also that if she weren't a bore she'd be a convenience.
+It rolled over him of a sudden, after he had
+resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate
+had meant. The charming girl adored her&mdash;Densher
+had for himself made out that&mdash;and would protect,
+would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
+might take place, in other words, on her premises,
+which would remove them still better from the streets.
+<i>That</i> was an explanation which did hang together.
+It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
+their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend
+upon her. Yet this fact in turn would be accounted
+for by the need of more preliminaries. One
+of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
+at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that
+propriety.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It was extraordinary enough that he should actually
+be finding himself, when Thursday arrived, none so
+wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all the way to
+this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the
+end of a quarter of an hour. What she had begun
+with was her surprise at her appearing to have left
+him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
+parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or
+less together, and it wasn't even as if she had spent
+the interval in twisting and fitting them. She was
+bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with the
+general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough
+that if the American ladies themselves weren't to be
+squared, which was absurd, they fairly imposed the
+necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One couldn't
+say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll
+meet, please, whenever you'll let us, at your house;
+but we count on you to help us to keep it secret."
+They must in other terms inevitably speak to Aunt
+Maud&mdash;it would be of the last awkwardness to ask
+them not to: Kate had embraced all this in her choice
+of speaking first. What Kate embraced altogether
+was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
+perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her
+piece by piece than as receiving it in a steady light.
+He had always felt, however, that the more he asked
+of her the more he found her prepared, as he imaged
+it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once
+even before his absence: "You keep the key of the
+cupboard, and I foresee that when we're married
+you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
+that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar
+would be his diet, and the domestic arrangement so
+prefigured might have seemed already to prevail. The
+supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless,
+of a truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met
+in a manner his immediate requirements. If her explanations
+at any rate prompted questions the questions
+no more exhausted them than they exhausted
+her patience. And they were naturally, of the series,
+the simpler; as for instance in his taking it from her
+that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He
+frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
+possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really
+exhausted the charms of the open air and the crowd,
+some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional
+opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to
+me these two days as better than nothing. But if our
+friends are so accountable to this house of course
+there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail,
+thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was
+but too glad without more ado to point the moral.
+"Now I hope you see we can't work it anyhow."
+</p><p>
+If she laughed for this&mdash;and her spirits seemed
+really high&mdash;it was because of the opportunity that,
+at the hotel, he had most shown himself as enjoying.
+"Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that
+you hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was
+as beautifully good-humoured. "You might of course
+get used to her&mdash;you <i>will.</i> You're quite right&mdash;so
+long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
+lucidly, that the dear things couldn't <i>help</i>, simply as
+charming friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak
+to Aunt Maud, but they won't shut their doors to us:
+that would be another matter. A friend always helps&mdash;and
+she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham
+by this time out of the question; she had reduced it to
+Milly. "Besides, she particularly likes us. She particularly
+likes <i>you</i>. I say, old boy, make something of
+that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
+made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the
+best, they could work it; but there were certain of his
+remarks&mdash;those mostly of the sharper penetration&mdash;that
+it had been quite her practice from the first not
+formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the
+effect of them in ways less trite. This was what happened
+now: he didn't think in truth that she wasn't
+really minding. She took him up, none the less, on a
+minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but
+you see it's just what we do. What could be more
+lovely than this?"
+</p><p>
+It wasn't to torment him&mdash;that again he didn't
+believe; but he had to come to the house in some discomfort,
+so that he frowned a little at her calling it
+thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
+back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled
+and varnished, but he knew in his bones how little the
+very highest privileges of Lancaster Gate could ever
+be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in
+one of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged
+as a boudoir, but visibly unused&mdash;it defied
+familiarity&mdash;and furnished in the ugliest of blues.
+He had immediately looked with interest at the closed
+doors, and Kate had met his interest with the assurance
+that it was all right, that Aunt Maud did them
+justice&mdash;so far, that was, as this particular time was
+concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing
+to fear. But the fresh allusion to this that he
+had drawn from her acted on him now more directly,
+brought him closer still to the question. They <i>were</i>
+alone&mdash;it <i>was</i> all right: he took in anew the shut
+doors and the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of
+the great house. They connected themselves on the
+spot with something made doubly vivid in him by the
+whole present play of her charming strong will. What
+it amounted to was that he couldn't have her&mdash;hanged
+if he could!&mdash;evasive. He couldn't and he
+wouldn't&mdash;wouldn't have her inconvenient and
+elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself,
+fine as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted
+to keep her where their communications would be
+straight and easy and their intercourse independent.
+The effect of this was to make him say in a moment:
+"Will you take me just as I am?"
+</p><p>
+She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it&mdash;which
+qualified to his sense delightfully the strength
+of her will; and the pleasure he found in this was not
+the less for her breaking out after an instant into a
+strain that stirred him more than any she had ever
+used with him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure
+you I see my way&mdash;so don't spoil it: wait for me and
+give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only believe in
+me, and it will be beautiful."
+</p><p>
+He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing
+in her as if he didn't; but he had come back&mdash;and
+it all was upon him now&mdash;to seize her with a
+sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with
+him had made, as happily appeared, irresistible. He
+laid strong hands upon her to say, almost in anger,
+"Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she closed
+her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but
+that she could gratefully take it. Her surrender was
+her response, her response her surrender; and, though
+scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by these
+things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
+appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long
+embrace in which they held each other was the rout of
+evasion, and he took from it the certitude that what
+she had from him was real to her. It was stronger than
+an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in
+afterthought was that she had been sublimely sincere.
+<i>That</i> was all he asked&mdash;sincerity making a basis that
+would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
+and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing
+left to ask her to swear to. Oaths and vows apart,
+now they could talk. It seemed in fact only now that
+their questions were put on the table. He had taken
+up more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea
+for her own plan, and it was marked that the difference
+made by the passage just enacted was a difference
+in favour of her choice of means. Means had
+somehow suddenly become a detail&mdash;her province
+and her care; it had grown more consistently vivid
+that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
+certainly don't want," he said&mdash;and he could say it
+with a smile of indulgence&mdash;"to be all the while
+bringing it up that I don't trust you."
+</p><p>
+"I should hope not! What do you think I want to
+do?"
+</p><p>
+He had really at this to make out a little what he
+thought, and the first thing that put itself in evidence
+was of course the oddity, after all, of their game, to
+which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
+at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way,
+a thing most people would call us fools for." But his
+visit passed, all the same, without his again attempting
+to make "just as he was" serve. He had no more
+money just as he was than he had had just as he had
+been, or than he should have, probably, when it came
+to that, just as he always would be; whereas she, on
+her side, in comparison with her state of some months
+before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily
+saw how their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more
+of an accent to that quantity than their meeting at
+stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand he
+couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent
+her indifference added in a manner to what
+Kate's taking him as he was would call on her to sacrifice.
+Such in fine was her art with him that she
+seemed to put the question of their still waiting into
+quite other terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid
+Sèvres, of complicated brass, in which their boudoir
+expressed it. She said almost all in fact by saying, on
+this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more
+pressed her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably
+soon happen, he would understand. "Do you
+mean," he asked at this, "that there's any <i>definite</i>
+sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
+"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave
+duplicities. Remember, after all, that supremely
+clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
+there is going&mdash;remember that she can play with us
+quite as much as we play with her."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't want to play with <i>me</i>, my dear,"
+Kate lucidly replied; "she doesn't want to make me
+suffer a bit more than she need. She cares for me too
+much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a
+value. <i>This</i> has a value&mdash;her being as she has been
+about us to-day. I believe she's in her room, where
+she's keeping strictly to herself while you're here with
+me. But that isn't 'playing'&mdash;not a bit."
+</p><p>
+"What is it then," the young man returned&mdash;"from
+the moment it isn't her blessing and a cheque?"
+</p><p>
+Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of
+smallness. There is something in her above trifles.
+She <i>generally</i> trusts us; she doesn't propose to hunt
+us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a thing&mdash;why,"
+said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She
+has really but one fault&mdash;she's indifferent, on such
+ground as she has taken about us, to details. However,"
+the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in detail
+we fight her."
+</p><p>
+"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's
+thought of this, "that it's in detail we deceive
+her"&mdash;a speech that, as soon as he had uttered it,
+applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
+to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
+</p><p>
+Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however,
+dropped from Kate, whom, as he could see with
+sacred joy, it must take more than that to make compunctious.
+"I don't say we can do it again. I mean,"
+she explained, "meet here."
+</p><p>
+Densher indeed had been wondering where they
+could do it again. If Lancaster Gate was so limited
+that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come back at all?"
+</p><p>
+"Certainly&mdash;to see her. It's she, really," his
+companion smiled, "who's in love with you."
+</p><p>
+But it made him&mdash;a trifle more grave&mdash;look at
+her a moment. "Don't make out, you know, that
+every one's in love with me."
+</p><p>
+She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
+</p><p>
+"You said just now Miss Theale."
+</p><p>
+"I said she liked you&mdash;yes."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which,
+however, he pursued: "Of course I ought to thank
+Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for <i>this</i>&mdash;as from
+myself."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an
+ironic gaiety for the implications of his "this," besides
+wishing to insist on a general prudence. "She'll
+wonder what you're thanking her for!"
+</p><p>
+Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes,
+I can't very well tell her all."
+</p><p>
+It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that
+Kate was again in a manner amused. Yet she gave
+out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her anything,
+and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please
+her; make her see how clever you are&mdash;only without
+letting her see that you're trying. If you're charming
+to her you've nothing else to do."
+</p><p>
+But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming'
+to her, so far as I see, only by letting her suppose I
+give you up&mdash;which I'll be hanged if I do! It <i>is</i>,"
+he said with feeling, "a game."
+</p><p>
+"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose
+you give me up&mdash;or I give <i>you</i>&mdash;if you keep reminding
+her how you enjoy our interviews."
+</p><p>
+"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant,"
+Densher asked, "what good does it do?"
+</p><p>
+Kate was for a moment checked. "What good
+does what&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Does my pleasing her&mdash;does anything. I <i>can't</i>,"
+he impatiently declared, "please her."
+</p><p>
+Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at
+his want of consistency; but it appeared to determine
+in her something better than a mere complaint.
+"Then <i>I</i> can! Leave it to me." With which she came
+to him under the compulsion, again, that had united
+them shortly before, and took hold of him in her urgency
+to the same tender purpose. It was her form of
+entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all,
+as he met it, their great fact clear. And it somehow
+clarified <i>all</i> things so to possess each other. The effect
+of it was that, once more, on these terms, he could
+only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
+everything to her that she reverted in the course of a
+few moments to one of her previous&mdash;and as positively
+seemed&mdash;her most precious ideas. "You
+accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love
+with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So
+there you are. That's the good she'll do us. It makes
+a basis for her seeing you&mdash;so that she'll help us to
+go on."
+</p><p>
+Densher stared&mdash;she was wondrous all round.
+"And what sort of a basis does it make for my seeing
+<i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
+</p><p>
+"Don't mind my leading her on?"
+</p><p>
+She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading
+<i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Well, she won't&mdash;so it's nothing not to mind.
+But how can that 'help,'" he pursued, "with what
+she knows?"
+</p><p>
+"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
+</p><p>
+"Prevent her helping you. She's <i>like</i> that," Kate
+Croy explained.
+</p><p>
+It took indeed some understanding. "Making
+nothing of the fact that I love another?"
+</p><p>
+"Making everything," said Kate. "To console
+you."
+</p><p>
+"But for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For not getting your other."
+</p><p>
+He continued to stare. "But how does she
+know&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That you <i>won't</i> get her? She doesn't; but on the
+other hand she doesn't know you will. Meanwhile
+she sees you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud's
+stand. <i>That</i>"&mdash;Kate was lucid&mdash;"gives her the
+chance to be nice to you."
+</p><p>
+"And what does it give <i>me</i>," the young man none
+the less rationally asked, "the chance to be? A brute
+of a humbug to her?"
+</p><p>
+Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she
+smiled at his violence. "You'll extraordinarily like
+her. She's exquisite. And there are reasons. I mean
+others."
+</p><p>
+"What others?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give
+you," the girl added, "are enough to go on with."
+</p><p>
+"To go on to what?"
+</p><p>
+"Why, to seeing her again&mdash;say as soon as you
+can: which, moreover, on all grounds, is no more than
+decent of you."
+</p><p>
+He of course took in her reference, and he had fully
+in mind what had passed between them in New York.
+It had been no great quantity, but it had made distinctly
+at the time for his pleasure; so that anything
+in the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have
+a slight kindling consequence. "Oh I shall naturally
+call again without delay. Yes," said Densher, "her
+being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
+independently of that, make every acknowledgement
+of favours received."
+</p><p>
+It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you
+see. I shall meet you there."
+</p><p>
+"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why
+she should wish to receive you for it."
+</p><p>
+"She receives me for myself&mdash;that is for <i>her</i> self.
+She thinks no end of me. That I should have to drum
+it into you!"
+</p><p>
+Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's
+beyond me."
+</p><p>
+Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She
+regards me as already&mdash;in these few weeks&mdash;her
+dearest friend. It's quite separate. We're in, she
+and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that,
+as if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere
+at sea, she threw out at last her own real light. "She
+doesn't of course know I care for <i>you</i>. She thinks I
+care so little that it's not worth speaking of." That
+he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made
+quickly clear, and Kate hailed the effect with surprise.
+"Have you been supposing that she does know&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such
+friends as you show me&mdash;and if you haven't otherwise
+represented it to her." She uttered at this such
+a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague.
+"You <i>have</i> denied it to her?"
+</p><p>
+She threw up her arms at his being so backward.
+"'Denied it'? My dear man, we've never spoken of
+you."
+</p><p>
+"Never, never?"
+</p><p>
+"Strange as it may appear to your glory&mdash;never."
+</p><p>
+He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs.
+Lowder have spoken?"
+</p><p>
+"Very probably. But of <i>you</i>. Not of me."
+</p><p>
+This struck him as obscure. "How does she know
+me but as part and parcel of you?"
+</p><p>
+"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly
+to make nothing of it, to have nothing to do with it, to
+stick consistently to her line about it. Aunt Maud's
+line is to keep all reality out of our relation&mdash;that
+is out of my being in danger from you&mdash;by not having
+so much as suspected or heard of it. She'll get
+rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it and sinking
+it&mdash;if she only does so hard enough. Therefore <i>she</i>,
+in her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she
+knows you otherwise than as part and parcel of me.
+She won't for a moment have allowed either to Mrs.
+Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they
+say, distinguished you."
+</p><p>
+"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that
+they must have made it out for themselves?"
+</p><p>
+"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared,
+"after Milly's so funnily bumping against us on
+Tuesday."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't see from <i>that</i>&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes,
+she sees, no doubt, that you regard me with a complacent
+eye&mdash;for you show it, I think, always too
+much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I
+don't show it too much; I don't perhaps&mdash;to please
+you completely where others are concerned&mdash;show it
+enough."
+</p><p>
+"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher
+demanded.
+</p><p>
+It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent.
+"Not where <i>you</i> are concerned. Beyond seeing
+that you're rather gone," she went on, "Milly only
+sees that I'm decently good to you."
+</p><p>
+"Very good indeed she must think it!"
+</p><p>
+"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate
+smiled, "as very good indeed."
+</p><p>
+The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take
+some explaining."
+</p><p>
+"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came
+back to her essential plea for her freedom of action
+and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she added, "I
+<i>will</i> explain."
+</p><p>
+"And what will I do?"
+</p><p>
+"Recognise the difference it must make if she
+thinks." But here in truth Kate faltered. It was his
+silence alone that, for the moment, took up her apparent
+meaning; and before he again spoke she had
+returned to remembrance and prudence. They were
+now not to forget that, Aunt Maud's liberality having
+put them on their honour, they mustn't spoil their
+case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they
+should probably find it would help them. But she
+came back to Milly too. "Mind you go to see her."
+</p><p>
+Densher still, however, took up nothing of this.
+"Then I may come again?"
+</p><p>
+"For Aunt Maud&mdash;as much as you like. But we
+can't again," said Kate, "play her <i>this trick</i>. I can't
+see you here alone."
+</p><p>
+"Then where?"
+</p><p>
+"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
+</p><p>
+"And what good will that do me?"
+</p><p>
+"Try it and you'll see."
+</p><p>
+"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher
+asked. "Say you are, how will that give us privacy?"
+</p><p>
+"Try it&mdash;you'll see," the girl once more returned.
+"We must manage as we can."
+</p><p>
+"That's precisely what <i>I</i> feel. It strikes me we
+might manage better." His idea of this was a thing
+that made him an instant hesitate; yet he brought it
+out with conviction. "Why won't you come to <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell
+him he was scarce generous in expecting her definitely
+to answer, and by looking to him to wait at least she
+appealed to something that she presently made him
+feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness
+that he thus found himself thrown back; and
+while he asked of his spirit and of his flesh just what
+concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
+again on the subject of her singular remedy for their
+embarrassment. It might have been irritating had she
+ever struck him as having in her mind a stupid corner.
+"You'll see," she said, "the difference it will make."
+</p><p>
+Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent;
+it was he who was stupid&mdash;the proof of which was
+that he would do what she liked. But he made a last
+effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
+bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something
+subtle but strong even as he spoke. "Is what
+you meant a moment ago that the difference will be in
+her being made to believe you hate me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of
+putting it, one of her more marked shows of impatience;
+with which in fact she sharply closed their
+discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her,
+and she accompanied him to the top of the stairs with
+an air of having so put their possibilities before him
+that questions were idle and doubts perverse. "I
+verily believe I <i>shall</i> hate you if you spoil for me the
+beauty of what I see!"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from
+her of what she saw; and the very next occasion had
+for him still other surprises than that. He received
+from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to
+Kate the telegraphic expression of a hope that he
+might be free to dine with them that evening; and his
+freedom affected him as fortunate even though in
+some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting
+American friends whom I'm so glad to find you
+know!" His knowledge of American friends was
+clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit
+to the last bitterness. This apprehension, however,
+we hasten to add, enjoyed for him, in the immediate
+event, a certain merciful shrinkage; the immediate
+event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes
+after his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty,
+Mrs. Stringham came in alone. The long daylight,
+the postponed lamps, the habit of the hour, made
+dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as
+he was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate
+herself not yet in the field. He had thus had with her
+several bewildering moments&mdash;bewildering by reason,
+fairly, of their tacit invitation to him to be supernaturally
+simple. This was exactly, goodness knew,
+what he wanted to be; but he had never had it so
+largely and freely&mdash;<i>so</i> supernaturally simply, for
+that matter&mdash;imputed to him as of easy achievement.
+It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to
+offer herself as an example, appeared to say quite
+agreeably: "What I want of you, don't you see? is to
+be just exactly as <i>I</i> am." The quantity of the article
+required was what might especially have caused him
+to stagger&mdash;he liked so, in general, the quantities in
+which Mrs. Lowder dealt. He would have liked as
+well to ask her how feasible she supposed it for a poor
+young man to resemble her at any point; but he had
+after all soon enough perceived that he was doing as
+she wished by letting his wonder show just a little as
+silly. He was conscious moreover of a small strange
+dread of the results of discussion with her&mdash;strange,
+truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity,
+that he feared. Asperity might have made him
+angry&mdash;in which there was always a comfort; good
+nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
+ashamed&mdash;which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully,
+liking him for himself, quite struck him as having
+guessed. To spare him therefore she also avoided discussion;
+she kept him down by refusing to quarrel
+with him. This was what she now proposed to him to
+enjoy, and his secret discomfort was his sense that on
+the whole it was what would best suit him. Being
+kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was
+of being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it
+mattered but little that he was ashamed of that too.
+It was of the essence of his position that in such a
+house as this the tables could always be turned on
+him. "What do you offer, what do you offer?"&mdash;the
+place, however muffled in convenience and decorum,
+constantly hummed for him with that thick
+irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious
+bribes, and he had already seen how little aid came to
+him from denouncing the bribes as ugly in form. That
+was what the precious metals&mdash;they alone&mdash;could
+afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly
+to try to impart a gloss to his own comparative brummagem.
+The humiliation of this impotence was precisely
+what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
+keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had
+doubtless never yet been so visible he had probably
+never felt so definitely placed in the world as while he
+waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
+welcomed him genially back from the States, as to
+his view of which her few questions, though not coherent,
+were comprehensive, and he had the amusement
+of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak
+of a plan and the sudden consciousness of a
+curiosity. She became aware of America, under his
+eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the idea
+of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just
+occurred to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of
+a minute, as her favourite dream. He didn't believe
+in it, but he pretended to; this helped her as well as
+anything else to treat him as harmless and blameless.
+She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
+absence of allusions, when the highest effect was
+given her method by the beautiful entrance of Kate.
+The method therefore received support all round, for
+no young man could have been less formidable than
+the person to the relief of whose shyness her niece
+ostensibly came. The ostensible, in Kate, struck him
+altogether, on this occasion, as prodigious; while
+scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his own
+reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions&mdash;a
+relation lighted for him by the straight
+look, not exactly loving nor lingering, yet searching
+and soft, that, on the part of their hostess, the girl had
+to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from
+head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made
+poor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked so
+something with which Kate habitually and consummately
+reckoned.
+</p><p>
+That was the story&mdash;that she was always, for her
+beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour,
+but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs.
+Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate
+ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the
+social scene; so that he now recognised in it something
+like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed
+by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect
+to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As
+such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look,
+to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this
+was what Kate was to do for the character she had
+undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
+was made up, the character, of definite elements and
+touches&mdash;things all perfectly ponderable to criticism;
+and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently at
+the start to be sure her make-up had had the last
+touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual.
+Aunt Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed
+managerial, and the performer's own contribution
+fairly that of the faultless soldier on parade. Densher
+saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall
+at the play; the watchful manager was in the depths
+of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights.
+But she <i>passed</i>, the poor performer&mdash;he could
+see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
+jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and
+her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper
+round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note
+for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
+much less time than notation demands; but we may
+none the less make the point that there was, still further,
+time among them for him to feel almost too
+scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself
+as having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind&mdash;so
+that in any case he only stared in silence at the
+older woman's technical challenge and at the younger
+one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama&mdash;it
+thus came to him, for the fact of a drama there was
+no blinking&mdash;was between <i>them</i>, them quite preponderantly;
+with Merton Densher relegated to mere
+spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the
+most expensive. This was why his appreciation had
+turned for the instant to fear&mdash;had just turned, as
+we have said, to sickness; and in spite of the fact that
+the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
+as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite,
+of a special intelligence. So might a practised
+performer, even when raked by double-barrelled
+glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
+sign to the person in the house she loved best.
+</p><p>
+The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile
+went on&mdash;amplified soon enough by the advent
+of two other guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers
+in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves
+to Kate during the next moments as subjects
+for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like
+usual mercy. At opposite ends of the social course,
+they displayed, in respect to the "figure" that each,
+in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
+contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A
+scratch company of two innocuous youths and a pacified
+veteran was therefore what now offered itself to
+Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless and
+full of the compunction of having had to come alone.
+Her companion, at the last moment, had been indisposed&mdash;positively
+not well enough, and so had
+packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
+regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's
+illness was the first thing Kate took up with Densher
+on their being able after dinner, without bravado, to
+have ten minutes "naturally," as she called it&mdash;which
+wasn't what <i>he</i> did&mdash;together; but it was already
+as if the young man had, by an odd impression,
+throughout the meal, not been wholly deprived of
+Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
+dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a
+topic as familiar to the enthusiastic younger as to
+the sagacious older man. Any knowledge they might
+lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
+supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to
+as the most privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't
+it he who had in a manner invented the wonderful
+creature&mdash;through having seen her first, caught her
+in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved
+the way for her by his prompt recognition of her
+rarity, by preceding her, in a friendly spirit&mdash;as he
+had the "ear" of society&mdash;with a sharp flashlight or
+two?
+</p><p>
+He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could,
+listening with interest, yet with discomfort; wincing
+in particular, dry journalist as he was, to find it seemingly
+supposed of him that he had put his pen&mdash;oh
+his "pen!"&mdash;at the service of private distinction.
+The ear of society?&mdash;they were talking, or almost,
+as if he had publicly paragraphed a modest young
+lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he appeared to
+perceive, that fairly waked <i>him</i> up, and he settled
+himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment
+and to catch the full revelation. His embarrassment
+came naturally from the fact that if he could claim no
+credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
+gracefully insist on his not having been concerned
+with her. What touched him most nearly was that the
+occasion took on somehow the air of a commemorative
+banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
+career. There was of course more said about the
+heroine than if she hadn't been absent, and he found
+himself rather stupefied at the range of Milly's triumph.
+Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the
+two wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or
+with hypocrisy, professed in the matter an equal expertness;
+and Densher at last seemed to know himself
+in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
+obviously, whose testimony would have been
+most invoked hadn't she been, as her friend's representative,
+rather confined to the function of inhaling
+the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
+smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the
+table, appeared benevolently both to speak and to interpret
+for her. Kate spoke as if she wouldn't perhaps
+understand <i>their</i> way of appreciating Milly, but
+would let them none the less, in justice to their good
+will, express it in their coarser fashion. Densher himself
+wasn't unconscious in respect to this of a certain
+broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
+indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move
+American nerves. He had only heard of them before,
+but in his recent tour he had caught them in the remarkable
+fact, and there was now a moment or two
+when it came to him that he had perhaps&mdash;and not
+in the way of an escape&mdash;taken a lesson from them.
+They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
+they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical
+organism&mdash;this lady striking him as before all things
+excited, as, in the native phrase, keyed-up, to a perception
+of more elements in the occasion than he was
+himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of
+it, he imagined, that were as yet obscure to him; for,
+though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he
+none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
+than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion
+in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience
+to report at home. Her little dry New England
+brightness&mdash;he had "sampled" all the shades
+of the American complexity, if complexity it were&mdash;had
+its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence;
+so that before the subject was changed he perceived
+(with surprise at the others) that they had given her
+enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself
+by the time he was asked if it were true that their
+friend had really not made in her own country the
+mark she had chalked so large in London. It was
+Mrs. Lowder herself who addressed him that enquiry;
+while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed
+with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose
+or with her hope that he would allow to London the
+honour of discovery. The less expansive of the white
+waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in
+London&mdash;for all that was said&mdash;much further than
+in the States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged,
+that they had taught the Americans to appreciate
+(especially when it was funny) some native product.
+He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny&mdash;though
+she was weird, and this was precisely her
+magic; but it might very well be that New York, in
+having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck.
+There <i>were</i> plenty of people who were nothing over
+there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just
+as&mdash;to make the balance right, thank goodness&mdash;they
+sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who
+left the Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in
+truth wasn't to be calculated&mdash;a formulation of the
+matter that was not reached, however, without producing
+in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
+announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration
+of her young friend <i>had</i> seemed to fail a little
+in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her
+having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral
+that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere;
+and the good lady, as the exponent of this
+doctrine&mdash;which she set forth at a certain length&mdash;made,
+obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest approach
+to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's
+absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed
+effective for him by suddenly addressing him. "You
+know nothing, sir&mdash;but not the least little bit&mdash;about
+my friend."
+</p><p>
+He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity
+of reproach in Mrs. Stringham's face and tone, a
+purity charged apparently with solemn meanings;
+so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
+couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered
+what she did mean, but while doing so he defended
+himself. "I certainly don't know enormously much&mdash;beyond
+her having been most kind to me, in New
+York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien,
+and my having tremendously appreciated it." To
+which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
+immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham,
+that you weren't then present."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression,
+though what it expressed he failed at the
+time to make out.
+</p><p>
+"You weren't present <i>then</i>, dearest," Mrs. Lowder
+richly concurred. "You don't know," she continued
+with mellow gaiety, "how far things may have gone."
+</p><p>
+It made the little woman, he could see, really lose
+her head. She had more things in that head than any
+of them in any other; unless perhaps it were Kate,
+whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
+foolish passage, though it pleased him&mdash;and because
+of the foolishness&mdash;not to meet her eyes. He met
+Mrs. Stringham's, which affected him: with her he
+could on occasion clear it up&mdash;a sense produced by
+the mute communion between them and really the
+beginning, as the event was to show, of something
+extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect
+of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly
+faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
+precisely my point that Mr. Densher <i>can't</i> have had
+vast opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I
+wasn't away, you know, long."
+</p><p>
+It made everything, in the oddest way in the world,
+immediately right for him. "And I wasn't <i>there</i> long,
+either." He positively saw with it that nothing for
+him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
+wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy
+to know."
+</p><p>
+"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied
+the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.
+</p><p>
+He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to
+these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too&mdash;away
+off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly
+more to see."
+</p><p>
+"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed
+with almost menacing archness.
+</p><p>
+"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't
+forget such charming impressions. But I never," he
+lucidly maintained, "chattered to others about her."
+</p><p>
+"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham
+with a flushed firmness.
+</p><p>
+"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud
+blandly enquired, "very often quite prove the depth
+of the impression?"
+</p><p>
+He would have been amused, hadn't he been
+slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to
+fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as deep as
+you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he
+pursued for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by
+any consent of my own as an authority about her."
+</p><p>
+Kate came to his assistance&mdash;if assistance it was&mdash;before
+their friend had had time to meet this
+charge. "You're right about her not being easy to
+know. One <i>sees</i> her with intensity&mdash;sees her more
+than one sees almost any one; but then one discovers
+that that isn't knowing her and that one may know
+better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say, half
+so much."
+</p><p>
+The discrimination was interesting, but it brought
+them back to the fact of her success; and it was at
+that comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully
+placed before them, that Milly's anxious companion
+sat and looked&mdash;looked very much as some spectator
+in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity
+of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly,
+caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling
+not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals
+let loose as for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs.
+Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with
+Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and
+more determined by it. He wondered afterwards if
+Kate had made this out; though it was not indeed
+till much later on that he found himself, in thought,
+dividing the things she might have been conscious
+of from the things she must have missed. If she actually
+missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham's discomfort,
+that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
+own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's
+prominence as a feature of the season's end, to keep
+Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present
+and to past. "It's everything that has happened
+<i>since</i> that makes you naturally a little shy about her.
+You don't know what has happened since, but we do;
+we've seen it and followed it; we've a little been <i>of</i>
+it." The great thing for him, at this, as Kate gave it,
+<i>was</i> in fact quite irresistibly that the case was a real
+one&mdash;the kind of thing that, when one's patience
+was shorter than one's curiosity, one had vaguely
+taken for possible in London, but in which one had
+never been even to this small extent concerned. The
+little American's sudden social adventure, her happy
+and, no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been
+favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured
+above all by the simple spring-board of the
+scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless
+foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable
+as ocean-currents. The huddled herd had
+drifted to her blindly&mdash;it might as blindly have
+drifted away. There had been of course a signal, but
+the great reason was probably the absence at the moment
+of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
+and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It
+was at all events characteristic, and what was of the
+essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter
+for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention,
+played over it, the "motive," as a sign of
+the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious
+and rough-and-tumble nature of the social
+boom. The boom as in <i>itself</i> required&mdash;that would
+be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively
+minor question. Anything was boomable
+enough when nothing else was more so: the author of
+the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty,
+the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was
+for the most part saved from being inconveniently
+strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
+American whose Americanism had been long desperately
+discounted, the creature in fine as to whom
+spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited
+sort could be loudly enough predicated.
+</p><p>
+So he judged at least, within his limits, and the
+idea that what he had thus caught in the fact was the
+trick of fashion and the tone of society went so far as
+to make him take up again his sense of independence.
+He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
+civilisation&mdash;! One could smoke one's pipe outside
+when twaddle was within. He had rather avoided, as
+we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but there came a moment
+when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
+the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is <i>this</i> the
+great world?" There came another, it must be added&mdash;and
+doubtless as a result of something that, over
+the cloth, did hang between them&mdash;when she struck
+him as having quite answered: "Dear no&mdash;for what
+do you take me? Not the least little bit: only a poor
+silly, though quite harmless, imitation." What she
+might have passed for saying, however, was practically
+merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
+aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts.
+She enunciated, to relieve his bewilderment, the obvious
+truth that you couldn't leave London for three
+months at that time of the year and come back to
+find your friends just where they were. As they had
+<i>of course</i> been jigging away they might well be so red
+in the face that you wouldn't know them. She reconciled
+in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that
+honour of having discovered her which it was vain for
+him modestly to shirk. He <i>had</i> unearthed her, but it
+was they, all of them together, who had developed
+her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest
+ever seen, but she wasn't the person he had
+"backed."
+</p><p>
+Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had
+had in these pleasantries no conscious, above all no
+insolent purpose of making light of poor Susan Shepherd's
+property in their young friend&mdash;which property,
+by such remarks, was very much pushed to the
+wall; but he was also to know that Mrs. Stringham
+had secretly resented them, Mrs. Stringham holding
+the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
+glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were
+but dust for the feet of her Milly. That, it was true,
+would be what she must reveal only when driven to
+her last entrenchments and well cornered in her passion&mdash;the
+rare passion of friendship, the sole passion
+of her little life save the one other, more imperturbably
+cerebral, that she entertained for the art of Guy
+de Maupassant. She slipped in the observation that
+her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
+on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little
+difference in the drift of Kate's contention. She was
+perfectly kind to Susie: it was as if she positively
+knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
+feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being
+committed to admiration of type. Kate had occasion
+subsequently&mdash;she found it somehow&mdash;to mention
+to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
+this view on the good lady's part. She would like&mdash;Milly
+had had it from her&mdash;to put Kate Croy in a
+book and see what she could so do with her. "Chop
+me up fine or serve me whole"&mdash;it was a way of being
+got at that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be
+Mrs. Stringham's, however, she understood, because
+Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such stuff
+as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in
+spite of Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment)
+she had never known, there was none other to
+be employed. These things were of later evidence,
+yet Densher might even then have felt them in the air.
+They were practically in it already when Kate, waiving
+the question of her friend's chemical change,
+wound up with the comparatively unobjectionable
+proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
+take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully,
+a little perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham&mdash;"Oh
+as far on as you like!" This even had
+its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it
+as might be meant for herself. The nice thing about
+her was that she could measure how much; so that
+by the time dinner was over they had really covered
+ground.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared,
+was most in his element at the piano; so that
+they had coffee and comic songs upstairs&mdash;the gentlemen,
+temporarily relinquished, submitting easily
+in this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction
+not to sit too tight. Our especial young man sat
+tighter when restored to the drawing-room; he made
+it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
+foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger
+needs in this general respect than she; but she had
+better names for the scant risks to which she consented.
+It was the blessing of a big house that intervals
+were large and, of an August night, that windows
+were open; whereby, at a given moment, on the wide
+balcony, with the songs sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud
+could hold her little court more freshly. Densher and
+Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side
+a small sofa&mdash;a luxury formulated by the latter as
+the proof, under criticism, of their remarkably good
+conscience. "To seem not to know each other&mdash;once
+you're here&mdash;would be," the girl said, "to
+overdo it"; and she arranged it charmingly that they
+<i>must</i> have some passage to put Aunt Maud off the
+scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
+world they found their account in. For Densher, none
+the less, the profit of snatched moments, snatched
+contacts, was partial and poor; there were in particular
+at present more things in his mind than he could
+bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on
+the other hand, that she suddenly met most of them&mdash;and
+more than he could see on the spot&mdash;by coming
+out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
+in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit
+right, you know. I mean in health. Just see her to-night.
+I mean it looks grave. For you she would
+have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
+</p><p>
+He took this in such patience as he could muster.
+"What in the world's the matter with her?"
+</p><p>
+But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed
+your being here has been just a reason for her
+funking it."
+</p><p>
+"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher
+asked again.
+</p><p>
+"Why just what I've told you&mdash;that she likes you
+so much."
+</p><p>
+"Then why should she deny herself the joy of
+meeting me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate cast about&mdash;it would take so long to explain.
+"And perhaps it's true that she <i>is</i> bad. She easily
+may be."
+</p><p>
+"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs.
+Stringham, who's visibly preoccupied and worried."
+</p><p>
+"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be
+only for that."
+</p><p>
+"For what then?"
+</p><p>
+But this question too, on thinking, she neglected.
+"Why, if it's anything real, doesn't that poor lady
+go home? She'd be anxious, and she has done all
+she need to be civil."
+</p><p>
+"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite
+beautifully civil."
+</p><p>
+It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit
+harder; but she was already, in a manner, explaining.
+"Her preoccupation is probably on two different
+heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but
+the other makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell
+Milly all about you."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said the young man between a laugh
+and a sigh, "I'm glad I felt, downstairs, a kind of
+'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to her?"
+</p><p>
+"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's
+all," Kate declared, "as it should be."
+</p><p>
+"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically
+suggested, "that she isn't getting much good of me
+now. Will she report to Milly on <i>this?</i>" And then as
+Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On
+our present disregard for appearances."
+</p><p>
+"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her
+high way. "I'll make them all right. Aunt Maud,
+moreover," she added, "has her so engaged that she
+won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion
+had indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope
+to match&mdash;had for instance another when she still
+subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to respond
+just in order to make that impression."
+</p><p>
+"Well," Densher dropped with some humour,
+"life's very interesting! I hope it's really as much so
+for you as you make it for others; I mean judging by
+what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent
+it as thrilling for <i>ces dames</i>, and in a different way
+for each: Aunt Maud, Susan Shepherd, Milly. But
+what <i>is</i>," he wound up, "the matter? Do you mean
+she's as ill as she looks?"
+</p><p>
+Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his
+derisive speech deserved no satisfaction; then she
+appeared to yield to a need of her own&mdash;the need to
+make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
+Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she
+looked she could scarce be a question with them, for
+her end would in that case be near. She believed herself
+nevertheless&mdash;and Kate couldn't help believing
+her too&mdash;seriously menaced. There was always the
+fact that they had been on the point of leaving town,
+the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled up. "We
+bade them good-bye&mdash;or all but&mdash;Aunt Maud and
+I, the night before Milly, popping so very oddly into
+the National Gallery for a farewell look, found you
+and me together. They were then to get off a day or
+two later. But they've not got off&mdash;they're not
+getting off. When I see them&mdash;and I saw them this
+morning&mdash;they have showy reasons. They do mean
+to go, but they've postponed it." With which the
+girl brought out: "They've postponed it for <i>you</i>."
+He protested so far as a man might without fatuity,
+since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever,
+understood herself. "You've made Milly change her
+mind. She wants not to miss you&mdash;though she wants
+also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I
+hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung
+back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see
+you again&mdash;she doesn't know she ever may. She
+doesn't see the future. It has opened out before her
+in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time
+you've all been telling me she has had?"
+</p><p>
+"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
+</p><p>
+"The shadow, you consider, of some physical
+break-up?"
+</p><p>
+"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's
+scared. She has so much to lose. And she wants
+more."
+</p><p>
+"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange
+sense of discomfort, "couldn't one say to her that
+she can't have everything?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;for one wouldn't want to. She really,"
+Kate went on, "has been somebody here. Ask Aunt
+Maud&mdash;you may think me prejudiced," the girl
+oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you&mdash;the
+world's before her. It has all come since you saw
+her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it certainly
+would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
+success&mdash;I mean of course so far as possible in
+the scrap of time&mdash;and she has taken it like a perfect
+angel. If you can imagine an angel with a thumping
+bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of
+the kind of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge;
+Aunt Maud has had all the facts, or enough of them,
+in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and Susie speaks
+by book. Take them then, in the last confidence,
+from <i>me</i>. There she is." Kate expressed above all
+what it most came to. "It's open to her to make, you
+see, the very greatest marriage. I assure you we're not
+vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite plain."
+</p><p>
+Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged
+them. "But what good then on earth can I do her?"
+</p><p>
+Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
+</p><p>
+"And for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept
+away. I shouldn't care for her if she hadn't so
+much," Kate very simply said. And then as it made
+him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble
+about her if there were one thing she did have." The
+girl spoke indeed with a noble compassion. "She has
+nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Not all the young dukes?"
+</p><p>
+"Well we must see&mdash;see if anything can come of
+them. She at any rate does love life. To have met a
+person like you," Kate further explained, "is to have
+felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part
+of life. Oh she has you arranged!"
+</p><p>
+"<i>You</i> have, it strikes me, my dear"&mdash;and he
+looked both detached and rueful. "Pray what am I
+to do with the dukes?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
+</p><p>
+"Then why shan't I be?"
+</p><p>
+"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully
+smiled. "Besides, you <i>will</i> be. You'll have expected
+enough for that."
+</p><p>
+"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
+</p><p>
+"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant
+for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You're
+what I have of most precious, and you're therefore
+what I use most."
+</p><p>
+He looked at her long. "I wish I could use <i>you</i> a
+little more." After which, as she continued to smile
+at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?" he asked.
+</p><p>
+Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be.
+"Not lungs, I think. Isn't consumption, taken in
+time, now curable?"
+</p><p>
+"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered.
+"Do you mean she has something that's past
+patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
+really as if her appearance put her outside of such
+things&mdash;being, in spite of her youth, that of a person
+who has been through all it's conceivable she should
+be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as a
+creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature
+may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances,
+go to sea again with confidence. She has <i>had</i> her
+wreck&mdash;she has met her adventure."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I grant you her wreck!"&mdash;Kate was all response
+so far. "But do let her have still her adventure.
+There are wrecks that are not adventures."
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;if there be also adventures that are not
+wrecks!" Densher in short was willing, but he came
+back to his point. "What I mean is that she has
+none of the effect&mdash;on one's nerves or whatever&mdash;of
+an invalid."
+</p><p>
+Kate on her side did this justice. "No&mdash;that's
+the beauty of her."
+</p><p>
+"The beauty&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that,
+any more than your watch, when it's about to stop for
+want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice
+or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
+won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of
+drugs. She won't taste, as it were, of medicine. No
+one will know."
+</p><p>
+"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified
+now, "are we talking about? In what extraordinary
+state <i>is</i> she?"
+</p><p>
+Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a
+fashion for herself. "I believe that if she's ill at all
+she's very ill. I believe that if she's bad she's not a
+<i>little</i> bad. I can't tell you why, but that's how I see
+her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll
+have it all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think
+she'll have it all."
+</p><p>
+Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her,
+her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it
+were more impressive than lucid. "You 'think' and
+you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
+without an inkling of her complaint?"
+</p><p>
+"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in
+which I don't want knowledge. She moreover herself
+doesn't want one to want it: she has, as to what
+may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty,
+a kind of&mdash;I don't know what to call it&mdash;intensity
+of pride. And then and then&mdash;" But with
+this she faltered.
+</p><p>
+"And then what?"
+</p><p>
+"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for
+you, my dear," Kate continued, "that you're as
+sound as a bell."
+</p><p>
+"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather
+good then for yourself too that you're as strong as the
+sea."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish
+gladness of their young immunities. It was all they
+had together, but they had it at least without a flaw&mdash;each
+had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal
+virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was
+as if that very consciousness threw them back the
+next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything
+else in the world, the great genial good they,
+alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of
+this. "How we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously
+sighed. But there were the facts. "From
+illness I keep away."
+</p><p>
+"But you don't&mdash;since here you are, in spite of all
+you say, in the midst of it."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I'm only watching&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"And putting me forward in your place? Thank
+you!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it
+give you the measure of what I shall expect of you.
+One can't begin too soon."
+</p><p>
+She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on
+the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before
+possessed himself; and the warning brought him
+back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's
+a case for surgery?"
+</p><p>
+"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to
+anything it may come to that. Of course she's in the
+highest hands."
+</p><p>
+"The doctors are after her then?"
+</p><p>
+"She's after <i>them</i>&mdash;it's the same thing. I think
+I'm free to say it now&mdash;she sees Sir Luke Strett."
+</p><p>
+It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand
+knives!" Then after an instant: "One seems to
+guess."
+</p><p>
+Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only
+do as I tell you."
+</p><p>
+For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in,
+might have had it before him. "What you want of
+me then is to make up to a sick girl."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect
+you as sick. You understand moreover just how
+much&mdash;and just how little."
+</p><p>
+"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you
+think I understand."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she
+returned, "that has been your way of breaking <i>me</i> in.
+Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty
+of others will."
+</p><p>
+Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might
+have been seeing their young friend on a pile of
+cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers
+and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher
+nobility. "Others can follow their tastes. Besides,
+others are free."
+</p><p>
+"But so are you, my dear!"
+</p><p>
+She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly
+quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he
+kept his place, only looking up at her. "You're prodigious!"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I'm prodigious!"&mdash;and, as immediately
+happened, she gave a further sign of it that he
+fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby had, as
+she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who,
+immediately finding her within his view, advanced
+to greet her before the announcement of his name
+could reach her companion. Densher none the less
+felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome
+to the visitor became almost precipitately an
+appeal to her friend, who slowly rose to meet it. "I
+don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And
+then for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher&mdash;who
+has just come back from America."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said
+nothing&mdash;occupied as he mainly was on the spot with
+weighing the sound in question. He recognised it in
+a moment as less imponderable than it might have
+appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It
+wasn't, that is, he knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot,
+however great the superficial resemblance: it was that
+of the clever, the accomplished man; it was the very
+specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training
+and experience had gone to producing it. Densher
+felt somehow that, as a thing of value accidentally
+picked up, it would retain an interest of curiosity.
+The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness
+to which he was conscious of contributing his
+share; Kate failing to ask Lord Mark to be seated,
+but letting him know that he would find Mrs. Lowder,
+with some others, on the balcony.
+</p><p>
+"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?&mdash;as I seemed
+to hear outside, from below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable
+voice."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell,"
+the girl explained, "and was compelled to disappoint
+us."
+</p><p>
+"Ah 'disappoint'&mdash;rather!" And, lingering a
+little, he kept his eyes on Densher. "She isn't really
+bad, I trust?"
+</p><p>
+Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed
+him interested in Milly; but he could imagine him
+also interested in the young man with whom he had
+found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered
+without visible intelligence. That young man concluded
+in a moment that he was doing what he wanted,
+satisfying himself as to each. To this he was aided
+by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I
+think not. I've just been reassuring Mr. Densher,"
+she added&mdash;"who's as concerned as the rest of us.
+I've been calming his fears."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark again&mdash;and again it was
+just as good. That was for Densher, the latter could
+see, or think he saw. And then for the others: "<i>My</i>
+fears would want calming. We must take great care
+of her. This way?"
+</p><p>
+She went with him a few steps, and while Densher,
+hanging about, gave them frank attention, presently
+paused again for some further colloquy. What passed
+between them their observer lost, but she was presently
+with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest.
+Densher was by this time quite ready for her. "It's
+<i>he</i> who's your aunt's man?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh immensely."
+</p><p>
+"I mean for <i>you.</i>"
+</p><p>
+"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There
+he is. Now you can judge."
+</p><p>
+"Judge of what?"
+</p><p>
+"Judge of him."
+</p><p>
+"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked.
+"I've nothing to do with him."
+</p><p>
+"Then why do you ask about him?"
+</p><p>
+"To judge of you&mdash;which is different."
+</p><p>
+Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference.
+"To take the measure, do you mean, of my
+danger?"
+</p><p>
+He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare
+say, of Miss Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile
+his interest in her&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"With his interest in me?"
+</p><p>
+"With her own interest in you," Densher said
+while she reflected. "If that interest&mdash;Mrs. Lowder's&mdash;takes
+the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
+rather to look out for the forms <i>he</i> takes?"
+</p><p>
+Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh
+he takes them easily," she answered. "The beauty
+is that she doesn't trust him."
+</p><p>
+"That Milly doesn't?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud.
+Not really."
+</p><p>
+Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her
+heart and yet thinks he cheats?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," said Kate&mdash;"that's the way people are.
+What they think of their enemies, goodness knows,
+is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with what
+they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind,
+however," she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt
+Maud's security, though she doesn't yet fully recognise
+it&mdash;besides being Milly's own."
+</p><p>
+"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for
+him?"
+</p><p>
+She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation.
+"You oughtn't to make me say too much. But I'm
+glad I don't."
+</p><p>
+"Don't say too much?"
+</p><p>
+"Don't care for Lord Mark."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his
+lordship's own. To which he added: "You absolutely
+hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!"
+It had made her again impatient.
+</p><p>
+Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You
+scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes."
+</p><p>
+"Mercy, no&mdash;far from it. He's not, compared
+with other possibilities, 'in' it. Milly, it's true," she
+said, to be exact, "has no natural sense of social
+values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
+or know who's who or what's what."
+</p><p>
+"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason
+for liking <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate,
+"who at least know what I lose."
+</p><p>
+Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable
+interest. "And Aunt Maud&mdash;why shouldn't <i>she</i>
+know? I mean that your friend there isn't really
+anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
+</p><p>
+"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a
+duke. That's undeniably something. He's the best
+moreover we can get."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not
+all derisive.
+</p><p>
+"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on
+without heeding this; "because perhaps in the line of
+that alone&mdash;as he has no money&mdash;more could be
+done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts
+with the sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand
+enough, with a duke in his family and at the other
+end of the string. <i>The</i> thing's his genius."
+</p><p>
+"And do you believe in that?"
+</p><p>
+"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more
+final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a
+moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one
+would scarce have known what to expect; but she
+came out in time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
+</p><p>
+"Political?"
+</p><p>
+"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what
+else to call it when a man's able to make himself
+without effort, without violence, without machinery of
+any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect
+without his being in any traceable way a cause."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious
+superficiality, "isn't agreeable&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh but it is!"
+</p><p>
+"Not surely for every one."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you
+may have reasons&mdash;and men don't count. Women
+don't know if it's agreeable or not."
+</p><p>
+"Then there you are!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, precisely&mdash;that takes, on his part, genius."
+</p><p>
+Densher stood before her as if he wondered what
+everything she thus promptly, easily and above all
+amusingly met him with, would have been found,
+should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
+suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch,
+welled up in him and overflowed&mdash;the sense of his
+good fortune and her variety, of the future she promised,
+the interest she supplied. "All women but you
+are stupid. How can I look at another? You're
+different and different&mdash;and then you're different
+again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you&mdash;except
+that you're so much too good for what she builds
+<i>for</i>. Even 'society' won't know how good for it you
+are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond it. You'd
+have to pull it uphill&mdash;it's you yourself who are at the
+top. The women one meets&mdash;what are they but
+books one has already read? You're a whole library
+of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
+ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my
+word I've a subscription!"
+</p><p>
+She took it from him with her face again giving out
+all it had in answer, and they remained once more
+confronted and united in their essential wealth of life.
+"It's you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in
+others."
+</p><p>
+It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association
+itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the
+sharp spring of fear. "See here, you know: don't,
+<i>don't</i>&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Don't what?"
+</p><p>
+"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him a minute with no response but
+her eyes. "So you think you'll kill <i>me</i> in time to
+prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the next
+instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after
+this she had got, in respect to the particular point,
+quite off. She had come back to another, which was
+one of her own; her own were so closely connected
+that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still
+she had a distance to go. "You do then see your
+way?" She put it to him before they joined&mdash;as was
+high time&mdash;the others. And she made him understand
+she meant his way with Milly.
+</p><p>
+He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation;
+then she had brought him up to a sort of recognition.
+He could make out by this light something
+of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
+undispelled since his return. "There's something
+you must definitely tell me. If our friend knows that
+all the while&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+She came straight to his aid, formulating for him
+his anxiety, though quite to smooth it down. "All the
+while she and I here were growing intimate, you and
+I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
+yes, she knows our relation must have involved your
+writing to me."
+</p><p>
+"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't suppose it."
+</p><p>
+"How then can she imagine you never named
+her?"
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her.
+I've told her everything. She's in possession of
+reasons that will perfectly do."
+</p><p>
+Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you
+exactly as I take them?"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly as you take them."
+</p><p>
+"She's just such another victim?"
+</p><p>
+"Just such another. You're a pair."
+</p><p>
+"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we
+can console each other?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah something <i>may</i> indeed happen," she returned,
+"if you'll only go straight!"
+</p><p>
+He watched the others an instant through the window.
+"What do you mean by going straight?"
+</p><p>
+"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've
+told you before, and you'll see. You'll have me perfectly,
+always, to refer to."
+</p><p>
+"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
+</p><p>
+It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her
+back. There you are. You won't be able to say I
+haven't made it smooth for you."
+</p><p>
+He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it
+wasn't the queerness that after another minute was
+uppermost. He was in a wondrous silken web, and it
+was amusing. "You spoil me!"
+</p><p>
+He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture
+reappeared, had caught his word as it dropped
+from him; probably not, he thought, her attention
+being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came
+through and who was now, none too soon, taking
+leave of her. They were followed by Lord Mark and
+by the other men, but two or three things happened
+before any dispersal of the company began. One of
+these was that Kate found time to say to him with
+furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another was
+that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord
+Mark, drew near to him with an almost reproachful
+"Come and talk to <i>me!</i>"&mdash;a challenge resulting after
+a minute for Densher in a consciousness of their installation
+together in an out-of-the-way corner, though
+not the same he himself had just occupied with her.
+Still another was that Mrs. Stringham, in the random
+intensity of her farewells, affected him as looking at
+him with a small grave intimation, something into
+which he afterwards read the meaning that if he had
+happened to desire a few words with her after dinner
+he would have found her ready. This impression was
+naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
+something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated.
+It gathered perhaps a slightly sharper shade from the
+mild formality of her "Good-night, sir!" as she passed
+him; a matter as to which there was now nothing more
+to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man
+he by this time had appraised as even more harmless
+than himself. This personage had forestalled him in
+opening the door for her and was evidently&mdash;with a
+view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs
+on Milly&mdash;proposing to attend her to her carriage.
+What further occurred was that Aunt Maud, having
+released her, immediately had a word for himself. It
+was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she
+both detained and dismissed him; she was particular
+about her minute, but he hadn't yet given her, as
+happened, a sign of withdrawal.
+</p><p>
+"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really
+interesting."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly
+not forget her. But you must remember that, so
+far as her 'interest' is concerned, I myself discovered,
+I&mdash;as was said at dinner&mdash;invented her."
+</p><p>
+"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't
+taken out the patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press
+of other things, too much neglect her."
+</p><p>
+Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal
+with Kate's, he asked himself quickly if it mightn't
+help him with her. He at any rate could but try.
+"You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
+you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to
+me. <i>She</i> keeps me up&mdash;she has had so much to say
+about them."
+</p><p>
+He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess
+an account of his passage with Kate that, while quite
+veracious, might be reassuring to herself. But Aunt
+Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
+if her confidence were supplied with other props. If
+she saw his intention in it she yet blinked neither with
+doubt nor with acceptance; she only said imperturbably:
+"Yes, she'll herself do anything for her friend;
+so that she but preaches what she practises."
+</p><p>
+Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew
+how far Kate's devotion went. He was moreover a
+little puzzled by this special harmony; in face of which
+he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought
+herself of the American girl as a distraction
+for him, and if Kate's mastery of the subject were
+therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
+What might really <i>become</i> in all this of the American
+girl was therefore a question that, on the latter contingency,
+would lose none of its sharpness. However,
+questions could wait, and it was easy, so far as he
+understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all
+the same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale
+charming."
+</p><p>
+Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a
+chance."
+</p><p>
+"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's&mdash;naturally
+now&mdash;leaving town and, as I take it, going
+abroad."
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself
+had been dealing with this difficulty. "She won't
+go," she smiled in spite of it, "till she has seen you.
+Moreover, when she does go&mdash;" She paused, leaving
+him uncertain. But the next minute he was still more
+at sea. "We shall go too."
+</p><p>
+He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly
+strange. "And what good will that do <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll
+come out to us."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
+</p><p>
+"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
+</p><p>
+"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher
+laughed. She was indeed putting him on his honour,
+and his honour winced a little at the use he rather
+helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she
+could make of it. "There are all sorts of things," he
+vaguely remarked, "to consider."
+</p><p>
+"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
+</p><p>
+"And pray what's that?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion
+of your life. I'm treating you handsomely, I'm
+looking after it for you. I <i>can</i>&mdash;I can smooth your
+path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good.
+And her fortune's a real fortune."
+</p><p>
+Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together
+for him as he felt her thus buying him off, and
+buying him&mdash;it would have been funny if it hadn't
+been so grave&mdash;with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
+derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm
+much obliged to you for the handsome offer&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't
+abashed. "I don't say it does&mdash;but there's no reason
+it shouldn't to <i>you</i>. Mind you, moreover"&mdash;she
+kept it up&mdash;"I'm not one who talks in the air.
+And you owe me something&mdash;if you want to know
+why."
+</p><p>
+Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis,
+her consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately
+to receive an odd confirmation, her truth.
+Her truth, for that matter, was that she believed him
+bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
+while they stood there, lighted up the impossible.
+What then in this light did Kate believe him? But
+that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of course I know
+I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
+inviting me for instance to-night&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But
+you don't know," she added, "how far I've gone for
+you."
+</p><p>
+He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring
+up; but he laughed again as he could. "I see
+how far you're going."
+</p><p>
+"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've
+nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And
+then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him
+stare: "To start you it <i>was</i> necessary. From <i>me</i> it has
+the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met
+his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand
+me? I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only
+showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of
+which, speaking with force and as if he must with a
+minute's reflexion see what she meant, she turned
+away from him. "I depend upon you now to make
+me right!"
+</p><p>
+The minute's reflexion he was of course more free
+to take after he had left the house. He walked up the
+Bayswater Road, but he stopped short, under the
+murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle
+of the square that, going eastward, opened out on
+his left. He had had his brief stupidity, but now he
+understood. She had guaranteed to Milly Theale
+through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for
+him. She had affirmed through the same source that
+the attachment was only his. He made it out, he made
+it out, and he could see what she meant by its starting
+him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate,
+so that Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper"
+indeed it was, her lie&mdash;the very properest possible
+and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So Milly
+was successfully deceived.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">V</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less
+promptly felt, was to see her after all very much on
+the old basis, the basis of his three visits in New York;
+the new element, when once he was again face to face
+with her, not really amounting to much more than a
+recognition, with a little surprise, of the positive extent
+of the old basis. Everything but that, everything
+embarrassing fell away after he had been present five
+minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their excellent,
+their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
+American relation&mdash;the legitimacy of which he
+could thus scarce express in names enough&mdash;should
+seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had both
+since then had great adventures&mdash;such an adventure
+for him was his mental annexation of her country;
+and it was now, for the moment, as if the greatest of
+them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
+other than those that had already served. Densher
+had asked for her, at her hotel, the day after Aunt
+Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with a highly
+troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played
+for him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's
+and Mrs. Lowder's so oddly conjoined and so really
+superfluous attempts to make her interesting. She
+had been interesting enough without them&mdash;that appeared
+to-day to come back to him; and, admirable
+and beautiful as was the charitable zeal of the two
+ladies, it might easily have nipped in the bud the
+germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly
+open to him. What had happily averted the
+need of his breaking off, what would as happily continue
+to avert it, was his own good sense and good
+humour, a certain spring of mind in him which ministered,
+imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances
+and which he had positively never felt such
+ground as just now to rejoice in the possession of.
+Many men&mdash;he practically made the reflexion&mdash;wouldn't
+have taken the matter that way, would have
+lost patience, finding the appeal in question irrational,
+exorbitant; and, thereby making short work with it,
+would have let it render any further acquaintance
+with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with
+Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and
+that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned,
+to sacrifice her. Such, however, had not been
+the tune to which his at first bewildered view had,
+since the night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so
+much that he failed of being the kind of man who
+"chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of man
+wise enough to mark the case in which chucking
+might be the minor evil and the least cruelty. It was
+that he liked too much every one concerned willingly
+to show himself merely impracticable. He liked Kate,
+goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked
+Mrs. Lowder. He liked in particular Milly herself;
+and hadn't it come up for him the evening before
+that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had
+never known himself so generally merciful. It was a
+footing, at all events, whatever accounted for it, on
+which he should surely be rather a muff not to manage
+by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should
+he find he couldn't work it there would still be time
+enough. The idea of working it crystallised before
+him in such guise as not only to promise much interest&mdash;fairly,
+in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
+positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
+</p><p>
+Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best
+intentions and with a margin consciously left for
+some primary awkwardness, he found his burden, to
+his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
+involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously
+traced for him turned round on the spot to present
+him another face. This was simply the face of his
+old impression, which he now fully recovered&mdash;the
+impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
+had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest
+people in the world. Had what had happened been
+that this specimen of the class was from the first so
+committed to ease that nothing subsequent <i>could</i> ever
+make her difficult? That affected him now as still
+more probable than on the occasion of the hour or two
+lately passed with her in Kate's society. Milly Theale
+had recognised no complication, to Densher's view,
+while bringing him, with his companion, from the
+National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon;
+it was therefore scarce supposable that complications
+had become so soon too much for her. His pretext for
+presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
+simplest; the least he could decently do, given their
+happy acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after
+learning that she had been prevented by illness from
+meeting him at dinner. And then there was the beautiful
+accident of her other demonstration; he must at
+any rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality
+he had shared with Kate. Well, he was giving one
+now&mdash;such as it was; he was finding her, to begin
+with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad
+to see him. He had come, after luncheon, early,
+though not so early but that she might already be out
+if she were well enough; and she was well enough and
+yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with
+this, of the comment Kate would have made on it;
+it wasn't absent from his thought that Milly would
+have been at home by <i>her</i> account because expecting,
+after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
+might turn up. He even&mdash;so pleasantly did things
+go&mdash;enjoyed freedom of mind to welcome, on that
+supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful hypocrisy of
+women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
+<i>might</i> have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy
+her behaving as if she hadn't. She expressed, that is,
+exactly the right degree of surprise; she didn't a bit
+overdo it: the lesson of which was, perceptibly, that,
+so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
+want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust
+her to take care of it for him as well as for herself.
+She had begun this, admirably, on his entrance,
+with her turning away from the table at which she
+had apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was
+the very possibility of his betraying a concern for her
+as one of the afflicted that she had within the first
+minute conjured away. She was never, never&mdash;did
+he understand?&mdash;to be one of the afflicted for him;
+and the manner in which he understood it, something
+of the answering pleasure that he couldn't help knowing
+he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
+acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy.
+When things like that could pass people had in truth
+to be equally conscious of a relation. It soon made
+one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She
+had let him ask&mdash;there had been time for that, his
+allusion to her friend's explanatory arrival at Lancaster
+Gate without her being inevitable; but she had
+blown away, and quite as much with the look in her
+eyes as with the smile on her lips, every ground for
+anxiety and every chance for insistence. How was
+she?&mdash;why she was as he thus saw her and as she
+had reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for
+desiring to appear. Kate's account of her as too proud
+for pity, as fiercely shy about so personal a secret,
+came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take a
+hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the
+girl had quickly disposed of&mdash;"Oh it was nothing:
+I'm all right, thank you!"&mdash;was one he was glad
+enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite
+of the appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair;
+for his interest had been invoked in the name of compassion,
+and the name of compassion was exactly
+what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden
+so much as to whisper. He had been sent to
+see her in order to be sorry for her, and how sorry he
+might be, quite privately, he was yet to make out.
+Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?&mdash;inasmuch
+as, whatever his upshot, he was never to
+give her a glimpse of it. Thus the ground was unexpectedly
+cleared; though it was not till a slightly
+longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with
+amusement and then with a strange shade of respect,
+what had most operated. Extraordinarily, quite
+amazingly, he began to see that if his pity hadn't had
+to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
+quite definitely to her own. That was the way the
+case had turned round: he had made his visit to be
+sorry for her, but he would repeat it&mdash;if he did repeat
+it&mdash;in order that she might be sorry for him.
+His situation made him, she judged&mdash;when once one
+liked him&mdash;a subject for that degree of tenderness:
+he felt this judgement in her, and felt it as something
+he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
+honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
+</p><p>
+Odd enough was it certainly that the question
+originally before him, the question placed there by
+Kate, should so of a sudden find itself quite dislodged
+by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
+straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and
+her wasted charity; the whole thing preparing for him
+as pretty a case of conscience as he could have desired,
+and one at the prospect of which he was already
+wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
+unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his
+passion for Kate had spent itself in vain; and if Kate
+was indifferent, inexorable, it was because she had
+left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
+came up for him&mdash;how clear an impression of this
+attitude, how definite an account of his own failure,
+Kate must have given her friend. His immediate
+quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for
+him almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as
+if the other party to their remarkable understanding
+had been with them as they talked, had been hovering
+about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
+value of the work affected him as different from the
+moment he saw it so expressed in poor Milly. Since it
+was false that he wasn't loved, so his right was quite
+quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
+if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating
+in a way quite at odds with straightness the
+good faith of Milly's benevolence. <i>There</i> was the
+place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
+what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to
+enjoy consideration on a perfectly false footing, where
+was the guarantee that, if he kept on, he mightn't
+soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not
+to miss the sweet? Consideration&mdash;from a charming
+girl&mdash;was soothing on whatever theory; and it
+didn't take him far to remember that he had himself
+as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description
+of him, his defeated state, it was none of his own;
+his responsibility would begin, as he might say, only
+with acting it out. The sharp point was, however, in
+the difference between acting and not acting: this
+difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience.
+He saw it with a certain alarm rise before
+him that everything was acting that was not speaking
+the particular word. "If you like me because you
+think <i>she</i> doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she <i>does</i> like me
+awfully!"&mdash;that would have been the particular
+word; which there were at the same time but too palpably
+such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't
+it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to
+leave her deluded?&mdash;and this quite apart from the
+exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would
+constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was
+something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he
+felt himself shrink from the complications involved
+in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved,
+but to back her up in her mistakes&mdash;once they had
+gone a certain length&mdash;that was perhaps chief
+among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love.
+Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence
+of any design on her part, however roundabout,
+to do one nothing but good.
+</p><p>
+Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck
+at the immensity of the good his own friend
+must on all this evidence have wanted to do him.
+Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
+Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of
+intervention. She would absolutely never say to him:
+"<i>Is</i> it so impossible she shall ever care for you seriously?"&mdash;without
+which nothing could well be less
+delicate than for him aggressively to set her right.
+Kate would be free to do that if Kate, in some prudence,
+some contrition, for some better reason in fine,
+should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
+failing this, <i>he</i> could do that wouldn't be after all
+more gross than doing nothing. This brought him
+round again to the acceptance of the fact that the poor
+girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own, on
+a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already
+supplied her with the pretext she required. The
+ground was there, that is, in the impression she had
+received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
+above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she
+now believed as she did made her sure at last that she
+might act; so that what Densher therefore would have
+struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a pure
+pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this
+pure pleasure, while the young man now sat with her,
+and there were things she seemed to say that took the
+words out of his mouth. These were not all the things
+she did say; they were rather what such things meant
+in the light of what he knew. Her warning him for
+instance off the question of how she was, the quick
+brave little art with which she did that, represented to
+his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for <i>you</i>&mdash;that's
+all you have to do with or need trouble
+about: I shall never be anything so horrid as ill for
+you. So there you are; worry about me, spare me,
+please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in short,
+to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see,
+even now while you sit here, that there aren't lots of
+others. Only do <i>them</i> justice and we shall get on
+beautifully." This was what was folded finely up in
+her talk&mdash;all quite ostensibly about her impressions
+and her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on
+his American doings, but he wouldn't have that to-day.
+As he thought of the way in which, the other
+afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently
+"jawing," he accused himself of excess, of having
+overdone it, having made&mdash;at least apparently&mdash;more
+of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
+events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing
+her out about London, about her vision of life there,
+and only too glad to treat her as a person with whom
+he could easily have other topics than her aches and
+pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence
+offered him at Lancaster Gate that she had come but
+to conquer; and when she had met this with full and
+gay assent&mdash;"How could I help being the feature
+of the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of
+every tongue?"&mdash;they fraternised freely over all that
+had come and gone for each since their interrupted
+encounter in New York.
+</p><p>
+At the same time, while many things in quick succession
+came up for them, came up in particular for
+Densher, nothing perhaps was just so sharp as the
+odd influence of their present conditions on their view
+of their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known
+how "thick" they had originally become, as if, in a
+manner, they had really fallen to remembrance of
+more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at
+the time quite been room for. They were in a relation
+now so complicated, whether by what they said or by
+what they didn't say, that it might have been seeking
+to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one of
+those fabulous periods in which prosperous states
+place their beginnings. He recalled what had been
+said at Mrs. Lowder's about the steps and stages, in
+people's careers, that absence caused one to miss, and
+about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them
+further on; which, with some other matters also recalled,
+he took occasion to communicate to Milly.
+The matters he couldn't mention mingled themselves
+with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been
+hard to say which of the two groups now played most
+of a part. He was kept face to face with this young
+lady by a force absolutely resident in their situation
+and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of the
+forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as
+beyond their control. The current thus determined
+had positively become for him, by the time he had
+been ten minutes in the room, something that, but
+for the absurdity of comparing the very small with
+the very great, he would freely have likened to the
+rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised acquaintance between
+a clever young man and a responsive young
+woman could do nothing more, at the most, than go,
+and his actual experiment went and went and went.
+Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as the
+marked circumstance that they had spoken all the
+while not a word about Kate; and this in spite of the
+fact that, if it were a question for them of what had
+occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
+comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had
+but the night before appealed to her for instruction as
+to what he must do about her, but he fairly winced to
+find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
+course how little; but it was a truth that looked different
+when shown him by Milly. It proved to him that
+the latter had in fact been dealt with, but it produced
+in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
+conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to
+speak to her before going further&mdash;to make sure she
+really meant him to succeed quite so much. With all
+the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it
+came up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit
+brief and never renew it; yet the strangest thing of
+all was that the argument against that issue would
+have sprung precisely from the beautiful little eloquence
+involved in Milly's avoidances.
+</p><p>
+Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised
+the fact that she was proceeding in the sense
+of the assurances she had taken. Over the latter she
+had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the
+merit of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her,
+felt her take it; the chance, neither more nor less, of
+help rendered him according to her freedom. It was
+what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, <i>I?</i>
+Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was
+to do, it thus appeared, as she was doing: our young
+man's glimpse of which was just what would have
+been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar brutality
+of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy
+fragrance of heroism, for it was not aided by any
+question of parting with Kate. She would be charming
+to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would
+incur whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight&mdash;should
+she continue to be exposed to the sight&mdash;of
+the adorer thrown with the adored. It wouldn't
+really have taken much more to make him wonder if
+he hadn't before him one of those rare cases of exaltation&mdash;food
+for fiction, food for poetry&mdash;in which a
+man's fortune with the woman who doesn't care for
+him is positively promoted by the woman who does.
+It was as if Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can
+at least meet her in my society, if that's anything to
+him; so that my line can only be to make my society
+attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a
+different impression if she <i>had</i> so reasoned. All of
+which, none the less, didn't prevent his soon enough
+saying to her, quite as if she were to be whirled into
+space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do
+you begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
+</p><p>
+She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put
+on what face she would, couldn't help betraying to
+him something of her suppressed view of the possibility&mdash;ever,
+ever perhaps&mdash;of any such proceedings.
+They weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no.
+We go abroad for a few weeks somewhere of high
+air. That has been before us for many days; we've
+only been kept on by last necessities here. However,
+everything's done and the wind's in our sails."
+</p><p>
+"May you scud then happily before it! But when,"
+he asked, "do you come back?"
+</p><p>
+She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it:
+"Oh when the wind turns. And what do you do with
+your summer?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary
+ink. My work in your country counts for play
+as well. You see what's thought of the pleasure your
+country can give. My holiday's over."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at
+such a different time from ours. If you could but
+have worked while we've been working&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction
+isn't so great with me. There's a little of
+each for me, of work and of play, in either. But you
+and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder&mdash;you
+all," he went on, "have been given up,
+like navvies or niggers, to real physical toil. Your
+rest is something you've earned and you need. My
+labour's comparatively light."
+</p><p>
+"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like
+mine."
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
+</p><p>
+"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested.
+Oh I could go far."
+</p><p>
+He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?&mdash;since
+you've got here, as I learn, the whole place in
+your pocket."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's a kind of economy&mdash;I'm saving things
+up. I've enjoyed so what you speak of&mdash;though
+your account of it's fantastic&mdash;that I'm watching
+over its future, that I can't help being anxious and
+careful. I want&mdash;in the interest itself of what I've
+had and may still have&mdash;not to make stupid mistakes.
+The way not to make them is to get off again
+to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall
+keep it fresh," she wound up as if herself rather
+pleased with the ingenuity of her statement&mdash;"I
+shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then you <i>will</i> return? Can you promise one
+that?"
+</p><p>
+Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise;
+but she made as if bargaining a little. "Isn't London
+rather awful in winter?"
+</p><p>
+He had been going to ask her if she meant for the
+invalid; but he checked the infelicity of this and took
+the enquiry as referring to social life. "No&mdash;I like it,
+with one thing and another; it's less of a mob than
+later on; and it would have for <i>us</i> the merit&mdash;should
+you come here then&mdash;that we should probably see
+more of you. So do reappear for us&mdash;if it isn't a
+question of climate."
+</p><p>
+She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't
+a question&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the determination of your movements. You
+spoke just now of going somewhere for that."
+</p><p>
+"For better air?"&mdash;she remembered. "Oh yes,
+one certainly wants to get out of London in August."
+</p><p>
+"Rather, of course!"&mdash;he fully understood.
+"Though I'm glad you've hung on long enough for
+me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
+"once more."
+</p><p>
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently
+asked.
+</p><p>
+It pulled him up an instant&mdash;representing, as he
+saw it might have seemed, an allusion to himself as
+conjoined with Kate, whom he was proposing not to
+mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
+was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll
+find ready to surround you with sympathy."
+</p><p>
+It made her, none the less, in her odd charming
+way, challenge him afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we <i>shall</i>
+feel for you will be much nearer worship."
+</p><p>
+"As near then as you like!" With which at last
+Kate's name was sounded. "The people I'd most
+come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
+for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind
+to me."
+</p><p>
+"So she has to <i>me</i>," said Densher. "I feel," he
+added as she at first answered nothing, "that, quite
+contrary to anything I originally expected, I've made
+a good friend of her."
+</p><p>
+"I didn't expect it either&mdash;its turning out as it
+has. But I did," said Milly, "with Kate. I shall
+come back for her too. I'd do anything"&mdash;she kept
+it up&mdash;"for Kate."
+</p><p>
+Looking at him as with conscious clearness while
+she spoke, she might for the moment have effectively
+laid a trap for whatever remains of the ideal straightness
+in him were still able to pull themselves together
+and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that
+something had at that moment hung for him by a
+hair. "Oh I know what one would do for Kate!"&mdash;it
+had hung for him by a hair to break out with that,
+which he felt he had really been kept from by an element
+in his consciousness stronger still. The proof
+of the truth in question was precisely in his silence;
+resisting the impulse to break out was what he was
+doing for Kate. This at the time moreover came and
+went quickly enough; he was trying the next minute
+but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself. "Of
+course I know what friends you are&mdash;and of course
+I understand," he permitted himself to add, "any
+amount of devotion to a person so charming. That's
+the good turn then she'll do us all&mdash;I mean her
+working for your return."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm
+really on her hands."
+</p><p>
+He could but accept the appearance of wondering
+how much he might show he knew. "Ah she's very
+masterful."
+</p><p>
+"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;that's not the way. At any rate it isn't
+hers," he smiled. He remembered, however, then
+that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways was
+just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject
+no further than to remark with a good intention
+that had the further merit of representing a truth:
+"I don't feel as if I knew her&mdash;really to call know."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she
+laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were
+uttered, a sense of responsibility for his own; though
+during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
+to recognise that his own contained after all no element
+of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that
+he could go too far&mdash;if it <i>was</i> too far&mdash;without being
+false. His observation was one he would perfectly
+have made to Kate herself. And before he again
+spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more
+still&mdash;for feeling how just here it was that he must
+break short off if his mind was really made up not to
+go further. It was as if he had been at a corner&mdash;and
+fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended
+on him whether or no to turn it. The silence, if prolonged
+but an instant, might even have given him a
+sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was
+filled for them the next thing by the sound, rather
+voluminous for the August afternoon, of the approach,
+in the street below them, of heavy carriage-wheels and
+of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great shake,
+a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently
+succeeded by a pause at the door of the hotel, which
+was in turn accompanied by a due display of diminished
+prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
+Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
+</p><p>
+"It's only my own carriage; it does that&mdash;isn't it
+wonderful?&mdash;every day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham
+and I, in the innocence of our hearts, very amusing."
+She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
+of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they
+were together on the balcony and looking down at her
+waiting chariot, which made indeed a brave show.
+"Is it very awful?"
+</p><p>
+It was to Densher's eyes&mdash;save for its absurd
+heaviness&mdash;only pleasantly pompous. "It seems to
+me delightfully rococo. But how do I know? You're
+mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
+wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to
+which your carriage&mdash;well, by this time, in the eye of
+London, also occupies one." But she was going out,
+and he mustn't stand in her way. What had happened
+the next minute was first that she had denied she was
+going out, so that he might prolong his stay; and
+second that she had said she would go out with pleasure
+if he would like to drive&mdash;that in fact there were
+always things to do, that there had been a question
+for her to-day of several in particular, and that this in
+short was why the carriage had been ordered so early.
+They perceived, as she said these things, that an enquirer
+had presented himself, and, coming back, they
+found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and
+prepared to accompany her. This appeared to have
+for her the effect of settling the matter&mdash;on the basis,
+that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
+happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the
+process we have described in him operating by this
+time with extreme intensity. The system of not pulling
+up, not breaking off, had already brought him
+headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually
+stood; and just now it was, with a vengeance, that he
+must do either one thing or the other. He had been
+waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
+him longer than they were; this was because he was
+anxiously watching himself wait. He couldn't keep
+that up for ever; and since one thing or the other was
+what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
+became conscious of having decided. If he had been
+drifting it settled itself in the manner of a bump, of
+considerable violence, against a firm object in the
+stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure. It's
+a charming idea."
+</p><p>
+She gave no look to thank him&mdash;she rather looked
+away; she only said at once to her servant, "In ten
+minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the man went
+out, "We'll go somewhere&mdash;I shall like that. But
+I must ask of you time&mdash;as little as possible&mdash;to get
+ready." She looked over the room to provide for him,
+keep him there. "There are books and things&mdash;plenty;
+and I dress very quickly." He caught her
+eyes only as she went, on which he thought them
+pretty and touching.
+</p><p>
+Why especially touching at that instant he could
+certainly scarce have said; it was involved, it was lost
+in the sense of her wishing to oblige him. Clearly
+what had occurred was her having wished it so that
+she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement,
+to oblige <i>her;</i> which he had now fully done by
+turning his corner. He was quite round it, his corner,
+by the time the door had closed upon her and he stood
+there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes
+more&mdash;remained with several very living little matters
+to think about. One of these was the phenomenon&mdash;typical,
+highly American, he would have said&mdash;of
+Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather
+as if he had sought refuge&mdash;refuge from another
+question&mdash;in the almost exclusive contemplation of
+this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even to
+a sound generalisation about American girls. It was
+spontaneous for his young friend to have asked him to
+drive with her alone&mdash;since she hadn't mentioned
+her companion; but she struck him after all as no
+more advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who
+wasn't an American girl, might have struck him in
+not doing it. Besides, Kate <i>would</i> have done it,
+though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
+spontaneous. And then in addition Kate <i>had</i> done it&mdash;or
+things very like it. Furthermore he was engaged
+to Kate&mdash;even if his ostensibly not being put
+her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds,
+at any rate, the relation between Kate and freedom,
+between freedom and Kate, was a different one from
+any he could associate or cultivate, as to anything,
+with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
+herself up to him. It had never struck him before,
+and he moved about the room while he thought of it,
+touching none of the books placed at his disposal.
+Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
+whereas Kate was backward&mdash;backward still,
+comparatively, as an English girl&mdash;and yet advanced
+in a high degree. However&mdash;though this
+didn't straighten it out&mdash;Kate was of course two or
+three years older; which at their time of life considerably
+counted.
+</p><p>
+Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued
+slowly to wander; yet without keeping at bay for
+long the sense of having rounded his corner. He
+had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even
+the option of taking advantage of Milly's absence to
+retrace his steps. If he might have turned tail, vulgarly
+speaking, five minutes before, he couldn't turn
+tail now; he must simply wait there with his consciousness
+charged to the brim. Quickly enough
+moreover that issue was closed from without; in the
+course of three minutes more Miss Theale's servant
+had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had
+met, obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom,
+throwing open the door, he loudly announced as Miss
+Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped short at
+sight of Densher&mdash;only, after an instant, as the
+young man saw with free amusement, not from surprise
+and still less from discomfiture. Densher immediately
+gave his explanation&mdash;Miss Theale had gone
+to prepare to drive&mdash;on receipt of which the servant
+effaced himself.
+</p><p>
+"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;with your approval; which I've taken, as
+you see, for granted."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!"
+She was thoroughly consistent and handsome about
+it.
+</p><p>
+"What I mean is of course," he went on&mdash;for he
+was sensibly affected by her gaiety&mdash;"at your so
+lively instigation."
+</p><p>
+She had looked about the room&mdash;she might have
+been vaguely looking for signs of the duration, of the
+character of his visit, a momentary aid in taking a
+decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you
+like." She treated it as pleasant, the success of her
+plea with him; she made a fresh joke of this direct
+impression of it. "So much so as that? Do you know
+I think I won't wait?"
+</p><p>
+"Not to see her&mdash;after coming?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, with you in the field&mdash;! I came for news of
+her, but she must be all right. If she <i>is</i>&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?"
+He was moved to say more. "It's not I who am responsible
+for her, my dear. It seems to me it's you."
+She struck him as making light of a matter that had
+been costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't
+both be quite just. Either she was too easy or he had
+been too anxious. He didn't want at all events to feel
+a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing&mdash;and shall not,
+I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
+</p><p>
+Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis
+he had given his words; and he had taken it
+from her the next moment that he really needn't get
+into a state. What in the world was the matter? She
+asked it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she
+better&mdash;if she's able to see you?"
+</p><p>
+"She assures me she's in perfect health."
+</p><p>
+Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On
+which she added: "It won't have been really for illness
+that she stayed away last night."
+</p><p>
+"For what then?"
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;for nervousness."
+</p><p>
+"Nervousness about what?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience,
+smiling however the next moment. "I've
+told you that."
+</p><p>
+He looked at her to recover in her face what she
+had told him; then it was as if what he saw there
+prompted him to say: "What have you told <i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as
+if they remembered where they were, liable to surprise,
+talking with softened voices, even stretching
+their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
+feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and
+yet they were saying things&mdash;! For a moment, none
+the less, they kept it up. "Ask <i>her</i>, if you like; you're
+free&mdash;she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
+trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have
+told. I'm all right with her," said Kate. "So there
+you are."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean <i>here</i> I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable.
+If you also mean that her believing in
+you is all I have to do with you're so far right as that
+she certainly does believe in you."
+</p><p>
+"Well then take example by her."
+</p><p>
+"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued.
+"She's driving me out for you."
+</p><p>
+"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity,
+"you can do it a little for <i>her</i>. I'm not afraid,"
+she smiled.
+</p><p>
+He stood before her a moment, taking in again the
+face she put on it and affected again, as he had already
+so often been, by more things in this face and
+in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
+relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under
+such impressions, a question of words. "I do nothing
+for any one in the world but you. But for you I'll do
+anything."
+</p><p>
+"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
+</p><p>
+He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to
+it?"
+</p><p>
+"To 'it'? To what?"
+</p><p>
+"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that,
+you know, that I'm letting you do&mdash;well, God knows
+what with me."
+</p><p>
+She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture&mdash;the
+sense of which she immediately further expressed.
+"If you don't believe in me then, after all,
+hadn't you better break off before you've gone
+further?"
+</p><p>
+"Break off with you?"
+</p><p>
+"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she
+said, "and I'll stay and explain to her why it is."
+</p><p>
+He wondered&mdash;as if it struck him. "What would
+you say?"
+</p><p>
+"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that
+there's nothing for me but to bear with you as I best
+may."
+</p><p>
+He considered of this. "How much do you abuse
+me to her?"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
+</p><p>
+Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought
+to mind her attitude."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my
+best for you."
+</p><p>
+He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a
+chance; and that of itself made things clearer. The
+feeling of how far he had gone came back to him not
+in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
+and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate
+offered, that he now weighed the consequence.
+"Won't it make her&mdash;her not finding me here&mdash;be
+rather more sure there's something between us?"
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course
+greatly upset her. But you needn't trouble about
+that. She won't die of it."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean she <i>will?</i>" Densher presently asked.
+</p><p>
+"Don't put me questions when you don't believe
+what I say. You make too many conditions."
+</p><p>
+She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness
+that made the want of pliancy, the failure to oblige
+her, look poor and ugly; so that what it suddenly
+came back to for him was his deficiency in the things
+a man of any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would
+have liked to make sure of being able to show&mdash;imagination,
+tact, positively even humour. The circumstance
+is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the
+less that the speculation uppermost with him at this
+juncture was: "What if I should begin to bore this
+creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
+translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love
+me&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+She looked about, at door and window, as if he
+were asking for more than he said. "Here? There's
+nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
+</p><p>
+"Oh <i>isn't</i> there?" Her smile itself, with this, had
+so settled something for him that he had come to her
+pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately
+seized with her own as if both to check him
+and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a
+minute that she did check him; she held him long
+enough, while, with their eyes deeply meeting, they
+waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew
+his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the
+sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely
+one of her usual victories, which immediately took
+further form. By the time he had dropped her hands
+he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It was
+not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all
+you wish," he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance
+of his condition that he had practically,
+after all, drawn from her&mdash;a declaration on which
+she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
+</p><p>
+"If you <i>are</i> as good as that I go. You'll tell her
+that, finding you with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that,
+you know, from yourself. She'll understand."
+</p><p>
+She had reached the door with it&mdash;she was full of
+decision; but he had before she left him one more
+doubt. "I don't see how she can understand enough,
+you know, without understanding too much."
+</p><p>
+"You don't need to see."
+</p><p>
+He required then a last injunction. "I must simply
+go it blind?"
+</p><p>
+"You must simply be kind to her."
+</p><p>
+"And leave the rest to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Leave the rest to <i>her</i>," said Kate disappearing.
+</p><p>
+It came back then afresh to that, as it had come
+before. Milly, three minutes after Kate had gone,
+returned in her array&mdash;her big black hat, so little
+superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
+throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher
+vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of
+priceless lace, and which, its folded fabric kept in
+place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
+like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once
+of their friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known
+she'd find me," he said&mdash;and said at present without
+difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it
+wasn't a question of a word more or less.
+</p><p>
+She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient;
+she glossed over whatever might be awkward.
+"I'm sorry&mdash;but I of course often see <i>her</i>." He felt
+the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
+Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was
+left to her. Well, it should now be wholly left.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK SEVENTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs.
+Stringham on the day of her meeting them together
+and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to face
+with that companion, had had one of those moments
+in which the warned, the anxious fighter of the battle
+of life, as if once again feeling for the sword at his
+side, carries his hand straight to the quarter of his
+courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the
+two women stood there showing each other a strange
+front. Susan Shepherd had received their great doctor's
+visit, which had been clearly no small affair for
+her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
+in place, against communication and betrayal, as she
+now practically confessed, the barrier of their invited
+guests. "You've been too dear. With what I see
+you're full of you treated them beautifully. <i>Isn't</i>
+Kate charming when she wants to be?"
+</p><p>
+Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in
+a high fine spasm, with different dangers, had now
+quite let itself go. She had to make an effort to reach
+a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh
+she was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham
+added. "She knew."
+</p><p>
+Milly braced herself&mdash;but conscious above all, at
+the moment, of a high compassion for her mate. She
+made her out as struggling&mdash;struggling in all her
+nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself,
+given her nature, could only be a torment. Milly
+gathered from the struggle how much there was of
+the pity, and how therefore it was both in her tenderness
+and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
+Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression
+instantly steadied the girl. Ruefully asking
+herself on what basis of ease, with the drop of their
+barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt
+the question met with a relief that was almost joy.
+The basis, the inevitable basis, was that she was going
+to be sorry for Susie, who, to all appearance, had been
+condemned in so much more uncomfortable a manner
+to be sorry for <i>her</i>. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow
+would hurt Mrs. Stringham, but how could her own
+ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at all events, on the
+spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
+the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture
+of an energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate
+knew," she asked, "that you were full of Sir Luke
+Strett?"
+</p><p>
+"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice;
+she seemed to want to help me through." Which the
+good lady had no sooner said, however, than she almost
+tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly
+with a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she
+saw one had been taken up with something. When I
+say she knows I should say she's a person who
+guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side,
+heroic. "But <i>she</i> doesn't matter, Milly."
+</p><p>
+The girl felt she by this time could face anything.
+"Nobody matters, Susie. Nobody." Which her next
+words, however, rather contradicted. "Did he take it
+ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
+just what he wanted&mdash;to have it out, so much more
+simply, with <i>you</i>?"
+</p><p>
+"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs.
+Stringham delicately quavered.
+</p><p>
+"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on,
+"and didn't he think you the most charming person
+I could possibly have referred him to for an account
+of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together
+and in fact fall quite in love, so that it will really be
+a great advantage for you to have me as a common
+ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end of
+a good thing of me."
+</p><p>
+"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham
+pleadingly murmured; yet showing as she did so that
+she feared the effect even of deprecation.
+</p><p>
+"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?&mdash;altogether,
+whatever he may say, a lovely acquaintance
+to have made? You're just the right people for me&mdash;I
+see it now; and do you know what, between you,
+you must do?" Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck
+and holding herself: "You must simply
+see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out
+together. I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and
+we'll be&mdash;the three of us, with whatever others, oh
+as many as the case requires, any one you like!&mdash;a
+sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying
+a feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence
+that her young friend almost saw her&mdash;and scarcely
+withheld the observation&mdash;as taking it for "a part of
+the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
+she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate
+awfully interesting, isn't he?&mdash;which is so much to
+the good. We haven't at least&mdash;as we might have,
+with the way we tumbled into it&mdash;got hold of one of
+the dreary."
+</p><p>
+"Interesting, dearest?"&mdash;Mrs. Stringham felt
+her feet firmer. "I don't know if he's interesting or
+not; but I do know, my own," she continued to
+quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you
+could possibly desire."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly&mdash;that's it. Like all the world."
+</p><p>
+"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very
+much more deeply and intelligently."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the
+way, Susie, I want you. So 'buck' up, my dear.
+We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't worry."
+</p><p>
+"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face
+registered the sublimity of her lie.
+</p><p>
+It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her
+companion went to her, met by her with an embrace
+in which things were said that exceeded speech. Each
+held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
+unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning
+the torment of helplessness, the woe for Milly
+of having <i>her</i>, at such a time, to think of. Milly's
+assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
+friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without
+bringing it more to the proof than tenderness and
+vagueness could permit. Nothing in fact came to the
+proof between them but that they could thus cling
+together&mdash;except indeed that, as we have indicated,
+the pledge of protection and support was all the
+younger woman's own. "I don't ask you," she presently
+said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what
+he told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that
+I had left him to you, nor what passed between you
+about me in any way. It wasn't to get that out of you
+that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
+freely&mdash;for there are things I don't want to know. I
+shall see him again and again and shall know more
+than enough. All I do want is that you shall see me
+through on <i>his</i> basis, whatever it is; which it's enough&mdash;for
+the purpose&mdash;that you yourself should know:
+that is with him to show you how. I'll make it charming
+for you&mdash;that's what I mean; I'll keep you up
+to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
+you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me.
+There. It's understood. We keep each other going,
+and you may absolutely feel of me that I shan't break
+down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a
+dig of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
+</p><p>
+"He told me I <i>can</i> help you&mdash;of course he told
+me that," Susie, on her side, eagerly contended.
+"Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I come
+out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful&mdash;nothing,
+nothing, nothing," the poor lady passionately
+protested. "Only that you must do as you like
+and as he tells you&mdash;which <i>is</i> just simply to do as
+you like."
+</p><p>
+"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to
+time go to him. But that's of course doing as I like.
+It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I like going to him."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave
+a clutch at the account of their situation that most
+showed it as workable. "That's what <i>will</i> be charming
+for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me&mdash;to
+help you to do as you like."
+</p><p>
+"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed,
+"to save me from the consequences? Of course,"
+she added, "there must first <i>be</i> things I like."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham
+more bravely said. "I think there <i>are</i> some&mdash;as for
+instance just this one. I mean," she explained,
+"really having us so."
+</p><p>
+Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable
+about <i>him</i>, and him the same about you? Yes&mdash;I
+shall get the good of it."
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this
+into a slight confusion. "Which of them are you talking
+of?"
+</p><p>
+Milly wondered an instant&mdash;then had a light.
+"I'm not talking of Mr. Densher." With which
+moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you
+can be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much
+the better."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's
+a fine type. Do you know," Susie continued, "whom
+he reminds me of? Of <i>our</i> great man&mdash;Dr. Buttrick
+of Boston."
+</p><p>
+Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she
+dropped him after a tributary pause. "What do you
+think, now that you've seen him, of Mr. Densher?"
+</p><p>
+It was not till after consideration, with her eyes
+fixed on her friend's, that Susie produced her answer.
+"I think he's very handsome."
+</p><p>
+Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on
+a little the manner of a teacher with a pupil. "Well,
+that will do for the first time. I <i>have</i> done," she went
+on, "what I wanted."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's all <i>we</i> want. You see there are plenty
+of things."
+</p><p>
+Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best
+is not to know&mdash;that includes them all. I don't&mdash;I
+don't know. Nothing about anything&mdash;except that
+you're <i>with</i> me. Remember that, please. There
+won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall
+forget. So it's all right."
+</p><p>
+The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended,
+to sustain Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into
+the reassuring. "Most certainly it's all right. I think
+you ought to understand that he sees no reason&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly
+had taken it straight up, as to understand it and for
+a moment consider it. But she disposed of it otherwise.
+"Oh of course I know <i>that</i>." She spoke as if
+her friend's point were small.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what
+I mean is that he didn't say to me anything that he
+hasn't said to yourself."
+</p><p>
+"Really?&mdash;I would in his place!" She might
+have been disappointed, but she had her good humour.
+"He tells me to <i>live</i>"&mdash;and she oddly limited
+the word.
+</p><p>
+It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you
+want more?"
+</p><p>
+"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,'
+as I assure you, anything. Still," she added, "I <i>am</i>
+living. Oh yes, I'm living."
+</p><p>
+It put them again face to face, but it had wound
+Mrs. Stringham up. "So am I then, you'll see!"&mdash;she
+spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet it was
+her wisdom now&mdash;meaning by it as much as she did&mdash;not
+to say more than that. She had risen by Milly's
+aid to a certain command of what was before them;
+the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made her
+more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of
+a new idea. It was really perhaps an old idea with a
+new value; it had at all events begun during the last
+hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special
+light. That was because in the morning darkness
+had so suddenly descended&mdash;a sufficient shade of
+night to bring out the power of a star. The dusk
+might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
+cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time
+on continued to twinkle for her. It was for the moment,
+after her passage with Milly, the one spark
+left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued
+to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir
+Luke Strett's visit and that the impressions immediately
+following had done no more than fix it. Milly's
+reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels&mdash;or, so
+oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being
+at Milly's&mdash;had contributed to this effect, though it
+was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that
+Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned during
+the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed
+while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable
+advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and
+the young man were conjoined in the other. If it
+hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which
+it was capable, this was because the poor lady still sat
+in her primary gloom, the gloom the great benignant
+doctor had practically left behind him.
+</p><p>
+The intensity the circumstance in question <i>might</i>
+wear to the informed imagination would have been
+sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt&mdash;and with other
+things to our purpose&mdash;in two or three of those confidential
+passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now
+permitted herself. She hadn't yet been so glad that
+she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't had,
+at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she
+should certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion
+had ceased to consist of silence; silence was gross
+and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however
+tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster
+Gate the morning after the colloquy just noted;
+and there, in Maud Manningham's own sanctum,
+she gradually found relief in giving an account of
+herself. An account of herself was one of the things
+that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself
+regularly to give&mdash;the regularity depending of
+course much on such tests of merit as might, by laws
+beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
+herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of
+how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she
+for the most part found herself able to make. What
+had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt,
+was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
+inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of
+herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first
+instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please
+let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation,
+at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for
+that purpose; and the power happily came to her with
+the good opportunity. She cried and cried at first&mdash;she
+confined herself to that; it was for the time the
+best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
+intelligently took it as such, though knocking off
+a note or two more, as she said, while Susie sat near
+her table. She could resist the contagion of tears, but
+her patience did justice to her visitor's most vivid
+plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry
+again&mdash;at least not ever with <i>her;</i> so I must take it
+out when I can. Even if she does herself it won't be
+for me to give away; for what would that be but a
+confession of despair? I'm not with her for that&mdash;I'm
+with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly
+won't cry herself."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she
+won't have occasion to."
+</p><p>
+"She won't even if she does have occasion. She
+won't shed a tear. There's something that will prevent
+her."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in
+spite of her friend's doubt, and it was with this that
+her communication took consistent form. It had
+never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted,
+that kept <i>her</i> from crying when other things made for
+it; it had only been that these same things, at such
+times, made still more for business, arrangements,
+correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling
+of servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying
+now," she said, "if I weren't writing letters"&mdash;and
+this quite without harshness for her anxious companion,
+to whom she allowed just the administrative
+margin for difference. She had interrupted her no
+more than she would have interrupted the piano-tuner.
+It gave poor Susie time; and when Mrs. Lowder,
+to save appearances and catch the post, had,
+with her addressed and stamped notes, met at the
+door of the room the footman summoned by the pressure
+of a knob, the facts of the case were sufficiently
+ready for her. It took but two or three, however,
+given their importance, to lay the ground for the great
+one&mdash;Mrs. Stringham's interview of the day before
+with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her about
+Milly.
+</p><p>
+"He had wished it himself?"
+</p><p>
+"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was.
+He stayed a quarter of an hour. I could see that for
+<i>him</i> it was long. He's interested," said Mrs. Stringham.
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean in her case?"
+</p><p>
+"He says it <i>isn't</i> a case."
+</p><p>
+"What then is it?"
+</p><p>
+"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained,
+"the case she believed it to be&mdash;thought it at any
+rate <i>might</i> be&mdash;when, without my knowledge, she
+went to see him. She went because there was something
+she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly&mdash;he
+has made sure. She's wrong&mdash;she
+hasn't what she thought."
+</p><p>
+"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
+</p><p>
+"He didn't tell me."
+</p><p>
+"And you didn't ask?"
+</p><p>
+"I asked nothing," said poor Susie&mdash;"I only took
+what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had
+to&mdash;he was beautiful," she went on. "He <i>is</i>, thank
+God, interested."
+</p><p>
+"He must have been interested in <i>you</i>, dear,"
+Maud Manningham observed with kindness.
+</p><p>
+Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I
+think he <i>is</i>. I mean that he sees what he can do with
+me."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For <i>her</i>."
+</p><p>
+"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must.
+He can use me to the last bone, and he likes at least
+that. He says the great thing for her is to be happy."
+</p><p>
+"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why,
+therefore," Mrs. Lowder handsomely asked, "should
+we cry so hard about it?"
+</p><p>
+"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange,
+so beyond us. I mean if she can't be."
+</p><p>
+"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles.
+"She <i>shall</i> be."
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we
+<i>can</i> help."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way,
+what Sir Luke Strett thought. She sat back there,
+her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed
+matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
+dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the
+matter one by one, into her capacious apron. "But is
+that all he came to you for&mdash;to tell you she must
+be happy?"
+</p><p>
+"That she must be <i>made</i> so&mdash;that's the point. It
+seemed enough, as he told me," Mrs. Stringham went
+on; "he makes it somehow such a grand possible
+affair."
+</p><p>
+"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
+</p><p>
+"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it
+to me, that is, as <i>my</i> part. The rest's his own."
+</p><p>
+"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. <i>His</i> business. He means to keep
+hold of her."
+</p><p>
+"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must
+be very much of one."
+</p><p>
+Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the
+extent of it. "It's only that it isn't <i>the</i> case she herself
+supposed."
+</p><p>
+"It's another?"
+</p><p>
+"It's another."
+</p><p>
+"Examining her for what she supposed he finds
+something else?"
+</p><p>
+"Something else."
+</p><p>
+"And what does he find?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from
+knowing!"
+</p><p>
+"He didn't tell you that?"
+</p><p>
+But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I
+mean is that if it's there I shall know in time. He's
+considering, but I can trust him for it&mdash;because he
+does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
+</p><p>
+"He's in other words not sure?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he
+means. She's to get away now, but to come back to
+him in three months."
+</p><p>
+"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he
+oughtn't meanwhile to scare us."
+</p><p>
+It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled
+in the great doctor's cause. This came out at
+least in her glimmer of reproach. "Does it scare us
+to enlist us for her happiness?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it
+scares <i>me</i>. I'm always scared&mdash;I may call it so&mdash;till
+I understand. What happiness is he talking
+about?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you
+know!"
+</p><p>
+She had really said it so that her friend had to take
+it; which the latter in fact after a moment showed
+herself as having done. A strange light humour in
+the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
+with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems
+to see. The point is&mdash;!" But, fairly too full now of
+her question, she dropped.
+</p><p>
+"The point is will it <i>cure?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy&mdash;the specific?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs.
+Stringham delicately declared.
+</p><p>
+"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
+</p><p>
+"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan
+Shepherd enquired.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
+</p><p>
+Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a
+break into momentary mirth, which operated&mdash;and
+happily too&mdash;as a challenge to her visitor's spirit.
+"Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But
+it's something to know he thinks it good for us."
+</p><p>
+"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes
+me we know it without him. So that when <i>that's</i>
+all he has to tell us&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.'
+I feel Sir Luke will have more; he won't have put
+me off with anything inadequate. I'm to see him
+again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So
+it won't be for nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has
+somebody of his own to propose? Do you mean you
+told him nothing?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I
+showed him I understood him. That was all I could
+do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit; but I felt,
+even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what
+I had from you night before last."
+</p><p>
+"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we
+had left her with Kate?"
+</p><p>
+"You had <i>seen</i>, apparently, in three minutes. And
+now that he's here, now that I've met him and had
+my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs. Stringham,
+"that you've been magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked
+Maud Manningham, "was I anything else? But
+Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
+Densher."
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man
+one loves. But we're going fast!" Mrs. Stringham
+woefully smiled.
+</p><p>
+"The thing <i>is</i> to go fast if I see the case right. What
+had I after all but my instinct of that on coming back
+with you, night before last, to pick up Kate? I felt
+what I felt&mdash;I knew in my bones the man had returned."
+</p><p>
+"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent.
+But wait," said Mrs. Stringham, "till you've seen
+him."
+</p><p>
+"I shall see him immediately"&mdash;Mrs. Lowder
+took it up with decision. "What is then," she asked,
+"your impression?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her
+doubts. "How can he ever care for her?"
+</p><p>
+Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner,
+sat on it. "By being put in the way of it."
+</p><p>
+"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed,
+"<i>put</i> him in the way! You have him, one feels, in
+your hand."
+</p><p>
+Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's.
+"Is that your impression of him?"
+</p><p>
+"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle
+every one."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd
+now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing
+that she pleased her. But there was a great limitation.
+"I don't handle Kate."
+</p><p>
+It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet
+had from her&mdash;something the sense of which made
+Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you mean Kate cares
+for <i>him?</i>"
+</p><p>
+That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to
+this moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend's
+quick question had produced a change in her face.
+She blinked&mdash;then looked at the question hard;
+after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed
+herself or had only reached a decision and then been
+affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's surprise,
+she accepted all results. What took place in her for
+Susan Shepherd was not simply that she made the
+best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them
+to her purpose than she could have imagined. A
+certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition:
+she had been keeping back, very hard, an important
+truth, and wouldn't have liked to hear that
+she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
+felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her
+for not having thought of it. What Susie indeed,
+however, most thought of at present, in the quick,
+new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
+She had time for that view while she waited for
+an answer to her cry. "Kate thinks she cares. But
+she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These things,
+distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort.
+Yet they weren't all of it. "<i>You</i> don't know it&mdash;that
+must be your line. Or rather your line must be
+that you deny it utterly."
+</p><p>
+"Deny that she cares for him?"
+</p><p>
+"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does.
+Positively and absolutely. Deny that you've so much
+as heard of it."
+</p><p>
+Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean&mdash;if
+she asks?"
+</p><p>
+"To Milly, naturally. No one else <i>will</i> ask."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment,
+"Milly won't."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for <i>me</i>.
+I lie badly."
+</p><p>
+"<i>I</i> lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost
+snorted, "when, as sometimes will happen, there's
+nothing else so good. One must always do the best.
+But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we
+can work it out." Her interest had risen; her friend
+saw her, as within some minutes, more enrolled and
+inflamed&mdash;presently felt in her what had made the
+difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried
+this at the time but dimly; she only made out at first
+that Maud had found a reason for helping her. The
+reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud too,
+for which she now desired to profess herself ready
+even to lying. What really perhaps most came out
+for her was that her hostess was a little disappointed
+at her doubt of the social solidity of this appliance;
+and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The
+truth about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented
+it, the delusion about the state of her affections, which
+might be removed&mdash;this was apparently the ground
+on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs.
+Stringham saw herself recruited for the removal of
+Kate's delusion&mdash;by arts, however, in truth, that she
+as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it perhaps to be
+only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?&mdash;success in
+which indeed might entail other successes. Before that
+job, unfortunately, her heart had already failed. She
+felt that she believed in her bones what Milly believed,
+and what would now make working for Milly such
+a dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly
+present&mdash;a cloud of questions out of which
+Maud Manningham's large seated self loomed, however,
+as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact
+for the consultative relation something of the form of
+an oracle. From the oracle the sound did come&mdash;or
+at any rate the sense did, a sense all accordant with
+the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
+sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that
+comes off I shall be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"&mdash;a
+view into which Mrs. Stringham could now sufficiently
+enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange
+to say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at
+least to Kate's good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble
+anxiety measured it. She found herself in short not
+caring what became of Kate&mdash;only convinced at
+bottom of the predominance of Kate's star. Kate
+wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't pathetic; Kate Croy,
+whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
+She saw moreover by this time that her friend was
+travelling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder
+had already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action,
+a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You
+must stay on a few days, and you must immediately,
+both of you, meet him at dinner." In addition to
+which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct
+of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights
+before, to prepare that ground. "The poor child,
+when I was with her there while you were getting
+your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me.
+Though it was nothing more," Susie did herself the
+justice to observe, "than what I too had quite felt."
+</p><p>
+But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she
+wondered what she had said. "I suppose I ought
+to be edified at what you can so beautifully give up."
+</p><p>
+"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I
+give up nothing&mdash;I cling."
+</p><p>
+Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with
+some stiffness to her great brass-bound cylinder-desk
+and giving a push to an object or two disposed there.
+"I give up then. You know how little such a person
+as Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know
+what I've been thinking perfectly possible."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you've been great"&mdash;Susie was perfectly
+fair. "A duke, a duchess, a princess, a palace: you've
+made me believe in them too. But where we break
+down is that <i>she</i> doesn't believe in them. Luckily
+for her&mdash;as it seems to be turning out&mdash;she doesn't
+want them. So what's one to do? I assure you
+I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream
+now."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so
+fully her meaning that Mrs. Lowder could but show
+herself as taking it in. They sat a moment longer
+confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
+</p><p>
+"If it <i>will</i> do anything for her."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do;
+but she spoke for the instant of something else. "It
+does provoke me a bit, you know&mdash;for of course I'm
+a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things.
+Yet it doesn't prevent the fact that we must be
+decent."
+</p><p>
+"We must take her"&mdash;Mrs. Stringham carried
+that out&mdash;"as she is."
+</p><p>
+"And we must take Mr. Densher as <i>he</i> is." With
+which Mrs. Lowder gave a sombre laugh. "It's a
+pity he isn't better!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined,
+"you'd have liked him for your niece; and in that
+case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie added,
+"interfere with <i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"She interferes with me as it is&mdash;not that it matters
+now. But I saw Kate and her&mdash;really as soon as
+you came to me&mdash;set up side by side. I saw your
+girl&mdash;I don't mind telling&mdash;you helping my girl;
+and when I say that," Mrs. Lowder continued,
+"you'll probably put in for yourself that it was part
+of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what
+I give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line,"
+she further set forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye
+to it all. Good-day to Mrs. Densher! Heavens!"
+she growled.
+</p><p>
+Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher
+my girl will be somebody."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs.
+Lowder, "we're talking in the air."
+</p><p>
+Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving
+everything out."
+</p><p>
+"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder
+had another thought. "<i>He's</i> not quite nobody
+either." It brought her back to the question she had
+already put and which her friend hadn't at the time
+dealt with. "What in fact do you make of him?"
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even
+to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained
+general. "He's charming."
+</p><p>
+She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme
+pointedness in her own to which people resort
+when they are not quite candid&mdash;a circumstance that
+had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
+</p><p>
+The effect of the words, however, was equally
+marked; they almost determined in Mrs. Stringham
+a return of amusement. "I thought you didn't like
+him!"
+</p><p>
+"I don't like him for Kate."
+</p><p>
+"But you don't like him for Milly either."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend
+also got up. "I like him, my dear, for myself."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's the best way of all."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for
+my niece, and he's not good enough for you. One's
+an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
+</p><p>
+"Oh <i>I'm</i> not&mdash;not either," Susie declared.
+</p><p>
+But her companion kept on. "One lives for others.
+<i>You</i> do that. If I were living for myself I shouldn't
+at all mind him."
+</p><p>
+But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find
+him charming it's however I'm living."
+</p><p>
+Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire
+but an instant, giving herself away with a laugh.
+"Of course he's all right in himself."
+</p><p>
+"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve;
+and the note in question&mdash;what Merton Densher
+was "in himself"&mdash;closed practically, with
+some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It had at least made the difference for them, they
+could feel, of an informed state in respect to the great
+doctor, whom they were now to take as watching,
+waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to himself
+some such process before he should make up his
+mind. Mrs. Stringham understood him as considering
+the matter meanwhile in a spirit that, on this
+same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come back
+to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed
+the course of his reckoning. If what they had talked
+of <i>could</i> happen&mdash;if Milly, that is, could have her
+thoughts taken off herself&mdash;it wouldn't do any
+harm and might conceivably do much good. If it
+couldn't happen&mdash;if, anxiously, though tactfully
+working, they themselves, conjoined, could do nothing
+to contribute to it&mdash;they would be in no worse
+a box than before. Only in this latter case the girl
+would have had her free range for the summer, for the
+autumn; she would have done her best in the sense
+enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her
+eminent man, would&mdash;besides having more to show
+him&mdash;find him more ready to go on with her. It
+was visible further to Susan Shepherd&mdash;as well as
+being ground for a second report to her old friend&mdash;that
+Milly did her part for a working view of the
+general case, inasmuch as she mentioned frankly and
+promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir
+Luke Strett and thank him. She even specified what
+she was to thank him for, his having been so easy
+about her behaviour.
+</p><p>
+"You see I didn't know that&mdash;for the liberty I
+took&mdash;I shouldn't afterwards get a stiff note from
+him."
+</p><p>
+So much Milly had said to her, and it had made
+her a trifle rash. "Oh you'll never get a stiff note
+from him in your life."
+</p><p>
+She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her
+young friend's question. "Why not, as well as any
+one else who has played him a trick?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick.
+He could understand your action. It's all right, you
+see."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;I do see. It <i>is</i> all right. He's easier with
+me than with any one else, because that's the way
+to let me down. He's only making believe, and I'm
+not worth hauling up."
+</p><p>
+Rueful at having provoked again this ominous
+flare, poor Susie grasped at her only advantage.
+"Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
+of trifling with you?"
+</p><p>
+She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion
+gave her&mdash;a strange half-amused perception
+of what she made of it. "Well, so far as it's
+trifling with me to pity me so much."
+</p><p>
+"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned.
+"He just&mdash;the same as any one else&mdash;likes you."
+</p><p>
+"He has no business then to like me. He's not
+the same as any one else."
+</p><p>
+"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
+</p><p>
+Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful
+smile. "Ah there you are!" Mrs. Stringham
+coloured, for there indeed she was again. But Milly
+let her off. "Work for me, all the same&mdash;work for
+me! It's of course what I want." Then as usual she
+embraced her friend. "I'm not going to be as nasty
+as this to <i>him</i>."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I hope not!"&mdash;and Mrs. Stringham
+laughed for the kiss. "I've no doubt, however, he'd
+take it from you! It's <i>you</i>, my dear, who are not the
+same as any one else."
+</p><p>
+Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her
+the last word. "No, so that people can take anything
+from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did indeed
+resignedly take after this was the absence on
+her part of any account of the visit then paid. It was
+the beginning in fact between them of an odd independence&mdash;an
+independence positively of action
+and custom&mdash;on the subject of Milly's future. They
+went their separate ways with the girl's intense assent;
+this being really nothing but what she had so wonderfully
+put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
+encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the
+idea that Susie had or was to have other encounters&mdash;private
+pointed personal; she favoured every idea,
+but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on
+as if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be
+worked for that would be her way; and though her
+companions learned from herself nothing of it this
+was in the event her way with her medical adviser.
+She put her visit to him on the simplest ground; she
+had come just to tell him how touched she had been
+by his good nature. That required little explaining,
+for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood
+he could but reply that it was all right.
+</p><p>
+"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that
+clever lady. You've got good friends."
+</p><p>
+"So each one of them thinks of all the others.
+But so I also think," Milly went on, "of all of them
+together. You're excellent for each other. And it's
+in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
+</p><p>
+There came to her on this occasion one of the
+strangest of her impressions, which was at the same
+time one of the finest of her alarms&mdash;the glimmer of
+a vision that if she should go, as it were, too far, she
+might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not
+of value. Going too far was failing to try at least to
+remain simple. He would be quite ready to hate her
+if she did, by heading him off at every point, embarrass
+his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt, rather
+constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't
+hate her, since Susie positively wanted to suffer for
+her; Susie had a noble idea that she might somehow
+so do her good. Such, however, was not the way in
+which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected
+to wish to do it. He wouldn't have time even
+should he wish; whereby, in a word, Milly felt herself
+intimately warned. Face to face there with her
+smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment
+quite such another lift of feeling as she had
+known in her crucial talk with Susie. It came round
+to the same thing; him too she would help to help
+her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't
+possibly be she would assist also to make this right.
+</p><p>
+It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the
+basis in question, almost to reverse for her their characters
+of patient and physician. What <i>was</i> he in fact
+but patient, what was she but physician, from the
+moment she embraced once for all the necessity,
+adopted once for all the policy, of saving him alarms
+about her subtlety? She would leave the subtlety to
+him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
+doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went
+so far as to imagine that the inward success of these
+reflexions flushed her for the minute, to his eyes, with
+a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
+and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour
+to the presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"&mdash;he
+noticed good-humouredly her harmless sally.
+"But, help or no help, you're looking, you know,
+remarkably well."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was
+as if already she saw his line. Only she wondered
+what he would have guessed. If he had guessed anything
+at all it would be rather remarkable of him.
+As for what there <i>was</i> to guess, he couldn't&mdash;if this
+was present to him&mdash;have arrived at it save by his
+own acuteness. That acuteness was therefore immense;
+and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
+leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad.
+Neither, for that matter, would hers be&mdash;which she
+was even actually enjoying. She wondered if really
+then there mightn't be something for her. She
+hadn't been sure in coming to him that she was
+"better," and he hadn't used, he would be awfully
+careful not to use, that compromising term about her;
+in spite of all of which she would have been ready to
+say, for the amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I <i>must</i>
+be," for he had this unaided sense of something that
+had happened to her. It was a sense unaided, because
+who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was
+certain, hadn't yet seen him again, and there were
+things it was impossible she could have told him the
+first time. Since such was his penetration, therefore,
+why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it,
+accept the new circumstance, the one he was clearly
+wanting to congratulate her on, as a sufficient cause?
+If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it might produce
+an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a
+way of nursing. "You gave me the other day," she
+went on, "plenty to think over, and I've been doing
+that&mdash;thinking it over&mdash;quite as you'll have probably
+wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to
+treat," she smiled, "since you've already done me so
+much good."
+</p><p>
+The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that
+he looked in advance so closely related to all one's
+possibilities that one missed the pleasure of really
+improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
+treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my
+wit."
+</p><p>
+"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile
+a bit believed in his answer, convinced as she
+was that if she <i>had</i> been difficult it would be the last
+thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said,
+"as I like."
+</p><p>
+"Then it's as <i>I</i> like. But you must really, though
+we're having such a decent month, get straight
+away." In pursuance of which, when she had replied
+with promptitude that her departure&mdash;for the Tyrol
+and then for Venice&mdash;was quite fixed for the fourteenth,
+he took her up with alacrity. "For Venice?
+That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a dream
+of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks
+off; three weeks during which, if I can get them clear,
+my niece, a young person who has quite the whip
+hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I heard
+from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer
+Venice."
+</p><p>
+"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And
+anything that, in advance or in any way, I can do for
+you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for
+me. But it will be capital to find you there."
+</p><p>
+"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after
+a moment, "that I <i>am</i> easy to treat."
+</p><p>
+But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it.
+"You've not come to that <i>yet</i>."
+</p><p>
+"One has to be so bad for it?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it&mdash;to
+'ease' of treatment. I doubt if it's possible. I've not,
+if it is, found any one bad enough. The ease, you see,
+is for <i>you</i>."
+</p><p>
+"I see&mdash;I see."
+</p><p>
+They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the
+least bit awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke
+asked: "And that clever lady&mdash;she goes with
+you?"
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with
+me, I hope, to the end."
+</p><p>
+He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of
+what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well&mdash;of everything."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end
+of everything is far off. This, you know, I'm hoping,"
+said Sir Luke, "is only the beginning." And
+the next question he risked might have been a part of
+his hope. "Just you and she together?"
+</p><p>
+"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've
+seen more here than of any one and who are just the
+right people for us."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment. "You'll be four women
+together then?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans.
+But I think," she added as if to say what she saw
+would reassure him, "that we shall not be unattractive,
+as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of
+'life' I suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
+</p><p>
+"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a
+moment during which he might have been appreciating
+her raciness&mdash;"when I talk of life I think I
+mean more than anything else the beautiful show of
+it, in its freshness, made by young persons of your age.
+So go on as you are. I see more and more <i>how</i> you are.
+You can't," he went so far as to say for pleasantness,
+"better it."
+</p><p>
+She took it from him with a great show of peace.
+"One of our companions will be Miss Croy, who came
+with me here first. It's in <i>her</i> that life is splendid;
+and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me.
+But she's above all magnificent in herself. So that
+if you'd like," she freely threw out, "to see <i>her</i>&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to
+you, for clearly it will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that
+if she's to be at Venice I <i>shall</i> see her?"
+</p><p>
+"We must arrange it&mdash;I shan't fail. She moreover
+has a friend who may also be there"&mdash;Milly
+found herself going on to this. "He's likely to come,
+I believe, for he always follows her."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
+</p><p>
+"<i>He</i> is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't
+care for him."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter
+with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
+</p><p>
+"And he's to be in Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll
+be constantly about with her."
+</p><p>
+"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
+</p><p>
+"As we're great friends&mdash;yes."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four
+women alone."
+</p><p>
+"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen.
+But he won't," Milly pursued in the same
+wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I see. But can't you help him?"
+</p><p>
+"Can't <i>you?</i>" Milly after a moment quaintly
+asked. Then for the joke of it she explained. "I'm
+putting you, you see, in relation with my entourage."
+</p><p>
+It might have been for the joke of it too, by this
+time, that her eminent friend fell in. "But if this
+gentleman <i>isn't</i> of your 'entourage '? I mean if he's
+of&mdash;what do you call her?&mdash;Miss Croy's. Unless
+indeed you also take an interest in him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
+</p><p>
+"You think there may be then some chance for
+him?"
+</p><p>
+"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
+</p><p>
+"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke
+next asked, "have I to do with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to
+be there, so may he be. And also that we shan't in
+that case be simply four dreary women."
+</p><p>
+He considered her as if at this point she a little
+tried his patience. "<i>You're</i> the least 'dreary' woman
+I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you know? There's no
+reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
+</p><p>
+"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
+</p><p>
+"The conviction&mdash;strong already when I had seen
+you once&mdash;is strengthened in me by having seen
+your friend. There's no doubt about it. The world's
+before you."
+</p><p>
+"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
+</p><p>
+"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure.
+We talked about you&mdash;and freely. I don't deny that.
+But it shows me I don't require of you the impossible."
+</p><p>
+She was now on her feet. "I think I know what
+you require of me."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing, for you," he went on, "<i>is</i> impossible.
+So go on." He repeated it again&mdash;wanting her so
+to feel that to-day he saw it. "You're all right."
+</p><p>
+"Well," she smiled&mdash;"keep me so."
+</p><p>
+"Oh you'll get away from me."
+</p><p>
+"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with
+her gentle eyes on him.
+</p><p>
+She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he
+thus for a moment did keep her. Something then,
+while he seemed to think if there were anything more,
+came back to him; though something of which there
+wasn't too much to be made. "Of course if there's
+anything I <i>can</i> do for your friend: I mean the gentleman
+you speak of&mdash;?" He gave out in short that he
+was ready.
+</p><p>
+"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
+</p><p>
+"Mr. Densher&mdash;is that his name?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;but his case isn't so dreadful." She had
+within a minute got away from that.
+</p><p>
+"No doubt&mdash;if <i>you</i> take an interest." She had
+got away, but it was as if he made out in her eyes&mdash;though
+they also had rather got away&mdash;a reason for
+calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can
+do&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+She looked at him while she thought, while she
+smiled. "I'm afraid there's really nothing one can
+do."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself
+sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth
+of the Southern summer was still in the high florid
+rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool pavements
+took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the
+sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through
+open windows, played over the painted "subjects"
+in the splendid ceilings&mdash;medallions of purple and
+brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as
+of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all
+toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and
+gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured
+concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures
+of the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second
+tier of smaller lights, straight openings to the front,
+which did everything, even with the Baedekers and
+photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
+eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This
+at last only, though she had enjoyed the palace for
+three weeks, seemed to count as effective occupation;
+perhaps because it was the first time she had been
+alone&mdash;really to call alone&mdash;since she had left
+London, it ministered to her first full and unembarrassed
+sense of what the great Eugenio had done for
+her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
+and Americans, had entered her service during
+the last hours of all&mdash;had crossed from Paris, after
+multiplied <i>pourparlers</i> with Mrs. Stringham, to whom
+she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on purpose
+to escort her to the Continent and encompass her
+there, and had dedicated to her, from the moment of
+their meeting, all the treasures of his experience. She
+had judged him in advance&mdash;polyglot and universal,
+very dear and very deep&mdash;as probably but a swindler
+finished to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying
+one well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging
+the other straight into her pocket, which, as she had
+instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
+glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements
+of their common consciousness had rapidly gathered
+into an indestructible link, formed the ground of a
+happy relation; being by this time, strangely, grotesquely,
+delightfully, what most kept up confidence
+between them and what most expressed it.
+</p><p>
+She had seen quickly enough what was happening&mdash;the
+usual thing again, yet once again. Eugenio
+had, in an interview of five minutes, understood her,
+had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so much
+of the care with which she must be taken up as of the
+care with which she must be let down. All the world
+understood her, all the world had got hold; but for
+nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
+close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender.
+Gracefully, respectfully, consummately enough&mdash;always
+with hands in position and the look, in his
+thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black professional,
+almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous
+tenor grown too old to make love, but with an art still
+to make money&mdash;did he on occasion convey to her
+that she was, of all the clients of his glorious career,
+the one in whom his interest was most personal and
+paternal. The others had come in the way of business,
+but for her his sentiment was special. Confidence
+rested thus on her completely believing that:
+there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It
+passed between them every time they conversed; he
+was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on the surface.
+He had taken his place already for her among those who
+were to see her through, and meditation ranked him,
+in the constant perspective, for the final function, side
+by side with poor Susie&mdash;whom she was now pitying
+more than ever for having to be herself so sorry and to
+say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact
+of a residuary legatee&mdash;which was a character that
+could be definitely worn; whereas she could see Susie,
+in the event of her death, in no character at all, Susie
+being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
+makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter,
+Milly at present, with a renewed flare of fancy, felt
+she should herself have liked to believe in. Eugenio
+had really done for her more than he probably knew&mdash;he
+didn't after all know everything&mdash;in having,
+for the wind-up of the autumn, on a weak word from
+her, so admirably, so perfectly established her. Her
+weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At Venice,
+please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but,
+if it can be at all managed&mdash;you know what I mean&mdash;some
+fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a
+series of months. Plenty of them too, and the more
+interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
+picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall
+be to ourselves, with a cook, don't you know?&mdash;with
+servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the
+thorough make-believe of a settlement."
+</p><p>
+The proof of how he better and better understood
+her was in all the place; as to his masterly acquisition
+of which she had from the first asked no questions.
+She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
+and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the
+transaction that mainly concerned her she would soon
+enough become acquainted, and his connexion with
+such values as she would then find noted could scarce
+help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming
+people, conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had
+given up their house to her, and had fled to a distance,
+to other countries, to hide their blushes alike
+over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and
+over what they had, however durably, gained. They
+had preserved and consecrated, and she now&mdash;her
+part of it was shameless&mdash;appropriated and enjoyed.
+Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap,
+even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about
+with decorations. Hung about with pictures and
+relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character,
+was here the presence revered and served: which
+brings us back to our truth of a moment ago&mdash;the
+fact that, more than ever, this October morning,
+awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved
+slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly
+it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught
+again and cherished for the hour; always a need of
+her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
+penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to
+her best; amid voices she lost the sense. Voices had
+surrounded her for weeks, and she had tried to listen,
+had cultivated them and had answered back; these
+had been weeks in which there were other things they
+might well prevent her from hearing. More than the
+prospect had at first promised or threatened she had
+felt herself going on in a crowd and with a multiplied
+escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke
+Strett as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached
+had in fact proved a rolling snowball, condemned
+from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
+Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion
+to the Empress Catherine's famous progress
+across the steppes of Russia; improvised settlements
+appeared at each turn of the road, villagers waiting
+with addresses drawn up in the language of London.
+Old friends in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's,
+Kate Croy's, her own; when the addresses weren't
+in the language of London they were in the more insistent
+idioms of American centres. The current was
+swollen even by Susie's social connexions; so that
+there were days, at hotels, at Dolomite picnics, on
+lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
+Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by
+the London "success" to which they had opened the
+door.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock
+of Milly's and Mrs. Stringham's compatriots, failed
+but little, really, of the concert-pitch; it had gone
+almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of the last
+great native novel. Those ladies were "so different"&mdash;different,
+observably enough, from the ladies so
+appraising them; it being throughout a case mainly
+of ladies, of a dozen at once sometimes, in Milly's
+apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
+many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed
+not only as perfectly fascinating in themselves, the
+nicest people yet known to the acclaimers, but as obvious
+helping hands, socially speaking, for the eccentric
+young woman, evident initiators and smoothers
+of her path, possible subduers of her eccentricity.
+Short intervals, to her own sense, stood now for great
+differences, and this renewed inhalation of her native
+air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that
+she mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated.
+She moved such a critic, it would appear,
+as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence induced
+by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her
+in the light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed
+for a thorough good time, and yet too rich and too
+befriended&mdash;an intuitive cunning within her managing
+this last&mdash;for a thorough bad one. The compatriots,
+in short, by what she made out, approved
+her friends for their expert wisdom with her; in spite
+of which judicial sagacity it was the compatriots who
+recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
+things in these days that she had never seen before,
+and she couldn't have said why save on a principle
+too terrible to name; whereby she saw that neither
+Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor
+New York what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in
+coquetting with the plan of a series of American visits.
+The plan might have been, humorously, on Mrs.
+Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social
+position&mdash;and it had verily in that direction lights
+that were perhaps but half a century too prompt; at
+all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool controlled
+facility that went so well, as the others said,
+with her particular kind of good looks, the kind that
+led you to expect the person enjoying them <i>would</i>
+dispose of disputations, speculations, aspirations, in
+a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so simplified
+in sense, however, that they sounded, even
+when guiltless, like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't
+that Kate hadn't pretended too that <i>she</i> should like
+to go to America; it was only that with this young
+woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more
+than ever of late, on the theory of intimate confessions,
+private frank ironies that made up for their
+public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they
+wearily put off the mask.
+</p><p>
+These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite
+become the form taken by their moments together,
+moments indeed not increasingly frequent and not
+prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue
+on Milly's side whenever, as she herself expressed it,
+she got out of harness. They flourished their masks,
+the independent pair, as they might have flourished
+Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing
+them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely
+enough, might have been suspected the greatest reality
+in the business. Strangely enough, we say, for the
+volume of effusion in general would have been found
+by either on measurement to be scarce proportional
+to the paraphernalia of relief. It was when they called
+each other's attention to their ceasing to pretend, it
+was then that what they were keeping back was most
+in the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and
+mainly to Kate's advantage: Milly didn't quite see
+what her friend could keep back, was possessed of, in
+fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas it
+was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor
+Milly had a treasure to hide. This was not the treasure
+of a shy, an abject affection&mdash;concealment, on
+that head, belonging to quite another phase of such
+states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively
+bold and hard, a principle that played up like
+a fine steel spring at the lightest pressure of too near
+a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was the truth
+about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus
+was a wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully
+to look at her from the far side of the moat she had
+dug round her tower. Certain aspects of the connexion
+of these young women show for us, such is the
+twilight that gathers about them, in the likeness of
+some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play; we have positively
+the image, in the delicate dusk, of the figures
+so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
+that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed,
+black-robed, hung about with amulets, reminders,
+relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and that of the upright
+restless slow-circling lady of her court who exchanges
+with her, across the black water streaked
+with evening gleams, fitful questions and answers.
+The upright lady, with thick dark braids down her
+back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered
+train, makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and
+the broken talk, brief and sparingly allusive, seems
+more to cover than to free their sense. This is because,
+when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
+they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to
+wait for their words. Such an impression as that was
+in fact grave, and might be tragic; so that, plainly
+enough, systematically at last, they settled to a care
+of what they said.
+</p><p>
+There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular,
+of the probability that if she wasn't so proud
+she might be pitied with more comfort&mdash;more to the
+person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
+sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate
+attitude, that this marvellous mixture of her
+weakness and of her strength, her peril, if such it were,
+and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly interesting.
+Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all,
+very much Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd
+herself indeed, in our Maeterlinck picture, might well
+have hovered in the gloaming by the moat. It may be
+declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
+about her friend, through this time, was deep, her
+compassionate imagination strong; and that these
+things gave her a virtue, a good conscience, a credibility
+for herself, so to speak, that were later to be
+precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence
+the logic of their common duplicity, went unassisted
+through the same ordeal as Milly's other
+hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be explicit
+was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses
+of the felt contrast between her fortune and her fear&mdash;all
+of which would have contradicted her systematic
+bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly
+saw: to recognise was to bring down the avalanche&mdash;the
+avalanche Milly lived so in watch for and that
+might be started by the lightest of breaths; though
+less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than
+that of the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping
+inference of others. With so many suppressions as
+these, therefore, between them, their withdrawal together
+to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted,
+on a nominal motive&mdash;which was decently represented
+by a joy at the drop of chatter. Chatter had in
+truth all along attended their steps, but they took the
+despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when
+face to face, some view or other of something. The
+relief of getting out of harness&mdash;that was the moral
+of their meetings; but the moral of this, in turn, was
+that they couldn't so much as ask each other why
+harness need be worn. Milly wore it as a general
+armour.
+</p><p>
+She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she
+hadn't been for weeks; she was always out of it, that
+is, when alone, and her companions had never yet so
+much as just now affected her as dispersed and suppressed.
+It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
+wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it
+from her without a word and just bravely and brilliantly
+in the name, for instance, of the beautiful day:
+"Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off&mdash;I don't
+care where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown
+them, kill them if you will: so that I may just a little,
+all by myself, see where I am." She was conscious of
+the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
+as the others to him&mdash;Susie who would have drowned
+her very self for her; gave her up to a mercenary
+monster through whom she thus purchased respites.
+Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
+strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of
+hope; yet lawful, all the same&mdash;weren't they?&mdash;those
+experiments tried with the truth that consisted,
+at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was
+now playing with the thought that Eugenio might
+<i>inclusively</i> assist her: he had brought home to her,
+and always by remarks that were really quite soundless,
+the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some
+complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as
+a counter-move to fate. It had passed between them
+as preposterous that with so much money she should
+just stupidly and awkwardly <i>want</i>&mdash;any more want
+a life, a career, a consciousness, than want a house, a
+carriage or a cook. It was as if she had had from him
+a kind of expert professional measure of what he was
+in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
+thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could
+closely compare with a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's
+part that&mdash;at least in Palazzo Leporelli when mornings
+were fine&mdash;showed as almost amateurish. Sir
+Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and
+leave the rest to <i>me</i>"&mdash;which was distinctly what
+Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared indeed to
+speak of purchase and payment, but in reference
+to a different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to
+be named nor reckoned, and such moreover as she
+wasn't sure of having at her command. Eugenio&mdash;this
+was the difference&mdash;could name, could reckon,
+and prices of <i>his</i> kind were things she had never suffered
+to scare her. She had been willing, goodness
+knew, to pay enough for anything, for everything, and
+here was simply a new view of the sufficient quantity.
+She amused herself&mdash;for it came to that, since Eugenio
+was there to sign the receipt&mdash;with possibilities
+of meeting the bill. She was more prepared than
+ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to pay
+too much. What else&mdash;if such were points at which
+your most trusted servant failed&mdash;was the use of
+being, as the dear Susies of earth called you, a princess
+in a palace?
+</p><p>
+She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place,
+noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring
+here and there a curtain or an outer blind, breathed
+into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
+it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was <i>in</i> it,
+as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness
+for it that why shouldn't this, in common
+mercy, be warrant enough? She would never, never
+leave it&mdash;she would engage to that; would ask nothing
+more than to sit tight in it and float on and on.
+The beauty and intensity, the real momentary relief
+of this conceit, reached their climax in the positive
+purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return
+as she had not yet put it; though the design, it must be
+added, dropped a little when, coming back to the great
+saloon from which she had started on her pensive
+progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
+Venice she had been unaware, and who had now&mdash;while
+a servant was following her through empty
+rooms&mdash;been asked, in her absence, to wait. He had
+waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting&mdash;oh unmistakeably;
+never before had he so much struck her
+as the man to do that on occasion with patience, to do
+it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
+though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness.
+The odd thing, as she was afterwards to recall,
+was that her wonder for what had brought him was
+not immediate, but had come at the end of five minutes;
+and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost
+as glad to see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption
+of her solitude, as if he had already been in
+her thought or acting at her suggestion. He was some-how,
+at the best, the end of a respite; one might like
+him very much and yet feel that his presence tempered
+precious solitude more than any other known to
+one: in spite of all of which, as he was neither dear
+Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even,
+for the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him
+did no damage to her sense of the dispersal of her
+friends. She hadn't been so thoroughly alone with
+him since those moments of his showing her the great
+portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly
+made the high-water-mark of her security, the moments
+during which her tears themselves, those she
+had been ashamed of, were the sign of her consciously
+rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue
+gulf of comparative ignorance and reaching her view
+of the troubled sea. His presence now referred itself
+to his presence then, reminding her how kind he had
+been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her, unexpectedly,
+at a time when she could particularly feel
+it, that, for such kindness and for the beauty of what
+they remembered together, she hadn't lost him&mdash;quite
+the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
+receive him there, to see him interested and charmed,
+as well, clearly, as delighted to have found her without
+some other person to spoil it&mdash;these things were
+so pleasant for the first minutes that they might have
+represented on her part some happy foreknowledge.
+She gave an account of her companions while he on
+his side failed to press her about them, even though
+describing his appearance, so unheralded, as the
+result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been
+shivering at Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when
+taken by it; so that, knowing where they all were, he
+had simply caught the first train. He explained how
+he had known where they were; he had heard&mdash;what
+more natural?&mdash;from their friends, Milly's and his.
+He mentioned this betimes, but it was with his mention,
+singularly, that the girl became conscious of her
+inner question about his reason. She noticed his
+plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to
+Kate; but she presently noticed also that it didn't
+affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had written to
+him, Kate apparently&mdash;and this was interesting&mdash;had
+written to him; but their design presumably
+hadn't been that he should come and sit there as if
+rather relieved, so far as <i>they</i> were concerned, at postponements.
+He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!"
+when she sketched their probable morning for him,
+under Eugenio's care and Mrs. Stringham's&mdash;sounding
+it quite as if any suggestion that he should
+overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs
+would leave him temporarily cold. This precisely it
+was that, after a little, operated for Milly as an obscure
+but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
+had known where they all were from the others, but
+it was not for the others that, in his actual dispositions,
+he had come. That, strange to say, was a pity; for,
+stranger still to say, she could have shown him more
+confidence if he himself had had less intention. His
+intention so chilled her, from the moment she found
+herself divining it, that, just for the pleasure of going
+on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of their remembrance
+together of Matcham and the Bronzino,
+the climax of her fortune, she could have fallen to
+pleading with him and to reasoning, to undeceiving
+him in time. There had been, for ten minutes, with
+the directness of her welcome to him and the way this
+clearly pleased him, something of the grace of amends
+made, even though he couldn't know it&mdash;amends
+for her not having been originally sure, for instance at
+that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
+human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's
+added itself to the hour at Matcham, added itself to
+other things, to consolidate, for her present benevolence,
+the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
+that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed,
+as he looked about, on the charm of the place: "What
+a temple to taste and an expression of the pride of life,
+yet, with all that, what a jolly <i>home!</i>"&mdash;so that, for
+his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about
+though she mentioned that she had just been, for her
+own purposes, in a general prowl, taking everything
+in more susceptibly than before. He embraced her
+offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he
+was to find her susceptible.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions,
+that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the
+end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen
+upon them, as before something poignant in which her
+visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but
+the perfection of the charm&mdash;or nothing rather but
+their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it.
+The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its
+beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs,
+that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but
+forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: "Oh
+the impossible romance&mdash;!" The romance for
+her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever,
+through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea
+became an image of never going down, of remaining
+aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would
+hear but the plash of the water against stone. The
+great floor on which they moved was at an altitude,
+and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not to go
+down&mdash;never, never to go down!" she strangely
+sighed to her friend.
+</p><p>
+"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that
+tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought
+of course always to be people at top and bottom, in
+Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
+</p><p>
+She shook her head both lightly and mournfully
+enough at his not understanding. "Not even for
+people in Veronese costumes. I mean that the positive
+beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't
+move in fact," she added&mdash;"now. I've not been out,
+you know. I stay up. That's how you happily found
+me."
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark wondered&mdash;he was, oh yes, adequately
+human. "You don't go about?"
+</p><p>
+She looked over the place, the storey above the
+apartments in which she had received him, the sala
+corresponding to the sala below and fronting the
+great canal with its gothic arches. The casements
+between the arches were open, the ledge of the balcony
+broad, the sweep of the canal, so overhung,
+admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
+white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have
+said what. But there was no mystery after a moment;
+she had never felt so invited to anything as to
+make that, and that only, just where she was, her
+adventure. It would be&mdash;to this it kept coming
+back&mdash;the adventure of not stirring. "I go about
+just here."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked,
+"that you're really not well?"
+</p><p>
+They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with
+the fine old faded palaces opposite and the slow
+Adriatic tide beneath; but after a minute, and before
+she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
+saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms,
+which rested on the coping. She had fallen to her
+knees on the cushion of the window-place, and she
+leaned there, in a long silence, with her forehead down.
+She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
+answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she
+saw her way. She would have made the question
+itself impossible to others&mdash;impossible for example
+to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could
+wonder even on the spot what it was a sign of in her
+feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips it almost
+tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really
+because she cared for him so little; to let herself go
+with him thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow,
+would be the relief&mdash;since it was actually, for
+her nerves, a question of relief&mdash;that would cost her
+least. If he had come to her moreover with the intention
+she believed, or even if this intention had but
+been determined in him by the spell of their situation,
+he mustn't be mistaken about her value&mdash;for what
+value did she now have? It throbbed within her as
+she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
+herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the
+act, to recover what might be possible of it. With
+that there came to her a light: wouldn't her value,
+for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the
+ravage of her disease? <i>She</i> mightn't last, but her
+money would. For a man in whom the vision of her
+money should be intense, in whom it should be most
+of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective
+failure on her part to be long for this world might
+easily count as a positive attraction. Such a man,
+proposing to please, persuade, secure her, appropriate
+her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature
+and the doctors should allow, would make the
+best of her, ill, damaged, disagreeable though she
+might be, for the sake of eventual benefits: she being
+clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do
+the handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing
+husband.
+</p><p>
+She had said to herself betimes, in a general way,
+that whatever habits her youth might form, that of
+seeing an interested suitor in every bush should certainly
+never grow to be one of them&mdash;an attitude
+she had early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She
+had had accordingly in fact as little to do with it
+as possible and she scarce knew why at the present
+moment she should have had to catch herself in the
+act of imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the
+ugly motive, in Lord Mark's cool English eyes; the
+darker side of it at any rate showed, to her imagination,
+but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this,
+simplified itself: there was a beautiful reason&mdash;indeed
+there were two&mdash;why her companion's motive
+shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
+her without a penny she wouldn't marry him
+for the world; the other was that she felt him, after
+all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and humanly,
+concerned for her. They were also two things, his
+wishing to be well, to be very well, with her, and his
+beginning to feel her as threatened, haunted, blighted;
+but they were melting together for him, making him,
+by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
+probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was
+presently what remained with her&mdash;his really doing
+it; and with the natural and proper incident of being
+conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
+had him&mdash;she could ask herself that&mdash;disconcerted
+or disgusted by it? If he could only be touched
+enough to do what she preferred, not to raise, not to
+press any question, he might render her a much better
+service than by merely enabling her to refuse him.
+Again, again it was strange, but he figured to her for
+the moment as the one safe sympathiser. It would
+have made her worse to talk to others, but she wasn't
+afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale.
+She would keep him, that is, her one easy relation&mdash;in
+the sense of easy for himself. Their actual outlook
+had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded them
+within and without did so much toward making appreciative
+stillness as natural as at the opera, that
+she could consider she hadn't made him hang on
+her lips when at last, instead of saying if she were
+well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't
+get tired of it. I never should&mdash;it suits me so. I
+adore the place," she went on, "and I don't want in
+the least to give it up."
+</p><p>
+"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with
+that luck, for one's <i>all</i>&mdash;! Should you positively like
+to live here?"
+</p><p>
+"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an
+instant, "to die here."
+</p><p>
+Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what
+she wanted&mdash;when a person did care: it was the
+pleasant human way, without depths of darkness.
+"Oh it's not good enough for <i>that!</i> That requires
+picking. But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the
+sort of place to see you in; you carry out the note,
+fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and you might do
+much worse&mdash;I mean for your friends&mdash;than show
+yourself here a while, three or four months, every
+year. But it's not my notion for the rest of the time.
+One has quite other uses for you."
+</p><p>
+"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly
+enquired, "to kill me?"
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too
+much for me&mdash;too many. England bristles with questions.
+This is more, as you say there, my form."
+</p><p>
+"Oho, oho!"&mdash;he laughed again as if to humour
+her. "Can't you then buy it&mdash;for a price? Depend
+upon it they'll treat for money. That is for money
+enough."
+</p><p>
+"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they
+won't. I think I shall try. But if I get it I shall cling
+to it." They were talking sincerely. "It will be my
+life&mdash;paid for as that. It will become my great
+gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must
+come and hunt me up."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then you <i>will</i> be alive," said Lord Mark.
+</p><p>
+"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken,
+wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried
+kernel of a nut."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you
+mistrust us, can do better for you than that."
+</p><p>
+"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really
+to have it over?"
+</p><p>
+He let her see now that she worried him, and after
+a look at her, of some duration, without his glasses&mdash;which
+always altered the expression of his eyes&mdash;he
+re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back
+to the view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released
+him. "Do you remember something I said to
+you that day at Matcham&mdash;or at least fully meant
+to?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham.
+It's another life."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly it will be&mdash;I mean the kind of thing:
+what I then wanted it to represent for you. Matcham,
+you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I think I
+tried to rub that into you a little."
+</p><p>
+She met him with the full memory of what he had
+tried&mdash;not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost
+to her. "What I meant is that it seems a hundred
+years ago."
+</p><p>
+"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of
+what makes me remember it," he pursued, "is that
+I was quite aware of what might have been said about
+what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me
+that I should perhaps be able to look after you&mdash;well,
+rather better. Rather better, of course, than
+certain other persons in particular."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely&mdash;than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy,
+even than Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark
+promptly amended.
+</p><p>
+It amused her even with what she had else to think
+of; and she could show him at all events how little,
+in spite of the hundred years, she had lost what he
+alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
+made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to
+start again the tears it had started at the time. "You
+could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood
+you."
+</p><p>
+"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained,
+"to <i>fix</i> your confidence. I mean, you know, in the
+right place."
+</p><p>
+"Well, Lord Mark, you did&mdash;it's just exactly
+now, my confidence, where you put it then. The only
+difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now to have
+no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do
+seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would
+undermine it a little."
+</p><p>
+He took no more notice of these last words than if
+she hadn't said them, only watching her at present
+as with a gradual new light. "Are you <i>really</i> in any
+trouble?"
+</p><p>
+To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making
+out his light was a little a light for herself. "Don't
+say, don't try to say, anything that's impossible.
+There are much better things you can do."
+</p><p>
+He looked straight at it and then straight over it.
+"It's too monstrous that one can't ask you as a friend
+what one wants so to know."
+</p><p>
+"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as
+by a sudden turn, with a slight hardness. "Do you
+want to know if I'm badly ill?"
+</p><p>
+The sound of it in truth, though from no raising
+of her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror,
+but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and
+flushed&mdash;clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his
+attitude together and spoke even with unwonted
+vivacity. "Do you imagine I can see you suffer and
+not say a word?"
+</p><p>
+"You won't see me suffer&mdash;don't be afraid. I
+shan't be a public nuisance. That's why I should
+have liked <i>this:</i> it's so beautiful in itself and yet it's
+out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
+anything," she added; and then as if to make with
+decision an end: "And you <i>don't!</i> No, not even you."
+He faced her through it with the remains of his expression,
+and she saw him as clearly&mdash;for <i>him</i>&mdash;bewildered;
+which made her wish to be sure not to
+have been unkind. She would be kind once for all;
+that would be the end. "I'm very badly ill."
+</p><p>
+"And you don't do anything?"
+</p><p>
+"I do everything. Everything's <i>this</i>," she smiled.
+"I'm doing it now. One can't do more than live."
+</p><p>
+"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that
+what you do? Why haven't you advice?"
+</p><p>
+He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if
+there were fifty things it didn't give her, so that he
+suggested with urgency the most absent. But she
+met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice
+in the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon
+it in receiving you, in talking with you thus. One
+can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
+</p><p>
+"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's immense for <i>me</i>." She finally spoke
+as if for amusement; now that she had uttered her
+truth, that he had learnt it from herself as no one
+had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up.
+There she was; but it was as if she would never speak
+again. "I shan't," she added, "have missed everything."
+</p><p>
+"Why should you have missed <i>anything?</i>" She
+felt, as he sounded this, to what, within the minute,
+he had made up his mind. "You're the person in
+the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom
+one would call it in fact most impossible; for whom
+'missing' at all will surely require an extraordinary
+amount of misplaced good will. Since you believe
+in advice, for God's sake take <i>mine</i>. I know what
+you want."
+</p><p>
+Oh she knew he would know it. But she had
+brought it on herself&mdash;or almost. Yet she spoke with
+kindness. "I think I want not to be too much worried."
+</p><p>
+"You want to be adored." It came at last straight.
+"Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do
+it. It <i>is</i> so"&mdash;he firmly kept it up. "You're not
+loved enough."
+</p><p>
+"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
+</p><p>
+"Why to get the full good of it."
+</p><p>
+Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see
+what you mean. That full good of it which consists
+in finding one's self forced to love in return." She
+had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is
+that I might find myself forced to love <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh 'forced'&mdash;!" He was so fine and so expert,
+so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a
+type with which the preaching of passion somehow so
+ill consorted&mdash;he was so much all these things that
+he had absolutely to take account of them himself.
+And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully.
+Milly liked him again, liked him for such shades as
+that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling
+it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among
+those minor charms of existence that she gasped at
+moments to remember she must give up. "Is it inconceivable
+to you that you might try?"
+</p><p>
+"To be so favourably affected by you&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark
+repeated.
+</p><p>
+Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your
+trying?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared.
+The prompt neat accent, however, his manner of
+disposing of her question, failed of real expression,
+as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
+almost comically saw&mdash;a failure pointed
+moreover by the laugh into which Milly was immediately
+startled. As a suggestion to her of a healing
+and uplifting passion it <i>was</i> in truth deficient; it
+wouldn't do as the communication of a force that
+should sweep them both away. And the beauty of
+him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
+of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could
+thereby show but the better as fitting into the pleasant
+commerce of prosperity. The way she let him
+see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him
+out, of itself, from services of danger, a thing that
+made a discrimination against him never yet made&mdash;made
+at least to any consciousness of his own. Born
+to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first encounter
+with a judgement formed in the sinister light
+of tragedy. The gathering dusk of <i>her</i> personal world
+presented itself to him, in her eyes, as an element in
+which it was vain for him to pretend he could find
+himself at home, since it was charged with depressions
+and with dooms, with the chill of the losing game.
+Almost without her needing to speak, and simply by
+the fact that there could be, in such a case, no decent
+substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from
+her that practically he was afraid&mdash;whether afraid to
+protest falsely enough, or only afraid of what might be
+eventually disagreeable in a compromised alliance,
+being a minor question. She believed she made out
+besides, wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected
+to have to protest about anything beyond his
+natural convenience&mdash;more, in fine, than his disposition
+and habits, his education as well, his personal
+<i>moyens</i>, in short, permitted. His predicament
+was therefore one he couldn't like, and also one she
+willingly would have spared him hadn't he brought
+it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could
+enjoy thus having it from her that he wasn't good
+for what she would have called her reality. It wouldn't
+have taken much more to enable her positively to
+make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting&mdash;had
+his innermost feeling spoken&mdash;at the propriety
+rather, in his interest, of some cutting down,
+some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would meet
+that halfway, but the real must also meet <i>him</i>. Milly's
+sense of it for herself, which was so conspicuously,
+so financially supported, couldn't, or wouldn't, so
+accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly
+showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a
+blow. It had marked the one minute during which he
+could again be touching to her. By the time he had
+tried once more, after all, to insist, he had quite ceased
+to be so.
+</p><p>
+By this time she had turned from their window to
+make a diversion, had walked him through other
+rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of the
+place, going even so far for that purpose as to point
+afresh her independent moral, to repeat that if one
+only had such a house for one's own and loved it and
+cherished it enough, it would pay one back in kind,
+would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for
+the quarter of an hour the perch she held out to him&mdash;grasped
+it with one hand, that is, while she felt him
+attached to his own clue with the other; he was by
+no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all
+justice, as not to be able to behave more or less as if
+nothing had happened. It was one of his merits, to
+which she did justice too, that both his native and his
+acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
+assumption that nothing&mdash;nothing to make a deadly
+difference for him&mdash;ever <i>could</i> happen. It was, socially,
+a working view like another, and it saw them
+easily enough through the greater part of the rest of
+their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the
+limit of his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting,
+when all was said, reappeared for her&mdash;breaking out
+moreover, with an effect of strangeness, in another
+quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of health.
+He might for that matter have been seeing what he
+could do in the way of making it a grievance that she
+should snub him for a charity, on his own part, exquisitely
+roused. "It's true, you know, all the same,
+and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one
+up." He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how
+little he cared. "Everybody knows affection often
+makes things out when indifference doesn't notice.
+And that's why I know that <i>I</i> notice."
+</p><p>
+"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled.
+"I thought rather that affection was supposed to be
+blind."
+</p><p>
+"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark
+promptly returned.
+</p><p>
+"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely
+domestic complications, which I'm ashamed
+to have given you a glimpse of&mdash;are they beauties?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, for those who care for you&mdash;as every one
+does. Everything about you is a beauty. Besides
+which I don't believe," he declared, "in the seriousness
+of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should
+have <i>any</i> trouble about which something can't be
+done. If you can't get the right thing, who can, in all
+the world, I should like to know? You're the first
+young woman of your time. I mean what I say."
+He looked, to do him justice, quite as if he did; not
+ardent, but clear&mdash;simply so competent, in such a
+position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
+the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a
+warrant. "We're all in love with you. I'll put it that
+way, dropping any claim of my own, if you can bear
+it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
+simply to torment us&mdash;you were born to make us
+happy. Therefore you must listen to us."
+</p><p>
+She shook her head with her slowness, but this
+time with all her mildness. "No, I mustn't listen
+to you&mdash;that's just what I mustn't do. The reason
+is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
+to you as you will, since you give that lovely
+account of yourselves. I give you in return the
+fullest possible belief of what it would be&mdash;" And
+she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give&mdash;there
+you are; stick to me as close as you like and see
+if I don't. Only I can't listen or receive or accept&mdash;I
+can't <i>agree</i>. I can't make a bargain. I can't
+really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've
+wanted to say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
+</p><p>
+He let her question fall&mdash;though clearly, it might
+have seemed, because, for reasons or for none, there
+was so much that <i>was</i> spoiled. "You want somebody
+of your own." He came back, whether in good
+faith or in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her
+headshake. He kept it up as if his faith were of
+the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
+</p><p>
+She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been
+at this juncture on the point of saying something
+emphatic and vulgar&mdash;"Well, I don't at all events
+want <i>you!</i>" What somehow happened, nevertheless,
+the pity of it being greater than the irritation&mdash;the
+sadness, to her vivid sense, of his being so painfully
+astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
+nothing to nourish him&mdash;was that his error amounted
+to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted
+with quite another sphere of usefulness
+for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
+convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped
+him off with her first impression of his purpose?
+She could do so now only by the allusion she had been
+wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
+you're doing very right?&mdash;and as a thing quite apart,
+I mean, from my listening to you. That's not right
+either&mdash;except that I'm <i>not</i> listening. You oughtn't
+to have come to Venice to see <i>me</i>&mdash;and in fact you've
+not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had.
+You've much older friends than I, and ever so much
+better. Really, if you've come at all, you can only
+have come&mdash;properly, and if I may say so honourably&mdash;for
+the best friend, as I believe her to be, that
+you have in the world."
+</p><p>
+When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough,
+as if he had been more or less expecting it. Still, he
+looked at her very hard, and they had a moment of
+this during which neither pronounced a name, each
+apparently determined that the other should. It was
+Milly's fine coercion, in the event, that was the
+stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark asked.
+</p><p>
+It might have been difficult to make out that she
+smiled. "Mrs. Lowder." He did make out something,
+and then fairly coloured for its attestation of
+his comparative simplicity. "I call <i>her</i> on the whole
+the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
+</p><p>
+Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do
+you want me to marry Mrs. Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+At which it seemed to her that it was he who was
+almost vulgar! But she wouldn't in any way have
+that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
+isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world.
+There's no cold world for you at all, I think," she
+went on; "nothing but a very warm and watchful
+and expectant world that's waiting for you at any
+moment you choose to take it up."
+</p><p>
+He never budged, but they were standing on the
+polished concrete and he had within a few minutes
+possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you want me
+to marry Kate Croy?"
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Lowder wants it&mdash;I do no wrong, I think,
+in saying that; and she understands moreover that
+you know she does."
+</p><p>
+Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it;
+and it wasn't obscure to her, on her side, that it was
+a comfort to deal with a gentleman. "It's ever so
+kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But
+what's the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
+</p><p>
+Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point
+out. "Because she's the handsomest and cleverest
+and most charming creature I ever saw, and because
+if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact
+I do as it is." It was a luxury of response.
+</p><p>
+"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her.
+But that can't further the case of <i>all.</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If
+the case of one's bad, the case of another's good.
+I don't see what you have to fear from any one else,"
+she said, "save through your being foolish, this way,
+about <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+So she said, but she was aware the next moment
+of what he was making of what she didn't see. "Is
+it your idea&mdash;since we're talking of these things in
+these ways&mdash;that the young lady you describe in
+such superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person.
+But don't be humble." She was almost gay.
+</p><p>
+It was this apparently, at last, that was too much
+for him. "But don't you really <i>know?</i>"
+</p><p>
+As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence
+she could pretend to, it made her of course
+wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that a particular person's
+very much in love with her."
+</p><p>
+"Then you must know by the same token that she's
+very much in love with a particular person."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I beg your pardon!"&mdash;and Milly quite
+flushed at having so crude a blunder imputed to her.
+"You're wholly mistaken."
+</p><p>
+"It's not true?"
+</p><p>
+"It's not true."
+</p><p>
+His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very
+sure?"
+</p><p>
+"As sure as one can be"&mdash;and Milly's manner
+could match it&mdash;"when one has every assurance.
+I speak on the best authority."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
+</p><p>
+"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he
+laughed, "that everything about her's so good."
+</p><p>
+"Good for you"&mdash;she was perfectly clear. "For
+you," she went on, "let her authority be the best.
+She doesn't believe what you mention, and you must
+know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can
+take it from her. <i>I</i> take it&mdash;" But Milly, with the
+positive tremor of her emphasis, pulled up.
+</p><p>
+"You take it from Kate?"
+</p><p>
+"From Kate herself."
+</p><p>
+"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
+</p><p>
+"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she
+went on. "She has given me her word for it."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added:
+"And what do you call her word?"
+</p><p>
+It made Milly, on her side, stare&mdash;though perhaps
+partly but with the instinct of gaining time for the
+consciousness that she was already a little further
+"in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark,
+what should <i>you</i> call her word?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her.
+You apparently have."
+</p><p>
+Well, it threw her on her defence&mdash;a defence that
+she felt, however, especially as of Kate. "We're very
+intimate," she said in a moment; "so that, without
+prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
+things."
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You
+mean then she made you of her own movement the
+declaration you quote?"
+</p><p>
+Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather
+than help in her sense of the way their eyes now met&mdash;met
+as for their each seeing in the other more than
+either said. What she most felt that she herself saw
+was the strange disposition on her companion's part
+to disparage Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned
+to "stand up" for that.
+</p><p>
+"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her
+having no private interest&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
+</p><p>
+Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise
+her; but she met it again for Kate. "She left me in no
+doubt whatever of her being free."
+</p><p>
+At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued
+to smile. "And thereby in no doubt of <i>your</i>
+being too?" It was as if as soon as he had said it,
+however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
+couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him
+she had instantly signified that. He at any rate gave
+her glare no time to act further; he fell back on the
+spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
+rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world,
+dear lady, should she be swearing to you?"
+</p><p>
+She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to
+herself; which disconcerted her when he might now
+so gracefully have used it for the aspersed Kate.
+Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
+part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you,
+we're such tremendous friends."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked
+as if that might have stood rather for an absence of
+such rigours. He was going, however, as if he had in
+a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
+Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to
+leave-taking, that she had given rather more than she
+intended or than she should be able, when once more
+getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
+Strange enough in fact that he had had from her,
+about herself&mdash;and, under the searching spell of the
+place, infinitely straight&mdash;what no one else had had:
+neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher,
+nor Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a
+minute, in particular, she was aware, lose her presence
+of mind, and she now wished he would take himself
+off, so that she might either recover it or bear the
+loss better in solitude. If he paused, however, she
+almost at the same time saw, it was because of his
+watching the approach, from the end of the sala, of
+one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were
+appointed for the party with the attendance of the
+others, always, as the most decorative, most sashed
+and starched, remained at the palace on the theory
+that she might whimsically want him&mdash;which she
+never, in her caged freedom, had yet done. Brown
+Pasquale, slipping in white shoes over the marble and
+suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
+could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too
+noiseless almost for her nerves, or simply a barefooted
+seaman on the deck of a ship&mdash;Pasquale
+offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
+held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card.
+Lord Mark&mdash;and as if also for admiration of him&mdash;delayed
+his departure to let her receive it; on which
+she read it with the instant effect of another blow to
+her presence of mind. This precarious quantity was
+indeed now so gone that even for dealing with Pasquale
+she had to do her best to conceal its disappearance.
+The effort was made, none the less, by the time
+she had asked if the gentleman were below and had
+taken in the fact that he had come up. He had followed
+the gondolier and was waiting at the top of the
+staircase.
+</p><p>
+"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added
+for her companion, while Pasquale went off: "Mr.
+Merton Densher."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark&mdash;in a manner that, making
+it resound through the great cool hall, might have
+carried it even to Densher's ear as a judgement of his
+identity heard and noted once before
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK EIGHTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his
+hotel&mdash;and all the more promptly that he had had
+occasion of old to make the same discrimination. The
+establishment, choked at that season with the polyglot
+herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German,
+mainly American, mainly English, it appeared as the
+corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded
+loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
+but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a
+dialect, he knew; yet it was pure Attic beside some of
+the dialects at the bustling inn. It made, "abroad,"
+both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
+at almost any point how he had been through every thing
+before. He had been three or four times, in Venice,
+during other visits, through this pleasant irritation of
+paddling away&mdash;away from the concert of false
+notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable
+American families and overfed German porters.
+He had in each case made terms for a lodging more
+private and not more costly, and he recalled with tenderness
+these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows
+of which he should easily know again in passing
+on canal or through campo. The shabbiest now failed
+of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the end
+of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a
+small independent <i>quartiere</i>, far down the Grand
+Canal, which he had once occupied for a month with
+a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also with
+a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian
+mysteries. The humour of those days came back to
+him for an hour, and what further befell in this interval,
+to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto in
+sight of the recognised house, he made out on the
+green shutters of his old, of his young windows the
+strips of white pasted paper that figure in Venice as an
+invitation to tenants. This was in the course of his
+very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions
+to which he responded with force. He had been almost
+without cessation, since his arrival, at Palazzo
+Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad weather
+on the second day had kept the whole party continuously
+at home. The episode had passed for him like
+a series of hours in a museum, though without the
+fatigue of that; and it had also resembled something
+that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a
+name for. He might have been looking for the name
+while he gave himself up, subsequently, to the ramble&mdash;he
+saw that even after years he couldn't lose his
+way&mdash;crowned with his stare across the water at the
+little white papers.
+</p><p>
+He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and
+he had lunched there, at an early luncheon, that morning.
+He had then been out with the three ladies, the
+three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
+and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient
+Venetian spell, until Aunt Maud had directed him to
+leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of two circumstances
+connected with this disposition of his
+person he was even now not unmindful; the first being
+that the lady of Lancaster Gate had addressed him
+with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
+sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but
+who might have been taken&mdash;yes, Susan Shepherd
+quite equally with Kate&mdash;for inscrutable parties to
+her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget
+was that he had, before the two others, as it struck
+him&mdash;that was to say especially before Kate&mdash;done
+exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself up without
+a protest and retraced his way to the palace.
+Present with him still was the question of whether he
+looked a fool for it, of whether the awkwardness he
+felt as the gondola rocked with the business of his
+leaving it&mdash;they could but make, in submission, for a
+landing-place that was none of the best&mdash;had furnished
+his friends with such entertainment as was to
+cause them, behind his back, to exchange intelligent
+smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes
+later alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned
+to tea. The strange part of this was that it had
+been very easy, extraordinarily easy. He knew it for
+strange only when he was away from her, because
+when he was away from her he was in contact with
+particular things that made it so. At the time, in her
+presence, it was as simple as sitting with his sister
+might have been, and not, if the point were urged,
+very much more thrilling. He continued to see her as
+he had first seen her&mdash;that remained ineffaceably
+behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd, his own
+Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess,
+as an angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she
+hadn't as yet complications to any point of discomfort:
+the princess, the angel, the star, were muffled
+over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little American
+girl who had been kind to him in New York and
+to whom certainly&mdash;though without making too
+much of it for either of them&mdash;he was perfectly willing
+to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming in
+on purpose, but there was nothing in that&mdash;from the
+moment she was always at home&mdash;that they couldn't
+easily keep up. The only note the least bit high that
+had even yet sounded between them was this admission
+on her part that she found it best to remain
+within. She wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet,
+for she insisted that her palace&mdash;with all its romance
+and art and history&mdash;had set up round her a whirlwind
+of suggestion that never dropped for an hour.
+It wasn't therefore, within such walls, confinement,
+it was the freedom of all the centuries: in respect to
+which Densher granted good-humouredly that they
+were then blown together, she and he, as much as she
+liked, through space.
+</p><p>
+Kate had found on the present occasion a moment
+to say to him that he suggested a clever cousin calling
+on a cousin afflicted, and bored for his pains; and
+though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so
+far see it as an impression he might make that he
+wondered if the same image wouldn't have occurred
+to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again the difference
+came up&mdash;the oddity, as he then instantly felt
+it, of his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because
+it was all doing what Kate had conceived for him; it
+wasn't in the least doing&mdash;and that had been his
+notion of his life&mdash;anything he himself had conceived.
+The difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp,
+sore, was the irritant under which he had quitted the
+palace and under which he was to make the best of
+the business of again dining there. He said to himself
+that he must make the best of everything; that was in
+his mind, at the traghetto, even while, with his preoccupation
+about changing quarters, he studied,
+across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had
+done for the past, would it do for the present? would
+it play in any manner into the general necessity of
+which he was conscious? That necessity of making
+the best was the instinct&mdash;as he indeed himself knew&mdash;of
+a man somehow aware that if he let go at one
+place he should let go everywhere. If he took off his
+hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
+the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall
+away in a minute and admit the light. It was really a
+matter of nerves; it was exactly because he was nervous
+that he <i>could</i> go straight; yet if that condition
+should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking
+in short on a high ridge, steep down on either side,
+where the proprieties&mdash;once he could face at all remaining
+there&mdash;reduced themselves to his keeping
+his head. It was Kate who had so perched him, and
+there came up for him at moments, as he found himself
+planting one foot exactly before another, a sensible
+sharpness of irony as to her management of him.
+It wasn't that she had put him in danger&mdash;to be in
+real danger with her would have had another quality.
+There glowed for him in fact a kind of rage at what
+he wasn't having; an exasperation, a resentment, begotten
+truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
+to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated
+state. It was beautifully done of her, but
+what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually
+bent to her will? His idea from the first,
+from the very first of his knowing her, had been to be,
+as the French called it, <i>bon prince</i> with her, mindful
+of the good humour and generosity, the contempt, in
+the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
+savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally
+afraid. There were things enough, goodness knew&mdash;for
+it was the moral of his plight&mdash;that he couldn't
+afford; but what had had a charm for him if not
+the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in
+another way? of not at all events reading the romance
+of his existence in a cheap edition. All he had originally
+felt in her came back to him, was indeed actually
+as present as ever&mdash;how he had admired and
+envied what he called to himself her pure talent for
+life, as distinguished from his own, a poor weak thing
+of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only it
+irritated him the more that this was exactly what was
+now, ever so characteristically, standing out in her.
+</p><p>
+It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily,
+that he was just where he was and that he was above
+all just <i>how</i> he was. The proof of a decent reaction
+in him against so much passivity was, with no great
+richness, that he at least knew&mdash;knew, that is, how
+he was, and how little he liked it as a thing accepted
+in mere helplessness. He was, for the moment, wistful&mdash;that
+above all described it; that was so large a part
+of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in,
+kept him, on his traghetto, positively throbbing with
+his question. His question connected itself, even while
+he stood, with his special smothered soreness, his sense
+almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame were
+less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions
+about him, regard it as serious. It was born, for that
+matter, partly of the conditions, those conditions that
+Kate had so almost insolently braved, had been willing,
+without a pang, to see him ridiculously&mdash;ridiculously
+so far as just complacently&mdash;exposed to. How
+little it <i>could</i> be complacently he was to feel with the
+last thoroughness before he had moved from his point
+of vantage. His question, as we have called it, was the
+interesting question of whether he had really no will
+left. How could he know&mdash;that was the point&mdash;without
+putting the matter to the test? It had been
+right to be <i>bon prince,</i> and the joy, something of the
+pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even
+now compatible with the impulse to look into their
+account; but he held his breath a little as it came
+home to him with supreme sharpness that, whereas
+he had done absolutely everything that Kate had
+wanted, she had done nothing whatever that he had.
+So it was in fine that his idea of the test by which he
+must try that possibility kept referring itself, in the
+warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern night&mdash;"conditions"
+these, such as we just spoke of&mdash;to
+the glimmer, more and more ghostly as the light failed,
+of the little white papers on his old green shutters.
+By the time he looked at his watch he had been for a
+quarter of an hour at this post of observation and reflexion;
+but by the time he walked away again he had
+found his answer to the idea that had grown so importunate.
+Since a proof of his will was wanted it was
+indeed very exactly in wait for him&mdash;it lurked there
+on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little
+pier had from time to time accosted him; but it was
+a part of the play of his nervousness to turn his back
+on that facility. He would go over, but he walked,
+very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the
+Rialto. The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the
+ancient padrona was there with her smile all a radiance
+but her recognition all a fable; the ancient rickety
+objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in their
+decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were
+tenderly veracious; so that before he took his way again
+he had arranged to come in on the morrow.
+</p><p>
+He was amusing about it that evening at dinner&mdash;in
+spite of an odd first impulse, which at the palace
+quite melted away, to treat it merely as matter for his
+own satisfaction. This need, this propriety, he had
+taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly
+perceiving, in the course of talk, that the incident
+would minister to innocent gaiety. Such was quite its
+effect, with the aid of his picture&mdash;an evocation of the
+quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
+in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess
+that her own high chambers, though they were a thousand
+grand things, weren't really this; made it in fact
+with such success that she presently declared it his
+plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She
+had expressed as yet&mdash;he could feel it as felt among
+them all&mdash;no such clear wish to go anywhere, not even
+to make an effort for a parish feast, or an autumn
+sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or
+Gianbellini. It was constantly Densher's view that,
+as between himself and Kate, things were understood
+without saying, so that he could catch in her, as she
+but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it,
+the whole soft breath of consciousness meeting and
+promoting consciousness. This view was so far justified
+to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her company
+was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her
+doing nothing to show it. It fell in so perfectly with
+what she had desired and foretold that she was&mdash;and
+this was what most struck him&mdash;sufficiently gratified
+and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality
+of his response, from his tone and his very look, which
+for an instant instinctively sought her own, that he
+had answered inevitably, almost shamelessly, in a mere
+time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her failure
+of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage
+he had been planning for&mdash;that is at least if she too
+were not darkly dishonest. She might, he was not unaware,
+have made out, from some deep part of her,
+the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
+announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable
+of guessing and yet of simultaneously hiding her
+guess. It wound him up a turn or two further, none
+the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision by
+which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever
+apprehension of his motive in shifting his abode might
+have brushed her with its wings, she at all events certainly
+didn't guess that he was giving their friend a hollow
+promise. That was what she had herself imposed
+on him; there had been in the prospect from the first
+a definite particular point at which hollowness, to call
+it by its least compromising name, would have to begin.
+Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
+Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms
+for, he had not recovered them to receive Milly
+Theale: which made no more difference in his expression
+of happy readiness than if he had been&mdash;just
+what he was trying not to be&mdash;fully hardened
+and fully base. So rapid in fact was the rhythm of his
+inward drama that the quick vision of impossibility
+produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
+appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively
+scaring him. It gave him a measure of the intensity,
+the reality of his now mature motive. It
+prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these
+things, but it made them as vivid as if they already
+flushed with success. It was before the flush of success
+that his heart beat almost to dread. The dread was
+but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only
+that was in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly
+should, in this projection of necessities, strike him as
+of the last incongruity, quite as a hateful idea, and
+above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
+game&mdash;the adoption of such a view might of course
+have an identity with one of those numerous ways of
+being a fool that seemed so to abound for him. It
+would remain none the less the way to which he should
+be in advance most reconciled. His mature motive,
+as to which he allowed himself no grain of illusion,
+had thus in an hour taken imaginative possession of
+the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated
+there, already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence,
+for Milly's beauty, no matter how short a time,
+to be housed with. There were things she would
+never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air; but
+this made no difference in the fact that her brushing
+against them would do nobody any good. The discrimination
+and the scruple were for <i>him</i>. So he felt
+all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
+admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however&mdash;when
+hadn't it to be his last word?&mdash;Kate
+was always sublime.
+</p><p>
+That came up in all connexions during the rest of
+these first days; came up in especial under pressure
+of the fact that each time our plighted pair snatched,
+in its passage, at the good fortune of half an hour together,
+they were doomed&mdash;though Densher felt it as
+all by <i>his</i> act&mdash;to spend a part of the rare occasion in
+wonder at their luck and in study of its queer character.
+This was the case after he might be supposed to
+have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
+the girl&mdash;ready always, as we say, with the last word&mdash;had
+given him the benefit of her righting of every
+wrong appearance, a support familiar to him now in
+reference to other phases. It was still the case after he
+possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
+insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the
+crisis, what idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined
+it. Such as the idea was&mdash;and that it suited
+Kate's own book she openly professed&mdash;he had only
+to see how things were turning out to feel it strikingly
+justified. Densher's reply to all this vividness was that
+of course Aunt Maud's intervention hadn't been occult,
+even for <i>his</i> vividness, from the moment she had
+written him, with characteristic concentration, that if
+he should see his way to come to Venice for a fortnight
+she should engage he would find it no blunder. It took
+Aunt Maud really to do such things in such ways; just
+as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such
+others as he must now strike them all&mdash;didn't he?&mdash;as
+committed to. Mrs. Lowder's admonition had been
+of course a direct reference to what she had said to him
+at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night
+Milly had failed them through illness; only it had at
+least matched that remarkable outbreak in respect to
+the quantity of good nature it attributed to him. The
+young man's discussions of his situation&mdash;which
+were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud
+herself&mdash;suffered a little, it may be divined, by the
+sense that he couldn't put everything off, as he privately
+expressed it, on other people. His ears, in solitude,
+were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder
+had simply tested him, seen him as he was and
+made out what could be done with him. She had had
+but to whistle for him and he had come. If she had
+taken for granted his good nature she was as justified
+as Kate declared. This awkwardness of his conscience,
+both in respect to his general plasticity, the
+fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits, to be a
+mode of life like another&mdash;certainly better than some,
+and particularly in respect to such confusion as might
+reign about what he had really come for&mdash;this inward
+ache was not wholly dispelled by the style,
+charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even
+the high wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him
+right with himself when there was something quite
+distinct from these things that kept him wrong.
+</p><p>
+In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile,
+for one thing, the interest of seeing&mdash;and quite
+for the first time in his life&mdash;whether, on a given occasion,
+that might be quite so necessary to happiness as
+was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment
+never doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an
+adventure&mdash;he who had never thought himself cut
+out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able
+at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below
+it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of
+the few late strolls he was finding time to take through
+dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty <i>campi</i>, overhung
+with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
+at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep
+on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded
+dancer in a banquet-hall deserted&mdash;during
+these interludes he entertained cold views, even to the
+point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest
+follies are the best, of thinking of immediate departure
+as not only possible but as indicated. He had however
+only to cross again the threshold of Palazzo Leporelli
+to see all the elements of the business compose,
+as painters called it, differently. It began to strike
+him then that departure wouldn't curtail, but would
+signally coarsen his folly, and that above all, as he
+hadn't really "begun" anything, had only submitted,
+consented, but too generously indulged and condoned
+the beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself
+with superstitious rigour. The single thing that
+was clear in complications was that, whatever happened,
+one was to behave as a gentleman&mdash;to which
+was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining
+truth that complications might sometimes have their
+tedium beguiled by a study of the question of how a
+gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten to
+add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest
+worry. Three women were looking to him at once,
+and, though such a predicament could never be, from
+the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet had,
+thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The
+law was not to be a brute&mdash;in return for amiabilities.
+He hadn't come all the way out from England to be a
+brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
+to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate
+in Venice, to be a brute. He hadn't treated Mrs.
+Lowder as if in responding to her suggestion he had
+understood her&mdash;he hadn't done that either to be a
+brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such
+an anti-climax was the prompt and inevitable, the
+achieved surrender&mdash;<i>as</i> a gentleman, oh that indubitably!&mdash;to
+the unexpected impression made by
+poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand
+old palace and the dispenser of an hospitality more
+irresistible, thanks to all the conditions, than any ever
+known to him.
+</p><p>
+This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority,
+a felicity&mdash;he scarce knew by what strange
+name to call it&mdash;for which he said to himself that
+he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome,
+her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her
+disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments
+to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole
+setting and by the perception at the same time, on
+the observer's part, that this element gained from
+her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as
+it gave&mdash;her whole attitude had, to his imagination,
+meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
+dropping and quavering forth again, like vague
+faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned
+melancholy music. It was positively well for him, he
+had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it off
+on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously
+wouldn't, that&mdash;well, that he had been
+rather taken in by not having known in advance!
+There had been now five days of it all without his
+risking even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought
+to have known and of what in particular therefore
+had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that really,
+when it came to any free handling and naming of
+things, they were living together, the five of them,
+in an air in which an ugly effect of "blurting out"
+might easily be produced. He came back with his
+friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
+propinquity, which had a double virtue in that
+favouring air. He breathed on it as if he could
+scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite
+of this privilege, without his quite committing himself,
+for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's
+high style and state as would have corresponded with
+the amount of recognition it had produced in him.
+Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
+which had fairly become a habit, that he had
+been the first to know her. This was what they had all
+insisted on, in her absence, that day at Mrs. Lowder's;
+and this was in especial what had made him feel its
+influence on his immediately paying her a second
+visit. Its influence had been all there, been in the
+high-hung, rumbling carriage with them, from the
+moment she took him to drive, covering them in together
+as if it had been a rug of softest silk. It had
+worked as a clear connexion with something lodged
+in the past, something already their own. He had
+more than once recalled how he had said to himself
+even at that moment, at some point in the drive, that
+he was not <i>there</i>, not just as he was in so doing it,
+through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
+Milly's own, and through himself and <i>his</i> own, unmistakeably&mdash;as
+well as through the little facts,
+whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New
+York.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+There was at last, with everything that made for it,
+an occasion when he got from Kate, on what she now
+spoke of as his eternal refrain, an answer of which
+he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
+His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the
+riddle of Mrs. Lowder's view of her profit&mdash;a view
+so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them
+to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the
+chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony
+that smote him rather straight, whether he felt their
+opportunities as anything so grand. He looked at her
+deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note; it
+was the least he could let her off with for having made
+him visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the
+sharpness dropped out of her tone, which became sweet
+and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she expressively
+echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
+very much out of our meetings?"
+</p><p>
+"On the contrary&mdash;they're starvation diet. All
+I mean is&mdash;and it's all I've meant from the day I
+came&mdash;that we at least get more than Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand
+what Aunt Maud gets."
+</p><p>
+"Exactly so&mdash;and it's what I don't understand
+that keeps me so fascinated with the question. <i>She</i>
+gives me no light; she's prodigious. She takes everything
+as of a natural&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate
+I shall be making my reflexions about you. There's
+every appearance for her," Kate went on, "that what
+she had made her mind up to as possible is possible;
+that what she had thought more likely than not to
+happen is happening. The very essence of her, as
+you surely by this time have made out for yourself,
+is that when she adopts a view she&mdash;well, to her
+own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes
+with her view any other, any opposite view, and
+those, not less, who represent that. I've often thought
+success comes to her"&mdash;Kate continued to study the
+phenomenon&mdash;"by the spirit in her that dares and
+defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has
+seen it so again and again, in the face of everything,
+become the right one."
+</p><p>
+Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the
+largest response. "Ah my dear child, if you can explain
+I of course needn't not 'understand.' I'm condemned
+to that," he on his side presently explained,
+"only when understanding fails." He took a moment;
+then he pursued: "Does she think she terrorises
+<i>us?</i>" To which he added while, without immediate
+speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
+believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed
+about me?" He knew now that he was probing the
+girl deep&mdash;something told him so; but that was a
+reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that
+you dislike me?"
+</p><p>
+To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong.
+"You could yourself easily put it there!"
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "By telling her so?"
+</p><p>
+"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity;
+"I don't ask that of you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask,
+you know, so little&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+There was a full irony in this, on his own part,
+that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. "I'm
+perfectly justified in what I've asked," she quietly
+returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their
+eyes again intimately met, and the effect was to make
+her proceed. "You're not a bit unhappy."
+</p><p>
+"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't practically show&mdash;which is enough
+for Aunt Maud. You're wonderful, you're beautiful,"
+Kate said; "and if you really want to know
+whether I believe you're doing it you may take from
+me perfectly that I see it coming." With which, by
+a quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she
+asked him the hour.
+</p><p>
+"Oh only twelve-ten"&mdash;he had looked at his
+watch. "We've taken but thirteen minutes; we've
+time yet."
+</p><p>
+"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
+</p><p>
+Densher, from where they had been standing,
+measured the long reach of the Square. "They're
+still in their shop. They're safe for half an hour."
+</p><p>
+"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+This colloquy had taken place in the middle of
+Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon,
+a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity,
+favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
+middle, but at the point where our pair had paused
+by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like
+church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but
+a little way behind them, and they had in front the
+vast empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at
+that hour movement and traffic were mostly confined.
+Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the
+visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except
+for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the
+crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear
+and they could see their companions hadn't yet been,
+and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
+by the lace-shop, in one of the <i>loggie</i>, where, shortly
+before, they had left them for a look-in&mdash;the expression
+was artfully Densher's&mdash;at Saint Mark's.
+Their morning had happened to take such a turn as
+brought this chance to the surface; yet his allusion,
+just made to Kate, hadn't been an overstatement of
+their general opportunity. The worst that could be
+said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
+in presence&mdash;in presence of every one; every
+one consisting at this juncture, in a peopled world,
+of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly. But the
+proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could
+become special was furnished precisely by this view
+of the compatibility of their comfort with a certain
+amount of lingering. The others had assented to
+their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the
+least the others could do. What had really helped
+them this morning was the fact that, on his turning
+up, as he always called it, at the palace, Milly had
+not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom
+and use had hitherto seemed fairly established;
+on his coming round, day after day&mdash;eight days had
+been now so conveniently marked&mdash;their friends,
+Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him
+to sit with her till luncheon. Such was the perfect
+operation of the scheme on which he had been, as
+he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly
+there was that amount of justification for Kate's
+vision of success. He <i>had</i>, for Mrs. Lowder&mdash;he
+couldn't help it while sitting there&mdash;the air, which
+was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
+sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their
+young hostess each morning as little as she had failed
+him; it was only to-day that she hadn't been well
+enough to see him.
+</p><p>
+That had made a mark, all round; the mark was
+in the way in which, gathered in the room of state,
+with the place, from the right time, all bright and
+cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
+they&mdash;the rest of them&mdash;simply looked at each
+other. It was lurid&mdash;lurid, in all probability, for
+each of them privately&mdash;that they had uttered no
+common regrets. It was strange for our young man
+above all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to <i>that</i>
+degree, the hush of gravity, of apprehension, of significance
+of some sort, should be the most the case&mdash;that
+of the guests&mdash;could permit itself. The hush,
+for that matter, continued after the party of four had
+gone down to the gondola and taken their places in it.
+Milly had sent them word that she hoped they would
+go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had produced
+a second remarkable look, a look as of their
+knowing, one quite as well as the other, what such
+a message meant as provision for the alternative beguilement
+of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
+his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take
+it as pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had
+helped the affair out, Mrs. Stringham who, when it
+came to that, knew their friend better than any of
+them. She knew her so well that she knew herself
+as acting in exquisite compliance with conditions
+comparatively obscure, approximately awful to them,
+by not thinking it necessary to stay at home. She had
+corrected that element of the perfunctory which was
+the slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she
+had invented a preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself;
+she had remembered the fond dreams of the visitation
+of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
+away by accidents, and it had come up as well for
+her that Kate had, the day before, spoken of the
+part played by fatality in her own failure of real
+acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
+sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention
+had by this time a corner of his mind all to itself;
+something that had begun for them at Lancaster
+Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape;
+her action, ineffably discreet, had at all events a way
+of affecting him as for the most part subtly, even
+when not superficially, in his own interest. They
+were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there
+were too many persons, at least three, and too many
+things, between them; but meanwhile something was
+preparing that would draw them closer. He scarce
+knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some
+hour when it would be a service to do so, that she had
+all the while understood him. He even had a presentiment
+of a juncture at which the understanding
+of every one else would fail and this deep little person's
+alone survive.
+</p><p>
+Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as
+we may say, that hung about our young friends;
+these had been the small accidents and quiet forces
+to which they owed the advantage we have seen them
+in some sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to
+deepen for them as they stayed their course again;
+the splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all
+the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any
+equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness
+from earshot, with solitude and security.
+It was as if, being in possession, they could say what
+they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence of
+that, each had an apprehension of what the other
+wanted to say. It was most of all for them, moreover,
+as if this very quantity, seated on their lips in
+the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
+ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart
+of each a fear. There might have been a betrayal of
+that in the way Densher broke the silence resting
+on her last words. "What did you mean just now
+that I can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For
+myself, stupidly, if you will, I don't see, from the
+moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
+lying."
+</p><p>
+Well, she could tell him. "You can say something
+both handsome and sincere to her about Milly&mdash;whom
+you honestly like so much. That wouldn't
+be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an
+effect. You don't, you know, say much about her."
+</p><p>
+And Kate put before him the fruit of observation.
+"You don't, you know, speak of her at all."
+</p><p>
+"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told
+you so?" Then as the girl, for answer, only seemed
+to bethink herself, "You must have extraordinary
+conversations!" he exclaimed.
+</p><p>
+Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary
+conversations."
+</p><p>
+His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed
+to hear more about them; but there was something
+in her own, apparently, that defeated the
+opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a
+different matter, which had been in his mind a week,
+yet in respect to which he had had no chance so good
+as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such wonderful
+things pass between you, what she makes
+of the incident, the other day, of Lord Mark's so very
+superficial visit?&mdash;his having spent here, as I gather,
+but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
+friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off
+by the same night's train, for seeing any one else.
+What can she make of his not having waited to see
+<i>you</i>, or to see herself&mdash;with all he owes her?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He
+came to make Milly his offer of marriage&mdash;he came
+for nothing but that. As Milly wholly declined it his
+business was for the time at an end. He couldn't
+quite on the spot turn round to make up to <i>us</i>."
+</p><p>
+Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of
+taste on such an adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't
+see it. But Densher was lost in another thought. "Do
+you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
+leaving her, that was what had been taking place between
+them?"
+</p><p>
+"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
+</p><p>
+"What sort of a blundering weathercock then <i>is</i>
+he?" the young man went on in his wonder.
+</p><p>
+"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled.
+"Do you pretend that Milly didn't tell you?"
+</p><p>
+"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
+</p><p>
+Kate continued to smile. "You <i>are</i> in love with
+her, you know."
+</p><p>
+He gave her another long look. "Why, since she
+has refused him, should my opinion of Lord Mark
+show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think well of
+him for such treatment of the other persons I've
+mentioned, and I feel I don't understand from you
+why Mrs. Lowder should."
+</p><p>
+"She doesn't&mdash;but she doesn't care," Kate explained.
+"You know perfectly the terms on which
+lots of London people live together even when they're
+supposed to live very well. He's not committed
+to us&mdash;he was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied
+man," she asked, "always have his try?"
+</p><p>
+"And come back afterwards, with confidence in
+a welcome, to the victim of his inconstancy?"
+</p><p>
+Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of
+as a victim. "Oh but he has <i>had</i> his try at <i>me</i>. So
+it's all right."
+</p><p>
+"Through your also having, you mean, refused
+him?"
+</p><p>
+She balanced an instant during which Densher
+might have just wondered if pure historic truth were
+to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped on the right
+side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
+discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on&mdash;now as
+lucid as ever&mdash;"considers, no doubt, that she has
+a pledge from him in respect to me; a pledge that
+would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
+As the case stands that makes no difference."
+</p><p>
+Densher laughed out. "It isn't <i>his</i> merit that he
+has failed."
+</p><p>
+"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark.
+He's just what he was, and what he knew he was. It's
+not for me either to reflect on him after I've so treated
+him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated
+him beautifully."
+</p><p>
+"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be
+jealous." But before he could take it up she had more
+to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle you that Milly's
+so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
+else can displease her. What does she see but
+that Milly herself recognises her situation with you
+as too precious to be spoiled? Such a recognition as
+that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
+your own recognition. Out of which she therefore
+gets it that the more you have for Milly the less you
+have for me."
+</p><p>
+There were moments again&mdash;we know that from
+the first they had been numerous&mdash;when he felt with
+a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way
+of putting things. There was something in it that
+bent him at once to conviction and to reaction. And
+this effect, however it be named, now broke into his
+tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have for
+you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it.
+"Luckily for us we may really consider she doesn't.
+So successful have we been."
+</p><p>
+"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what
+you give me, and I suppose that, to be consistent&mdash;to
+stand on my feet where I do stand at all&mdash;I ought
+to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me
+seems to me, more than anything else, the larger and
+larger size of my job. It seems to me more than anything
+else what you expect of me. It never seems to
+me somehow what I may expect of <i>you</i>. There's so
+much you <i>don't</i> give me."
+</p><p>
+She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I
+don't&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me
+none."
+</p><p>
+"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment
+ventured to ask.
+</p><p>
+"Your doing something for me."
+</p><p>
+She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing
+<i>this</i> for you? Do you call this nothing?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing at all."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
+</p><p>
+They had strolled slowly further, but he was
+brought up short. "I thought you exactly contend
+that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing!"
+</p><p>
+It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful
+idea that he had seen her at a loss. He judged
+the next instant moreover that she didn't like it&mdash;either
+the being so or the being seen, for she soon
+spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded;
+an appearance that produced in himself, he no less
+quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence. "What
+then do you wish me to risk?"
+</p><p>
+The appeal from danger touched him, but all to
+make him, as he would have said, worse. "What
+I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this rate
+that I <i>am</i>?" Oh she understood him, for all she
+might so bravely disguise it, and that made him feel
+straighter than if she hadn't. Deep, always, was
+his sense of life with her&mdash;deep as it had been from
+the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky
+London of two winters ago they had originally exchanged.
+He had never taken her for unguarded,
+ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
+intenser faith between them this was because he believed
+it could reach her and she could meet it. "I
+can go on perhaps," he said, "with help. But I can't
+go on without."
+</p><p>
+She looked away from him now, and it showed
+him how she understood. "We ought to be there&mdash;I
+mean when they come out."
+</p><p>
+"They <i>won't</i> come out&mdash;not yet. And I don't
+care if they do." To which he straightway added, as
+if to deal with the charge of selfishness that his
+words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling
+her to make: "Why not have done with it all
+and face the music as we are?" It broke from him
+in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only <i>take</i>
+me!"
+</p><p>
+It brought her eyes round to him again, and he
+could see how, after all, somewhere deep within, she
+felt his rebellion more sweet than bitter. Its effect
+on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her an
+instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less
+pulled herself together to reply. "Do you want to
+kill her?"
+</p><p>
+He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill,
+you mean, Aunt Maud?"
+</p><p>
+"You know whom I mean. We've told too many
+lies."
+</p><p>
+Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have
+told none!"
+</p><p>
+He had brought it out with a sharpness that did
+him good, but he had naturally, none the less, to take
+the look it made her give him. "Thank you very
+much."
+</p><p>
+Her expression, however, failed to check the words
+that had already risen to his lips. "Rather than lay
+myself open to the least appearance of it I'll go this
+very night."
+</p><p>
+"Then go," said Kate Croy.
+</p><p>
+He knew after a little, while they walked on again
+together, that what was in the air for him, and disconcertingly,
+was not the violence, but much rather
+the cold quietness, of the way this had come from
+her. They walked on together, and it was for a minute
+as if their difference had become of a sudden, in
+all truth, a split&mdash;as if the basis of his departure had
+been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
+recklessly moreover, since they now might
+easily, from under the arcades, be observed, he passed
+his hand into her arm with a force that produced for
+them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any
+your idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
+</p><p>
+"Come to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Come to me."
+</p><p>
+"How? Where?"
+</p><p>
+She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his
+uncertainty, a wonder in her being so equal to him.
+"To my rooms, which are perfectly possible, and in
+taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must
+have felt, in view. We can arrange it&mdash;with two
+grains of courage. People in our case always arrange
+it." She listened as for the good information, and
+there was support for him&mdash;since it was a question
+of his going step by step&mdash;in the way she took no
+refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth
+not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the
+absence of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason
+to his sense of possibilities. For the knowledge of
+what she was he had absolutely to <i>see</i> her now, incapable
+of refuge, stand there for him in all the light of
+the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her
+mere listening in fact made him even understand
+himself as he hadn't yet done. Idea for idea, his
+own was thus already, and in the germ, beautiful.
+"There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm
+not a fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know
+what it means. <i>With</i> you I can do it&mdash;I'll go as far
+as you demand or as you will yourself. Without you&mdash;I'll
+be hanged! And I must be sure."
+</p><p>
+She listened so well that she was really listening
+after he had ceased to speak. He had kept his grasp
+of her, drawing her close, and though they had again,
+for the time, stopped walking, his talk&mdash;for others
+at a distance&mdash;might have been, in the matchless
+place, that of any impressed tourist to any slightly
+more detached companion. On possessing himself
+of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
+afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of
+which his eyes moved while she twiddled her parasol.
+She now, however, made a motion that confronted them
+finally with the opposite end. Then only she spoke&mdash;"Please
+take your hand out of my arm." He understood
+at once: she had made out in the shade of
+the gallery the issue of the others from their place of
+purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
+was all right. The others had seen them as well and
+waited for them, complacent enough, under one
+of the arches. They themselves too&mdash;he argued
+that Kate would argue&mdash;looked perfectly ready,
+decently patient, properly accommodating. They
+themselves suggested nothing worse&mdash;always by
+Kate's system&mdash;than a pair of the children of a supercivilised
+age making the best of an awkwardness.
+They didn't nevertheless hurry&mdash;that would overdo
+it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
+felt, ever so distinctly&mdash;it was with this he faced
+Mrs. Lowder&mdash;that he was already in a sense possessed
+of what he wanted. There was more to come&mdash;everything;
+he had by no means, with his companion,
+had it all out. Yet what he was possessed of
+was real&mdash;the fact that she hadn't thrown over his
+lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
+this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled
+was in itself of the nature of bliss. The danger
+had dropped&mdash;it was behind him there in the great
+sunny space. So far she was good for what he
+wanted.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put
+to her that evening, and with further ground for it,
+the next sharpest question that had been on his lips
+in the morning&mdash;which his other preoccupation had
+then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity
+was again made, as befell, by his learning from
+Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as usual, with the close
+of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them again
+at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come
+down later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in
+the great saloon, where even more candles than their
+friend's large common allowance&mdash;she grew daily
+more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed
+her about it&mdash;lighted up the pervasive mystery of
+Style. He had thus five minutes with the good lady
+before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared&mdash;minutes
+illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number
+of Milly's candles.
+</p><p>
+"<i>May</i> she come down&mdash;ought she if she isn't
+really up to it?"
+</p><p>
+He had asked that in the wonderment always
+stirred in him by glimpses&mdash;rare as were these&mdash;of
+the inner truth about the girl. There was of course
+a question of health&mdash;it was in the air, it was in the
+ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds
+he heard, it was everywhere. But it was everywhere
+with the effect of a request to him&mdash;to his very delicacy,
+to the common discretion of others as well as
+his own&mdash;that no allusion to it should be made.
+There had practically been none, that morning,
+on her explained non-appearance&mdash;the absence of
+it, as we know, quite monstrous and awkward; and
+this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
+licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held
+them closed; all the more that his doing so performed
+for his own spirit a useful function. If he positively
+wanted not to be brought up with his nose against
+Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his
+conduct was marked by straightness? It was perhaps
+pathetic for her, and for himself was perhaps
+even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
+curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary
+friend. He might have shaken himself at moments
+to try, for a sort of dry decency, to have it; but that
+too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
+was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his
+feelings&mdash;it being so established that he had none
+at all. They were all for Kate, without a feather's
+weight to spare. He was acting for Kate&mdash;not, by
+the deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly
+not interested, for had he been interested
+he would have cared, and had he cared he would have
+wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
+have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity
+that had to represent his dignity and his honour.
+His dignity and his honour, at the same time, let us
+add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling his little
+talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse&mdash;it was as
+if she had wished to give him that; and it was as if,
+for himself, on current terms, he could oblige her by
+accepting it. She not only permitted, she fairly invited
+him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're
+here." It was no answer to his question, but it had
+for the moment to serve. And the rest was fully to
+come.
+</p><p>
+He smiled at her and presently found himself, as
+a kind of consequence of communion with her, talking
+her own language. "It's a very wonderful experience."
+</p><p>
+"Well"&mdash;and her raised face shone up at him&mdash;"that's
+all I want you to feel about it. If I weren't
+afraid," she added, "there are things I should like
+to say to you."
+</p><p>
+"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly
+asked.
+</p><p>
+"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides,
+I don't, you know, seem to have the chance.
+You're always, you know, <i>with</i> her."
+</p><p>
+He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his
+fixed smile; which was the more fixed as he felt in
+these last words an exact description of his course.
+It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
+with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm
+not with her now."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;and I'm so glad, since I get this from it.
+She's ever so much better."
+</p><p>
+"Better? Then she <i>has</i> been worse?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous&mdash;that's
+what she has been. She <i>is</i> marvellous.
+But she's really better."
+</p><p>
+"Oh then if she's really better&mdash;!" But he
+checked himself, wanting only to be easy about it
+and above all not to appear engaged to the point of
+mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him.
+"She's keeping herself. You'll see. You'll not
+really need to miss anything. There's to be a little
+party."
+</p><p>
+"Ah I do see&mdash;by this aggravated grandeur."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it <i>is</i> lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing.
+She's lodged for the first time as she ought, from her
+type, to be; and doing it&mdash;I mean bringing out all
+the glory of the place&mdash;makes her really happy.
+It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be&mdash;with me
+as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put
+into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only
+had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
+should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper,
+the woman in charge here, has a big red
+cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb
+for the evening." These explanations and sundry
+others Mrs. Stringham gave, though not all with the
+result of making him feel that the picture closed him
+in. What part was there for <i>him</i>, with his attitude
+that lacked the highest style, in a composition in
+which everything else would have it? "They won't,
+however, be at dinner, the few people she expects&mdash;they
+come round afterwards from their respective
+hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
+ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or
+two ago. It's for <i>him</i> she has wanted to do something&mdash;to
+let it begin at once. We shall see more
+of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad&mdash;she'll
+be glad too&mdash;that <i>you're</i> to see him." The
+good lady, in connexion with it, was urgent, was
+almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope&mdash;!"
+But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her
+cheer.
+</p><p>
+He considered a little this appearance, while she
+let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than
+she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, that you'll stay on."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he
+seemed to feel, so much that he could scarce tell where
+it ended or began.
+</p><p>
+"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music&mdash;beautiful
+instruments and songs; and not Tasso
+declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has arranged
+it&mdash;or at least I have. That is Eugenio has.
+Besides, you're in the picture."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;I!" said Densher almost with the gravity
+of a real protest.
+</p><p>
+"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses
+the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup.
+What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is that
+you'll be faithful to us&mdash;that you've not come for
+a mere foolish few days."
+</p><p>
+Densher's more private and particular shabby
+realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious,
+at this touch, in the artificial repose he had in his
+anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The
+way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and
+housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed
+working-men, engaged in an unprecedented
+sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
+acquisition! The things they took for granted and the
+general misery of explaining! He couldn't tell them
+how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he
+had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
+for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because
+that would give them a false view of the source
+of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would
+operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to
+that weight as of expected performance which these
+very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and
+more to settle on his heart. He had incurred it, the
+expectation of performance; the thing was done, and
+there was no use talking; again, again the cold breath
+of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
+floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when
+I say I've very tiresome things to consider. Botherations,
+necessities at home. The pinch, the pressure in
+London."
+</p><p>
+But she understood in perfection; she rose to the
+pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been
+her own very element. "Oh the daily task and the
+daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
+knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight
+of the precious deceiving days. Aren't they just what
+I myself have given up? I've given up all to follow
+<i>her</i>. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't you,"
+she asked, "write about Venice?"
+</p><p>
+He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could
+feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly. "Do <i>you</i>
+write about Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"No; but I would&mdash;oh wouldn't I?&mdash;if I hadn't
+so completely given up. She's, you know, my princess,
+and to one's princess&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. There you are!"
+</p><p>
+It pressed on him with this that never had a man
+been in so many places at once. "I quite understand
+that she's yours. Only you see she's not mine." He
+felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he
+had the moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and
+least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a disturbing
+implication. This was part of what he liked
+in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that
+she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him
+to know it. That was in itself a hint of possibilities
+between them, of a relation, beneficent and elastic for
+him, which wouldn't engage him further than he
+could see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt
+how strange it all was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd
+then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only
+wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
+way and from a motive so different, even though
+scarce less deep. Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so
+odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what
+each of the others did; and he was between them all,
+he was in the midst. Such perceptions made occasions&mdash;well,
+occasions for fairly wondering if it
+mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to <i>be</i>
+the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and
+yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine.
+He was glad there was no male witness; it was a
+circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a man to
+see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought
+of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom
+Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce
+with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance,
+just announced to him, required some accounting
+for. He had a vision of great London surgeons&mdash;if
+this one was a surgeon&mdash;as incisive all round; so
+that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
+ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be
+able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to
+he could take that in. It was a train, however, that
+brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
+Mark had caught him twice in the fact&mdash;the fact of
+his absurd posture; and that made a second male.
+But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark.
+</p><p>
+His companion had before this taken him up, and
+in a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of
+Milly's not being his princess. "Of course she's not.
+You must do something first."
+</p><p>
+Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be
+rather <i>she</i> who must?"
+</p><p>
+It had more than he intended the effect of bringing
+her to a stand. "I see. No doubt, if one takes it so."
+Her cheer was for the time in eclipse, and she looked
+over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of
+what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be
+kind."
+</p><p>
+It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course
+she has. No one could be more charming. She has
+treated me as if <i>I</i> were somebody. Call her my hostess
+as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm
+with you altogether. Of course," he added in the right
+spirit for her, "I do see that it's quite court life."
+</p><p>
+She promptly showed how this was almost all she
+wanted of him. "That's all I mean, if you understand
+it of such a court as never was: one of the courts
+of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
+vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
+</p><p>
+"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a
+general thing, you know," he observed, "isn't supposed
+to pay."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
+That's just the beauty here; it's why she's the great
+and only princess. With her, at her court," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
+settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage
+her. "I think you were right just now. One must
+do something first."
+</p><p>
+"Well, you've done something."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I don't see that. I can do more."
+</p><p>
+Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so!
+"You can do everything, you know."
+</p><p>
+"Everything" was rather too much for him to
+take up gravely, and he modestly let it alone, speaking
+the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a different
+but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir
+Luke Strett if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
+</p><p>
+"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs.
+Stringham explained. "He has wanted to come."
+</p><p>
+"Isn't that rather worse then&mdash;if it means he
+mayn't be easy?"
+</p><p>
+"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday.
+She has known that these several weeks." After
+which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can <i>make</i> him
+easy."
+</p><p>
+"<i>I</i> can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the
+circle of petticoats. "What have I to do with it for a
+man like that?"
+</p><p>
+"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's
+like? He's not like any one you've ever seen. He's a
+great beneficent being."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an
+outsider, to meddle."
+</p><p>
+"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged,
+"what you think."
+</p><p>
+"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared.
+It was, as they said, a large order. But he found the
+right note. "It's none of his business."
+</p><p>
+It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the
+right note. She fixed him at least with an expression
+still bright, but searching, that showed almost to excess
+what she saw in it; though what this might be he
+was not to make out till afterwards. "Say <i>that</i> to him
+then. Anything will do for him as a means of getting
+at you."
+</p><p>
+"And why should he get at me?"
+</p><p>
+"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then
+you'll see."
+</p><p>
+All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened
+his sense of immersion in an element rather more
+strangely than agreeably warm&mdash;a sense that was
+moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be
+fed to satiety by several other impressions. Milly
+came down after dinner, half a dozen friends&mdash;objects
+of interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of
+Lancaster Gate&mdash;having by that time arrived; and
+with this call on her attention, the further call of her
+musicians ushered by Eugenio, but personally and
+separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity
+offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came
+last of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the
+spell of a general, a beatific mildness. There was a
+deeper depth of it, doubtless, for some than for others;
+what he in particular knew of it was that he seemed
+to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it
+and it made no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam
+in it, and they were all together, for that matter, like
+fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of the place, the
+beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
+the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in
+themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general
+manner, and made people bland without making
+them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
+had said, staying for the week or two at the inns,
+people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers,
+gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions
+of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly, let
+loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought
+them somehow into relation with something that made
+them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture
+of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
+not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the
+previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by
+"beating down," were at last almost nobly disowned.
+There was perhaps something for him in the accident
+of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she
+hadn't yet had occasion&mdash;circulating with a clearness
+intensified&mdash;to strike him as so happily pervasive.
+She was different, younger, fairer, with the
+colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether
+lucky challenge to attention; yet he was loth
+wholly to explain it by her having quitted this once,
+for some obscure yet doubtless charming reason, her
+almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much
+as the change did for the value of her presence, she
+had never yet, when all was said, made it for <i>him</i>;
+and he was not to fail of the further amusement of
+judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke
+Strett's visit. If he could in this connexion have felt
+jealous of Sir Luke Strett, whose strong face and type,
+less assimilated by the scene perhaps than any others,
+he was anon to study from the other side of the saloon,
+that would doubtless have been most amusing
+of all. But he couldn't be invidious, even to profit by
+so high a tide; he felt himself too much "in" it, as he
+might have said: a moment's reflexion put him more
+in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for
+other cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so
+much as the attenuation of a joke, introduced him to
+English ladies&mdash;that was itself a proof; for nothing
+really of so close a communion had up to this time
+passed between them as the single bright look and the
+three gay words (all ostensibly of the last lightness)
+with which her confessed consciousness brushed by
+him.
+</p><p>
+She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he
+could see, under some supreme idea, an inspiration
+which was half her nerves and half an inevitable harmony;
+but what he especially recognised was the
+character that had already several times broken out
+in her and that she so oddly appeared able, by choice
+or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display.
+She was the American girl as he had originally found
+her&mdash;found her at certain moments, it was true, in
+New York, more than at certain others; she was the
+American girl as, still more than then, he had seen
+her on the day of her meeting him in London and in
+Kate's company. It affected him as a large though
+queer social resource in her&mdash;such as a man, for instance,
+to his diminution, would never in the world
+be able to command; and he wouldn't have known
+whether to see it in an extension or a contraction of
+"personality," taking it as he did most directly for a
+confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it was
+the right thing this evening all round: that came out
+for him in a word from Kate as she approached him to
+wreak on him a second introduction. He had under
+cover of the music melted away from the lady toward
+whom she had first pushed him; and there was something
+in her to affect him as telling evasively a tale of
+their talk in the Piazza. To what did she want to
+coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had done
+to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for
+him that he had done something; not only caused her
+perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her
+unable to get away, by any mere private effort, from
+his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence,
+and near him&mdash;and it had been as unmistakeable
+through dinner&mdash;there was no getting away for her
+at all, there was less of it than ever: so she could only
+either deal with the question straight, either frankly
+yield or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or
+else merely express herself by following up the advantage
+she did possess. It was part of that advantage
+for the hour&mdash;a brief fallacious makeweight to his
+pressure&mdash;that there were plenty of things left in
+which he must feel her will. They only told him,
+these indications, how much she was, in such close
+quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again
+that her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as
+Milly's own, gave him back the sense of his action.
+It had never yet in life been granted him to know,
+almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
+minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest.
+He had lived long enough to have been on occasion
+"liked," but it had never begun to be allowed
+him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter.
+It was a liking greater than Milly's&mdash;or it would be:
+he felt it in him to answer for that. So at all events he
+read the case while he noted that Kate was somehow&mdash;for
+Kate&mdash;wanting in lustre. As a striking young
+presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness
+that Milly diffused she had assimilated all her
+share; she might fairly have been dressed to-night in
+the little black frock, superficially indistinguishable,
+that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he perceived,
+the opposite pole from such an effect as that of
+her wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes&mdash;he
+had never forgotten it&mdash;the day of their younger
+friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She was, in her
+accepted effacement&mdash;it was actually her acceptance
+that made the beauty and repaired the damage&mdash;under
+her aunt's eyes now; but whose eyes were not
+effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the less
+certainly that almost the first thing she said to him
+showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced
+at least self-possessed.
+</p><p>
+"Don't you think her good enough <i>now?</i>"
+Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms,
+she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
+renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members
+of her little orchestra, who had approached her
+with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native
+humours&mdash;things quite in the line of old Venetian
+comedy. The girl's idea of music had been
+happy&mdash;a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic;
+thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general
+habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected
+the good manners of its interpreters, representatives
+though these might be but of the order in which taste
+was natural and melody rank. It was easy at all events
+to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good
+I think her!"
+</p><p>
+"But she's <i>too</i> nice," Kate returned with appreciation.
+"Everything suits her so&mdash;especially her
+pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll trouble
+you really to look at them." Densher, though aware
+he had seen them before, had perhaps not "really"
+looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the
+embodied poetry&mdash;his mind, for Milly's aspects,
+kept coming back to that&mdash;which owed them part
+of its style. Kate's face, as she considered them,
+struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice
+round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front
+of the wearer's breast&mdash;so far down that Milly's
+trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely
+fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably
+to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went
+on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled.
+Yet they suit her down to the ground."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;down to the ground is the word." Densher
+saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps
+still more aware of something intense in his companion's
+feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove;
+this was the figure, though it most applied to her
+spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just
+now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
+under the impression of that element of wealth in her
+which was a power, which was a great power, and
+which was dove-like only so far as one remembered
+that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have
+them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even
+came to him dimly that such wings could in a given
+case&mdash;<i>had</i>, truly, in the case with which he was concerned&mdash;spread
+themselves for protection. Hadn't
+they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach,
+and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan
+Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular, nestling
+under them to a great increase of immediate ease?
+All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of
+which he heard Kate presently going on.
+</p><p>
+"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every
+one."
+</p><p>
+"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly
+returned.
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I see myself!"
+</p><p>
+As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her&mdash;she
+would have been splendid; and with it he felt more
+what she was thinking of. Milly's royal ornament
+had&mdash;under pressure now not wholly occult&mdash;taken
+on the character of a symbol of differences, differences
+of which the vision was actually in Kate's face.
+It might have been in her face too that, well as she
+certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly
+what Merton Densher would never be able to give
+her. Wasn't <i>that</i> the great difference that Milly to-night
+symbolised? She unconsciously represented to
+Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there
+was nobody with whom she had less in common than
+a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable
+to make her on any such lines as that the least little
+present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not
+till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think
+now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham
+had said to him before dinner. He could but come
+back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's
+certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that
+I'm assured she's better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour
+or two since, was in great feather to me about it. She
+evidently believes her better."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if they choose to call it so&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"And what do <i>you</i> call it&mdash;as against them?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm
+not 'against' them!" Kate added as with just a fresh
+breath of impatience for all he had to be taught.
+</p><p>
+"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What
+do you call it to me?"
+</p><p>
+It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's
+worse. But that has nothing to do with it."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
+</p><p>
+But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except
+of course that we're doing our best for her. We're
+making her want to live." And Kate again watched
+her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke
+with a kindness that had the strange property of
+striking him as inconsequent&mdash;so much, and doubtless
+so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication
+of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"It's beautiful indeed."
+</p><p>
+He hated somehow the helplessness of his own
+note; but she had given it no heed. "She's doing
+it for <i>him</i>"&mdash;and she nodded in the direction of
+Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at
+her best. But she can't deceive him."
+</p><p>
+Densher had been looking too; which made him
+say in a moment: "And do you think <i>you</i> can? I
+mean, if he's to be with us here, about your sentiments.
+If Aunt Maud's so thick with him&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his
+side and was visibly doing her best to entertain him,
+though this failed to prevent such a direction of his
+own eyes&mdash;determined, in the way such things happen,
+precisely by the attention of the others&mdash;as
+Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly
+marked. "He's looking at <i>you</i>. He wants to speak
+to you."
+</p><p>
+"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed,
+"advised me he would."
+</p><p>
+"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need,"
+Kate went on in answer to the previous question,
+"to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's necessary, will
+do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he
+can see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so
+well. He has nothing to do with me."
+</p><p>
+"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
+</p><p>
+"For not caring for <i>you?</i> Perfectly. As a brilliant
+young man driven by it into your relation with
+Milly&mdash;as all <i>that</i> I leave you to him."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think
+I can thank you for leaving me to some one easier
+perhaps with me than yourself."
+</p><p>
+She had been looking about again meanwhile, the
+lady having changed her place, for the friend of Mrs.
+Lowder's to whom she had spoken of introducing
+him. "All the more reason why I should commit you
+then to Lady Wells."
+</p><p>
+"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished
+Lady Wells from afar, that she inspired him
+with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at the back
+of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in
+germ, of whether this was the kind of person he should
+be involved with when they were married. It was
+furthermore that the consciousness of something he
+had not got from Kate in the morning, and that
+logically much concerned him, had been made more
+keen by these very moments&mdash;to say nothing of
+the consciousness that, with their general smallness
+of opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant
+hard. If Aunt Maud, over there with Sir Luke,
+noted him as a little "attentive," that might pass for
+a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who
+had to confess to having, not very gracefully, changed
+his mind. Besides, just now, he didn't care for Aunt
+Maud except in so far as he was immediately to
+show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of
+with any finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl
+who's dying? If you're right about that, about the
+state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs. Lowder's
+being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly
+pursued, "can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever,
+the great surgeon won't deceive other people&mdash;not
+those, that is, who are closely concerned. He won't
+at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's
+greatest friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham
+deceives Aunt Maud, who's her own."
+</p><p>
+Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea
+that really was worth his having kept her for. "Why
+will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing your way so
+little."
+</p><p>
+Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had
+now for him its quick, its slightly quaking intensities.
+He had compared her once, we know, to a "new
+book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest
+quality; and his emotion (to justify that) was again
+and again like the thrill of turning the page. "Well,
+you know how deeply I marvel at the way <i>you</i> see
+it!"
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on,
+"that anything in the nature of what you call deception
+on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what you call
+odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
+</p><p>
+"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why
+should she?"
+</p><p>
+"To please you."
+</p><p>
+"And how in the world can it please me?"
+</p><p>
+Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost
+tired of his density. But she looked at him again
+as she spoke. "Well then to please Milly." And before
+he could question: "Don't you feel by this time
+that there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for
+you?"
+</p><p>
+He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply
+it corresponded with the good lady's recent reception
+of him. It was queerer than anything again, the way
+they all came together round him. But that was an
+old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on
+and on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed
+this. "She's ever so kind. Only her view of
+the right thing may not be the same as yours."
+</p><p>
+"How can it be anything different if it's the view
+of serving you?"
+</p><p>
+Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung
+fire. "Oh the difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour,
+even yet quite make out how yours does serve me."
+</p><p>
+"It helps you&mdash;put it then," said Kate very simply&mdash;"to
+serve <i>me</i>. It gains you time."
+</p><p>
+"Time for what?"
+</p><p>
+"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more,
+with impatience; then as usual she qualified. "For
+anything that may happen."
+</p><p>
+Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as
+strained. "You're cryptic, love!"
+</p><p>
+It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could
+thus see that, by one of those incalculable motions in
+her without which she wouldn't have been a quarter
+so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some
+source he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a
+trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any
+human creature."
+</p><p>
+Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he
+soon enough felt his reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my
+whole insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble
+away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out again;
+it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or
+two to make. "There <i>need</i> be none whatever between
+us. There need be nothing but our sense of each other."
+</p><p>
+It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry
+while she took up again one of the so numerous links
+in her close chain. "You can tell her anything you
+like, anything whatever."
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Stringham? I <i>have</i> nothing to tell her."
+</p><p>
+"You can tell her about <i>us</i>. I mean," she wonderfully
+pursued, "that you do still like me."
+</p><p>
+It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him.
+"Only not that you still like me."
+</p><p>
+She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain
+she wouldn't repeat it."
+</p><p>
+"I see. To Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to
+any one else." Kate then, he saw, was always seeing
+Milly much more, after all, than he was; and she
+showed it again as she went on. "<i>There</i>, accordingly,
+is your time."
+</p><p>
+She did at last make him think, and it was fairly
+as if light broke, though not quite all at once. "You
+must let me say I <i>do</i> see. Time for something in
+particular that I understand you regard as possible.
+Time too that, I further understand, is time for you as
+well."
+</p><p>
+"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged
+visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him
+as through the air she had painfully made clear. Yet
+she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however,
+I'll do all the work for you. If you want things named
+you must name them."
+</p><p>
+He had quite, within the minute, been turning
+names over; and there was only one, which at last
+stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted.
+"Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
+</p><p>
+It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that
+she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might
+for the grace of silence, for favour to their conditions,
+have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
+bravely moved. "To marry her."
+</p><p>
+"So that when her death has taken place I shall
+in the natural course have money?"
+</p><p>
+It was before him enough now, and he had nothing
+more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably
+cold with the thought that all along&mdash;to
+his stupidity, his timidity&mdash;it had been, it had
+been only, what she meant. Now that he was in possession
+moreover she couldn't forbear, strangely
+enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't pronounced:
+they broke through her controlled and colourless
+voice as if she should be ashamed, to the
+very end, to have flinched. "You'll in the natural
+course have money. We shall in the natural course
+be free."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to
+Lady Wells."
+</p><p>
+He never budged&mdash;there was too much else. "I'm
+to propose it then&mdash;marriage&mdash;on the spot?"
+</p><p>
+There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the
+more simply he spoke the more he seemed ironic.
+But she remained consummately proof. "Oh I can't
+go into that with you, and from the moment you don't
+wash your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask
+me. You must act as you like and as you can."
+</p><p>
+He thought again. "I'm far&mdash;as I sufficiently
+showed you this morning&mdash;from washing my hands
+of you."
+</p><p>
+"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
+</p><p>
+"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll
+come?"
+</p><p>
+But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't
+what she meant. "You'll have a free hand, a clear
+field, a chance&mdash;well, quite ideal."
+</p><p>
+"Your descriptions"&mdash;her "ideal" was such a
+touch!&mdash;"are prodigious. And what I don't make
+out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
+</p><p>
+"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness,
+who can do what I don't like."
+</p><p>
+It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he
+was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a
+note of character that belittled his own incapacity for
+action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the greatness
+of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time
+too, moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew
+what <i>he</i> did. But something else on his lips was uppermost.
+"What I don't make out then is how you can
+even bear it."
+</p><p>
+"Well, when you know me better you'll find out
+how much I can bear." And she went on before he
+could take up, as it were, her too many implications.
+That it was left to him to know her, spiritually, "better"
+after his long sacrifice to knowledge&mdash;this for
+instance was a truth he hadn't been ready to receive
+so full in the face. She had mystified him enough,
+heaven knew, but that was rather by his own generosity
+than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem
+to suggest she might incur at his hands? In spite of
+these questions she was carrying him on. "All you'll
+have to do will be to stay."
+</p><p>
+"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh dear no&mdash;we shall go."
+</p><p>
+"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
+</p><p>
+"In a day or two&mdash;straight home. Aunt Maud
+wishes it now."
+</p><p>
+It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then
+what becomes of Miss Theale?"
+</p><p>
+"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with
+her."
+</p><p>
+He stared. "All alone?"
+</p><p>
+She had a smile that was apparently for his tone.
+"You're old enough&mdash;with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+Nothing might have been so odd for him now,
+could he have measured it, as his being able to feel,
+quite while he drew from her these successive cues,
+that he was essentially "seeing what she would say"&mdash;an
+instinct compatible for him therefore with that
+absence of a need to know her better to which she had
+a moment before done injustice. If it hadn't been
+appearing to him in gleams that she would somewhere
+break down, he probably couldn't have gone on.
+Still, as she wasn't breaking down there was nothing
+for him but to continue. "Is your going Mrs. Lowder's
+idea?"
+</p><p>
+"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what
+it does for us. And I don't," she added, "refer only to
+our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of the general
+propriety of it."
+</p><p>
+"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment.
+"It makes everything fit."
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+The word, for a little, held the air, and he might
+have seemed the while to be looking, by no means
+dimly now, at all it stood for. But he had in fact
+been looking at something else. "You leave her here
+then to die?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay.
+I mean," Kate explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
+</p><p>
+"And that's all that's necessary?"
+</p><p>
+Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we
+long ago agree that what she believes is the principal
+thing for us?"
+</p><p>
+He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from
+long ago. "Oh yes. I can't deny it." Then he added:
+"So that if I stay&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"It won't"&mdash;she was prompt&mdash;"be our fault."
+</p><p>
+"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
+</p><p>
+"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
+</p><p>
+Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared
+to leave him nothing more; and he might in fact well
+have found nothing if he hadn't presently found:
+"But what if she doesn't accept me?"
+</p><p>
+It produced in her a look of weariness that made
+the patience of her tone the next moment touch him.
+"You can but try."
+</p><p>
+"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to
+try a little hard to propose to a dying girl."
+</p><p>
+"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined
+in Kate the flash of <i>justesse</i> he could perhaps
+most, on consideration, have admired, since her retort
+touched the truth. There before him was the fact
+of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion,
+with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression
+to the depths of them, literally now perched
+on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to where
+their friend was again in range, and it made him turn
+his, so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly,
+from the other side, happened at the moment to
+notice them, and she sent across toward them in response
+all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her
+pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth.
+It brought them together again with faces made
+fairly grave by the reality she put into their plan. Kate
+herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
+only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous,
+had broken out afresh and protected more than
+interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was
+under cover.
+</p><p>
+"I might stay, you know, without trying."
+</p><p>
+"Oh to stay <i>is</i> to try."
+</p><p>
+"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of
+it?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't see how you can have the appearance
+more."
+</p><p>
+Densher waited. "You think it then possible she
+may <i>offer</i> marriage?"
+</p><p>
+"I can't think&mdash;if you really want to know&mdash;what
+she may <i>not</i> offer!"
+</p><p>
+"In the manner of princesses, who do such
+things?"
+</p><p>
+"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
+</p><p>
+Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be
+for me then to accept. But that's the way it must
+come."
+</p><p>
+Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently
+said: "You'll, on your honour, stay then?"
+</p><p>
+His answer made her wait, but when it came it was
+distinct. "Without you, you mean?"
+</p><p>
+"Without us."
+</p><p>
+"And you yourselves go at latest&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Not later than Thursday."
+</p><p>
+It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay,
+on my honour, if you'll come to me. On your honour."
+</p><p>
+Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid,
+with a rigour out of which, at a loss, she vaguely cast
+about her. Her rigour was more to him, nevertheless,
+than all her readiness; for her readiness was the woman
+herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap
+and a "dodge." She cast about, however, as happened,
+and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes,
+turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady
+Wells is tired of waiting: she's coming&mdash;see&mdash;to
+<i>us</i>."
+</p><p>
+Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for
+their visitor to cross, and he still had time. "If you
+decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand
+you. I'll do nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute
+to plead.
+</p><p>
+"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
+</p><p>
+He was to have afterwards the sense of her having
+then, as the phrase was&mdash;and for vulgar triumphs
+too&mdash;seen he meant it. She looked again at Lady
+Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back.
+"And if I do understand?"
+</p><p>
+"I'll do everything."
+</p><p>
+She found anew a pretext in her approaching
+friend: he was fairly playing with her pride. He had
+never, he then knew, tasted, in all his relation with
+her, of anything so sharp&mdash;too sharp for mere sweetness&mdash;as
+the vividness with which he saw himself
+master in the conflict. "Well, I understand."
+</p><p>
+"On your honour?"
+</p><p>
+"On my honour."
+</p><p>
+"You'll come?"
+</p><p>
+"I'll come."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK NINTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference,
+which was most to be felt moreover in his faded
+old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of
+his attachment to this scene of contemplation, within
+sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither
+side of that arch of associations and the left going up
+the Canal; he had seen it in a particular light, to
+which, more and more, his mind and his hands adjusted
+it; but the interest the place now wore for him
+had risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the
+spot, completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief
+from which&mdash;if relief was the name&mdash;he could
+find only by getting away and out of reach. What
+had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an
+obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again,
+as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and
+in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant
+and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
+watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to
+be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment
+was scarcely less futile than frivolous. Kate
+had come to him; it was only once&mdash;and this not
+from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities,
+for bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was
+at the last no blinking; yet she had come, that once,
+to stay, as people called it; and what survived of
+her, what reminded and insisted, was something he
+couldn't have banished if he had wished. Luckily he
+didn't wish, even though there might be for a man
+almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified a consequence
+of his act. It had simply <i>worked</i>, his idea, the
+idea he had made her accept; and all erect before him,
+really covering the ground as far as he could see, was
+the fact of the gained success that this represented.
+It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as directly
+applied, as converted from a luminous conception
+into an historic truth. He had known it before but as
+desired and urged, as convincingly insisted on for the
+help it would render; so that at present, <i>with</i> the help
+rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office and to
+set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own.
+He had in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance
+as an inestimable value, and what he must now know
+his case for was that of a possession of the value to the
+full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
+possessed <i>him</i>, kept him thinking of it and waiting on
+it, turning round and round it and making sure of it
+again from this side and that?
+</p><p>
+It played for him&mdash;certainly in this prime afterglow&mdash;the
+part of a treasure kept at home in safety
+and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its
+place when, with each return, he worked his heavy
+old key in the lock. The door had but to open for
+him to be with it again and for it to be all there; so
+intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible
+to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination,
+of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or
+stood, to whatever aspect he gave for the instant the
+advantage, it was in view as nothing of the moment,
+nothing begotten of time or of chance could be, or
+ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has
+risen, the play on the stage is in view, night after night,
+for the fiddlers. He remained thus, in his own theatre,
+in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the
+ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low
+and slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations
+of most importance. No other visitor was to
+come to him; he met, he bumped occasionally, in the
+Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to acquaintance,
+remembered or forgotten, at present mostly
+effusive, sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no
+address and encouraged no approach; he couldn't
+for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a third
+person. Such a person would have interrupted him,
+would have profaned his secret or perhaps have
+guessed it; would at any rate have broken the spell
+of what he conceived himself&mdash;in the absence of
+anything "to show"&mdash;to be inwardly doing. He was
+giving himself up&mdash;that was quite enough&mdash;to the
+general feeling of his renewed engagement to fidelity.
+The force of the engagement, the quantity of the article
+to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract,
+the way, above all, as a service for which the price
+named by him had been magnificently paid, his equivalent
+office was to take effect&mdash;such items might well
+fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
+outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more
+rounded and fastened down over what filled it; which
+is precisely what we have spoken of as, in its degree,
+the oppression of success, the somewhat chilled state&mdash;tending
+to the solitary&mdash;of supreme recognition.
+If it was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by
+the loss of the warmth of the element of mystery.
+The lucid reigned instead of it, and it was into the
+lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
+it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act
+his constant still communion. It wasn't still communion
+she had meant to bequeath him; it was the
+very different business of that kind of fidelity of which
+the other name was careful action.
+</p><p>
+Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful
+action than the immersion he enjoyed at home. The
+actual grand queerness was that to be faithful to Kate
+he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
+straight off her&mdash;he had to let her alone. He had
+to remember it was time to go to the palace&mdash;which
+in truth was a mercy, since the check was not less
+effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
+as yet, was that when he closed the door behind
+him for an absence he always shut her in. Shut
+her out&mdash;it came to that rather, when once he had
+got a little away; and before he reached the palace,
+much more after hearing at his heels the bang of the
+greater <i>portone</i>, he felt free enough not to know his
+position as oppressively false. As Kate was <i>all</i> in his
+poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
+it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out;
+so long as he left it to the mercy of beneficent chance
+it offered him no face and made of him no claim that
+he couldn't meet without aggravation of his inward
+sense. This aggravation had been his original horror;
+yet what&mdash;in Milly's presence, each day&mdash;was
+horror doing with him but virtually letting him off?
+He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end; there was
+time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
+Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he
+liked best, and that kept him for the time more safe.
+What he liked best was, in any case, to know why
+things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
+well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other
+friends. He then fairly perceived that&mdash;even putting
+their purity of motive at its highest&mdash;it was neither
+Kate nor he who made his strange relation to Milly,
+who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent;
+it was neither of them who practically purged it&mdash;if
+practically purged it was. Milly herself did everything&mdash;so
+far at least as he was concerned&mdash;Milly
+herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
+and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps
+still more than anything else, Milly's imagination,
+Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed a little
+aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext
+to ask himself what more he had to do. Something
+incalculable wrought for them&mdash;for him and
+Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
+and doubtless ever so much better than they: which
+wasn't a reason, however&mdash;its being so much better&mdash;for
+them not to profit by it. Not to profit by it, so
+far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to
+go directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at
+present engendered in Densher could have felt no
+greater pang than by his having to go directly against
+Milly.
+</p><p>
+To go <i>with</i> her was the thing, so far as she could
+herself go; which, from the moment her tenure of
+her loved palace stretched on, was possible but by his
+remaining near her. This remaining was of course
+on the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations&mdash;which
+was exactly why Kate had required it;
+it was so marked that on the very evening of the day
+it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not
+to reach out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness,
+for some account of it. It was as if she had wanted
+from him some name that, now they were to be almost
+alone together, they could, for their further ease,
+know it and call it by&mdash;it being, after all, almost
+rudimentary that his presence, of which the absence
+of the others made quite a different thing, couldn't
+but have for himself some definite basis. She only
+wondered about the basis it would have for himself,
+and how he would describe it; that would quite do
+for her&mdash;it even would have done for her, he could
+see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had
+he said he was waiting for money or clothes, for letters
+or for orders from Fleet Street, without which,
+as she might have heard, newspaper men never took
+a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that;
+but he had none the less had there with her, that
+night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving them alone&mdash;Mrs.
+Stringham proved really prodigious&mdash;his acquaintance
+with a shade of awkwardness darker than
+any Milly could know. He had supposed himself
+beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
+pretending, in possession of some tone that would
+serve; but there were three minutes of his feeling incapable
+of promptness quite in the same degree in which
+a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels incapable
+of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly,
+that he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken
+for him&mdash;or rather not so much in some way as in
+one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at
+the last, what she might, in the connexion, have said;
+nothing would have induced him to put such a question
+after she had been to see him: his lips were so
+sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed,
+in respect to any charge upon her freedom. There
+was something he could only therefore read back into
+the probabilities, and when he left the palace an hour
+afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed
+there, in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
+</p><p>
+Just this perception it was, however, that had made
+him for the time ugly to himself in his awkwardness.
+It was horrible, with this creature, to <i>be</i> awkward;
+it was odious to be seeking excuses for the relation
+that involved it. Any relation that involved it was
+by the very fact as much discredited as a dish would
+be at dinner if one had to take medicine as a sauce.
+What Kate would have said in one of the young women's
+last talks was that&mdash;if Milly absolutely must
+have the truth about it&mdash;Mr. Densher was staying
+because she had really seen no way but to require
+it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her&mdash;or
+didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when
+she kept him from following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't
+pretend, in scenes, the renewal of which at this time
+of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub him
+as she might. She did nothing in fact <i>but</i> snub him&mdash;wouldn't
+that have been part of the story?&mdash;only
+Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the sort that had repeatedly
+to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
+token, reasonable enough&mdash;as he now, for that matter,
+well might; he had consented to oblige them,
+aunt and niece, by giving the plainest sign possible
+that he could exist away from London. To exist
+away from London was to exist away from Kate Croy&mdash;which
+was a gain, much appreciated, to the latter's
+comfort. There was a minute, at this hour, out of
+Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of
+Milly's uttering some such allusion to their friend's
+explanation as he must meet with words that wouldn't
+destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything,
+to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
+by a breach of faith still uglier than anything
+else the beauty of their own last passage. He had
+given her his word of honour that if she would come
+to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he
+had done so with a full enough vision of what her
+sense implied. What it implied for one thing was that
+to-night in the great saloon, noble in its half-lighted
+beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
+hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable
+in her mercy&mdash;what it implied was that he should
+lie with his lips. The single thing, of all things, that
+could save him from it would be Milly's letting him
+off after having thus scared him. What made her
+mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more
+than once saved him it was yet apparently without
+knowing how nearly he was lost.
+</p><p>
+These were transcendent motions, not the less
+blest for being obscure; whereby yet once more he
+was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept on his
+feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him
+with Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't
+stand up to lie&mdash;he felt as if he should have to go
+down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking
+a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
+the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but
+he had nothing more to subscribe to, to perjure himself
+about, than the three or four inanities he had,
+on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
+scrambled a little higher than the reference to money
+and clothes, letters and directions from his manager;
+but he brought out the beauty of the chance for him&mdash;there
+before him like a temptress painted by Titian&mdash;to
+do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment
+on the difficulty of writing quietly in London;
+and he was precipitate, almost explosive, on his idea,
+long cherished, of a book.
+</p><p>
+The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your
+book here?"
+</p><p>
+"I hope to begin it."
+</p><p>
+"It's something you haven't begun?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, only just."
+</p><p>
+"And since you came?"
+</p><p>
+She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps
+after all be too easily let off. "I tried to think
+a few days ago that I had broken ground."
+</p><p>
+Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have
+let him in deeper. "I'm afraid we've made an awful
+mess of your time."
+</p><p>
+"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on
+for now is precisely to repair that ravage."
+</p><p>
+"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
+</p><p>
+"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little
+I shall mind anything."
+</p><p>
+"You'll want"&mdash;Milly had thrown herself into it&mdash;"the
+best part of your days."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment: he did what he could to
+wreathe it in smiles. "Oh I shall make shift with
+the worst part. The best will be for <i>you</i>." And he
+wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him
+moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged
+to her by such touches his quest for comfort against
+discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
+also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a
+high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion&mdash;that
+Milly was so interested. She was so interested
+that she presently asked him if he found his rooms
+propitious, while he felt that in just decently answering
+her he put on a brazen mask. He should need
+it quite particularly were she to express again her
+imagination of coming to tea with him&mdash;an extremity
+that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
+on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're
+coming"&mdash;the extremity was but to face that remainder,
+yet it demanded all his tact. Facing their
+visit itself&mdash;to that, no matter what he might have
+to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be
+pushed; and this even though it might be exactly
+such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
+top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder
+freely enough, deep within, if Kate's view of that especial
+propriety had not been modified by a subsequent
+occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
+likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference
+for tact. It pleased him to think of "tact"
+as his present prop in doubt; that glossed his predicament
+over, for it was of application among the sensitive
+and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long
+as it would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly,
+to help him not to sweeten Milly's hopes. He didn't
+want to be rude to them, but he still less wanted them
+to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
+casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to
+meet her, he put his foot, with unhappy effect, just
+in the wrong place. "Will it be safe for you to break
+into your custom of not leaving the house?"
+</p><p>
+"'Safe'&mdash;?" She had for twenty seconds an
+exquisite pale glare. Oh but he didn't need it, by
+that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
+soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what,
+so unforgettably, she had asked him in London not
+to do; he had touched, all alone with her here, the
+supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him.
+He had not, since the occasion in London, touched it
+again till now; but he saw himself freshly warned that
+it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he
+knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
+life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as
+dying, yet he couldn't pretend he thought of her as
+indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile too she had
+narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
+bad?"
+</p><p>
+He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the
+time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair
+he had found what he wanted. "I'll believe whatever
+you tell me."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, I'm splendid."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
+</p><p>
+"I mean I'm capable of life."
+</p><p>
+"I've never doubted it."
+</p><p>
+"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity
+of it.
+</p><p>
+"Well, that I know I <i>can</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity
+about it.
+</p><p>
+"Whatever I do. If I want to."
+</p><p>
+"If you want to do it?"
+</p><p>
+"If I want to live. I <i>can</i>," Milly repeated.
+</p><p>
+He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he
+hesitated with all the pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
+</p><p>
+"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight
+of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
+</p><p>
+He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You
+simply must!"
+</p><p>
+It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well
+then, if you say it, why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
+</p><p>
+"Will it help you to live?"
+</p><p>
+"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very
+little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I
+shan't want to miss it&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes?"&mdash;she had dropped again.
+</p><p>
+"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
+</p><p>
+It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at
+this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly
+broke, giving way to something inordinately strange,
+something of a nature to become clear to him only
+when he had left her. "You can come," he said,
+"when you like."
+</p><p>
+What had taken place for him, however&mdash;the
+drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense
+of her own reality&mdash;apparently showed in his face or
+his manner, and even so vividly that she could take
+it for something else. "I see how you feel&mdash;that
+I'm an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have
+any such upset, you'll go. So it's no matter."
+</p><p>
+"No matter? Oh!"&mdash;he quite protested now.
+</p><p>
+"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you
+not to go."
+</p><p>
+It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham.
+Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. "I
+won't go."
+</p><p>
+"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
+</p><p>
+"You mean you won't come to me?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;never now. It's over. But it's all right.
+I mean, apart from that," she went on, "that I won't
+do anything I oughtn't or that I'm not forced to."
+</p><p>
+"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his
+hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her
+encouragement. "You're the least coercible of
+creatures."
+</p><p>
+"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
+</p><p>
+"The freest person probably now in the world.
+You've got everything."
+</p><p>
+"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
+</p><p>
+On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in.
+"No I know you don't complain."
+</p><p>
+As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the
+pity in it. His telling her she had "everything" was
+extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so
+tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
+gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he
+might as well have praised her outright for looking
+death in the face. This was the way she just looked
+<i>him</i> again, and it was of no attenuation that she took
+him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit&mdash;when
+one sees one's way."
+</p><p>
+"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
+</p><p>
+"I mean to keeping what one has."
+</p><p>
+"Oh that's success. If what one has is good,"
+Densher said at random, "it's enough to try for."
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more."
+To which then she added with a change: "And now
+about your book."
+</p><p>
+"My book&mdash;?" He had got in a moment so far
+from it.
+</p><p>
+"The one you're now to understand that nothing
+will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling."
+</p><p>
+He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not
+doing a book."
+</p><p>
+"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder.
+"You're not writing?"
+</p><p>
+He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my
+honour, what I'm doing."
+</p><p>
+It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in
+another way, he was afraid of what she would see in
+it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again
+his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
+didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words
+for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, <i>might</i>
+complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him
+some such patience as he should be perhaps able to
+arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly,
+however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might
+venture; and he could see her make out in a moment
+that she had a sort of test.
+</p><p>
+"Then if it's not for your book&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"What <i>am</i> I staying for?"
+</p><p>
+"I mean with your London work&mdash;with all you
+have to do. Isn't it rather empty for you?"
+</p><p>
+"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had
+held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered
+if this were the way she would naturally begin it.
+It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt,
+at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have
+been in the vagueness of his reply. "Oh well&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for
+herself before he could protest. "You stay because
+you've got to."
+</p><p>
+He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to."
+And he couldn't have said when he had uttered it if it
+were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner,
+away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet
+Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement
+of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would
+have told her of&mdash;the permission from Lancaster
+Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with
+either niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All
+this Densher read in the girl's sense of the spirit of
+his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and
+he had to think of something to correct that. What
+he thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough,
+whatever may be one's other complications, to stay
+after all for <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Oh you must judge."
+</p><p>
+He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and
+was also at last too restless. The speech in question
+at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that was the very
+tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
+kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession
+of a motive. He was staying so little "for" Milly
+that he was staying positively against her. He didn't,
+none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
+didn't care. The only thing he could say might make
+it either better or worse. "Well then, so long as I
+don't go, you must think of me all <i>as</i> judging!"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He didn't go home, on leaving her&mdash;he didn't want
+to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and
+his <i>campi</i> with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively
+sequestered café where he had already more
+than once found refreshment and comparative repose,
+together with solutions that consisted mainly and
+pleasantly of further indecisions. It was a literal
+fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
+leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against
+a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than
+the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded
+by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
+because, before getting to his feet again, there was a
+step he had seen his way to; it was simply because
+the acceptance of his position took sharper effect
+from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
+When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned
+about to Milly on the question of the impossibility
+so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under
+her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
+seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all,
+impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry;
+when people were at <i>her</i> pass everything was allowed.
+And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
+a spring, just completely his own&mdash;to the extent, as
+he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he
+should do or shouldn't would have close reference
+to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands&mdash;and
+ought never to have reference to anything else.
+It was on the cards for him that he might kill her&mdash;that
+was the way he read the cards as he sat in his
+customary corner. The fear in this thought made him
+let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless,
+for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption
+and smoked more cigarettes than he had
+ever done in the time. What had come out for him
+had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror;
+so that action itself, of any sort, the right as well as the
+wrong&mdash;if the difference even survived&mdash;had heard
+in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep from that
+moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his
+vigil lasted of several different ways for his doing so,
+and the hour might have served him as a lesson in
+going on tiptoe.
+</p><p>
+What he finally took home, when he ventured to
+leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might
+on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction
+was represented for him by the idea of his
+really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything
+whatever. Nothing so "brought," he easily argued,
+but <i>must</i> be in one way or another a catastrophe.
+He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
+be better, was mixed up in <i>him</i>, so that a single false
+motion might either way snap the coil. They helped
+him, it was true, these considerations, to a degree of
+eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted
+to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after
+all with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was
+only not to budge without the girl's leave&mdash;not,
+oddly enough at the last, to move without it, whether
+further or nearer, any more than without Kate's.
+It was to this his wisdom reduced itself&mdash;to the need
+again simply to be kind. That was the same as being still&mdash;as
+studying to create the minimum of vibration.
+He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room
+on the wall of which something precious was too precariously
+hung. A false step would bring it down,
+and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
+when he walked away again that even Fleet Street
+wouldn't at this juncture successfully touch him. His
+manager might wire that he was wanted, but he could
+easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the idle
+life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice
+was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that
+Milly in a manner supported him. The greatest of
+his expenses really was to walk to the palace to dinner.
+He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and
+he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath
+and his hand. He should be able to be still enough
+through everything.
+</p><p>
+He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after
+a little of not having failed. There had to be a delicate
+art in it, for he wasn't trying&mdash;quite the contrary&mdash;to
+be either distant or dull. That would not have
+been being "nice," which in its own form was the real
+law. That too might just have produced the vibration
+he desired to avert; so that he best kept everything in
+place by not hesitating or fearing, as it were, to let
+himself go&mdash;go in the direction, that is to say, of
+staying. It depended on where he went; which was
+what he meant by taking care. When one went on
+tiptoe one could turn off for retreat without betraying
+the manoeuvre. Perfect tact&mdash;the necessity for which
+he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised&mdash;was
+to keep all intercourse in the key of the absolutely
+settled. It was settled thus for instance that
+they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
+well that her being the American girl was, just in
+time and for the relation they found themselves concerned
+in, a boon inappreciable. If, at least, as the
+days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
+of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she
+didn't diviningly and responsively desire and labour
+to record herself as possessed of it, this wouldn't
+have been for want of Densher's keeping her, with
+his idea, well up to it&mdash;wouldn't have been in fine
+for want of his encouragement and reminder. He
+didn't perhaps in so many words speak to her of the
+quantity itself as of the thing she was least to intermit;
+but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself
+was an impersonal way, and this held it there before
+her&mdash;since he was careful also to talk pleasantly.
+It was at once their idea, when all was said, and the
+most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
+elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything;
+and yet, not stretched, it kept down, remained normal,
+remained properly within bounds. And he <i>had</i> meanwhile,
+thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted,
+the sense, for the girl's part of the business,
+of the queerest conscious compliance, of her doing
+very much what he wanted, even though without her
+quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once in saying:
+"Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's
+a kind of facilitation to you that we don't quite measure:
+I think one would have to be English to measure
+it!"&mdash;and that too, strangely enough, without
+prejudice to her good nature. She might have been
+conceived as doing&mdash;that is of being&mdash;what he
+liked in order perhaps only to judge where it would
+take them. They really as it went on <i>saw</i> each other
+at the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune
+with his conception, and he knowing she thus knew
+it. Add that he again knew she knew, and yet that
+nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression
+of the line they found most completely workable. The
+strangest fact of all for us must be that the success
+he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured
+to his gratitude as the something above and beyond
+him, above and beyond Kate, that made for daily
+decency. There would scarce have been felicity&mdash;certainly
+too little of the right lubricant&mdash;had not
+the national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably
+than entirely, in Milly's chords. It made up
+her unity and was the one thing he could unlimitedly
+take for granted.
+</p><p>
+He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without
+deepened fear of the undue vibration that was keeping
+him watchful. He knew in his nervousness that he
+was living at best from day to day and from hand to
+mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding
+a mistake. All women had alternatives, and Milly's
+would doubtless be shaky too; but the national character
+was firm in her, whether as all of her, practically,
+by this time, or but as a part; the national character
+that, in a woman still so young, made of the air
+breathed a virtual non-conductor. It wasn't till a
+certain occasion when the twenty days had passed
+that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by
+the information that the signorina padrona was not
+"receiving." The announcement met him, in the
+court, on the lips of one of the gondoliers, met him,
+he thought, with such a conscious eye as the knowledge
+of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously
+shown, could scarce fail to beget. Densher had
+not been at Palazzo Leporelli among the mere receivable,
+but had taken his place once for all among
+the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly
+braved he recognised after a moment the propriety
+of a further appeal. Neither of the two ladies,
+it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not prepared
+to say that either was <i>poco bene</i>. He was yet
+not prepared to say that either was anything, and he
+would have been blank, Densher mentally noted, if
+the term could ever apply to members of a race in
+whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses&mdash;not a
+vain surface, but a place of withdrawal in which
+something obscure, something always ominous, indistinguishably
+lived. He felt afresh indeed at this
+hour the force of the veto laid within the palace on
+any mention, any cognition, of the liabilities of its
+mistress. The state of her health was never confessed
+to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
+taken for one was another matter; of which he grew
+fully aware on carrying his question further. This
+appeal was to his friend Eugenio, whom he immediately
+sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
+protected from the weather, he was confronted in the
+gallery that led from the water-steps to the court,
+and whom he always called, in meditation, his friend;
+seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would have
+put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation
+which required a name of its own, an intimacy of
+consciousness in truth for each&mdash;an intimacy of eye,
+of ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue.
+It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far
+from occult to our young man that Eugenio took a
+view of him not less finely formal than essentially
+vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't himself
+raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air
+now again; it was as much between them as ever
+while Eugenio waited on him in the court.
+</p><p>
+The weather, from early morning, had turned to
+storm, the first sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher
+had almost invidiously brought him down the
+outer staircase&mdash;the massive ascent, the great feature
+of the court, to Milly's <i>piano nobile</i>. This was to
+pay him&mdash;it was the one chance&mdash;for all imputations;
+the imputation in particular that, clever, <i>tanto
+bello</i> and not rich, the young man from London was&mdash;by
+the obvious way&mdash;pressing Miss Theale's fortune
+hard. It was to pay him for the further ineffable
+intimation that a gentleman must take the young
+lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less
+in the high attraction) for a strangely casual appendage
+if he counted in such a connexion on impunity
+and prosperity. These interpretations were odious to
+Densher for the simple reason that they might have
+been so true of the attitude of an inferior man, and
+three things alone, accordingly, had kept him from
+righting himself. One of these was that his critic
+sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive
+inhumanity, of politeness; the second was that refinements
+of expression in a friend's servant were not a
+thing a visitor could take action on; and the third was
+the fact that the particular attribution of motive did
+him after all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar
+view, the view that might have been taken of an
+inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He
+apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as
+that came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to
+him as "my friend" because he was conscious of his
+seeing so much of him, what he made him see on the
+same lines in the course of their present interview was
+ever so much more. Densher felt that he marked
+himself, no doubt, as insisting, by dissatisfaction with
+the gondolier's answer, on the pursuit taken for
+granted in him; and yet felt it only in the augmented,
+the exalted distance that was by this time established
+between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a
+word to Miss Theale from such a pair of lips would
+cost him his place; but he could also bethink himself
+that, so long as the word never came&mdash;and it was,
+on the basis he had arranged, impossible&mdash;he enjoyed
+the imagination of mounting guard. He had
+never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as during
+these minutes in the damp <i>loggia</i> where the storm-gusts
+were strong; and there came in fact for our
+young man, as a result of his presence, a sudden
+sharp sense that everything had turned to the dismal.
+Something had happened&mdash;he didn't know what;
+and it wasn't Eugenio who would tell him. What
+Eugenio told him was that he thought the ladies&mdash;as
+if their liability had been equal&mdash;were a "leetle"
+fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause
+named for it. It was one of the signs of what Densher
+felt in him that, by a profundity, a true deviltry of
+resource, he always met the latter's Italian with English
+and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
+slightly smiled at him in the process&mdash;but ever so
+slightly this time, his manner also being attuned, our
+young man made out, to the thing, whatever it was,
+that constituted the rupture of peace.
+</p><p>
+This manner, while they stood a long minute facing
+each other over all they didn't say, played a part as
+well in the sudden jar to Densher's protected state. It
+was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for them
+alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if
+they really could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing
+rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging
+through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption,
+with the people engaged in all the water-life
+huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical,
+under archways and bridges. Our young man's mute
+exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such a
+depth of reference that, had the pressure been but
+slightly prolonged, they might have reached a point at
+which they were equally weak. Each had verily something
+in mind that would have made a hash of mutual
+suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility,
+they were more united than disjoined. But it was to
+have been a moment for Densher that nothing could
+ease off&mdash;not even the formal propriety with which
+his interlocutor finally attended him to the <i>portone</i>
+and bowed upon his retreat. Nothing had passed
+about his coming back, and the air had made itself
+felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew
+of course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's
+invitation to return was not what he missed; yet he
+knew at the same time that what had happened to
+him was part of his punishment. Out in the square
+beyond the <i>fondamenta</i> that gave access to the land-gate
+of the palace, out where the wind was higher,
+he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled his umbrella
+closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
+enough by others&mdash;the base predicament of
+having, by a concatenation, just to <i>take</i> such things:
+such things as the fact that one very acute person in
+the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
+scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was
+no attacking, no disproving, no (what was worst of all)
+even noticing. One had come to a queer pass when a
+servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
+mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances,
+it had been quite wrong. It was the more
+disagreeable accordingly that the vision of appearances
+was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
+</p><p>
+Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off
+with the more impatience that he was independently
+restless. He had to walk in spite of weather, and he
+took his course, through crooked ways, to the Piazza,
+where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here,
+in the high arcade, half Venice was crowded close,
+while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old
+columns of the Saint Theodore and of the Lion were
+the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was
+odd for him, as he moved, that it should have made
+such a difference&mdash;if the difference wasn't only that
+the palace had for the first time failed of a welcome.
+There was more, but it came from that; that gave
+the harsh note and broke the spell. The wet and the
+cold were now to reckon with, and it was to Densher
+precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at a stroke,
+of the margin on a faith in which they were all living.
+The margin had been his name for it&mdash;for the thing
+that, though it had held out, could bear no shock.
+The shock, in some form, had come, and he wondered
+about it while, threading his way among loungers
+as vague as himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly
+on the rubbish in shops. There were stretches of
+the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
+now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its
+huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the
+beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great
+drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
+and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He
+brushed shoulders with brown men whose hats askew,
+and the loose sleeves of whose pendent jackets, made
+them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and
+chairs that overflowed from the cafés were gathered,
+still with a pretence of service, into the arcade, and here
+and there a spectacled German, with his coat-collar
+up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These
+were impressions for Densher too, but he had made
+the whole circuit thrice before he stopped short, in
+front of Florian's, with the force of his sharpest. His
+eye had caught a face within the café&mdash;he had
+spotted an acquaintance behind the glass. The person
+he had thus paused long enough to look at twice was
+seated, well within range, at a small table on which a
+tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still remained;
+and though he had on his knee, as he leaned
+back, a copy of a French newspaper&mdash;the heading of
+the <i>Figaro</i> was visible&mdash;he stared straight before him
+at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
+for a minute in profile, had him for a time during
+which his identity produced, however quickly, all the
+effect of establishing connexions&mdash;connexions startling
+and direct; and then, as if it were the one thing
+more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn
+of the head, that might have been a prompt result of
+the sense of being noticed. This wider view showed
+him <i>all</i> Lord Mark&mdash;Lord Mark as encountered,
+several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
+to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark
+that was going out, on that occasion, as he came in&mdash;he
+had felt it, in the hall, at the time; and he was
+accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
+seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface,
+the same potential quantity.
+</p><p>
+It was a matter, the whole passage&mdash;it could only
+be&mdash;but of a few seconds; for as he might neither
+stand there to stare nor on the other hand make any
+advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk,
+this time to another pace. It had been for all the
+world, during his pause, as if he had caught his answer
+to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had simply
+faced him&mdash;as he had faced <i>him</i>, not placed by him,
+not at first&mdash;as one of the damp shuffling crowd.
+Recognition, though hanging fire, had then clearly
+come; yet no light of salutation had been struck from
+these certainties. Acquaintance between them was
+scant enough for neither to take it up. That neither
+had done so was not, however, what now mattered,
+but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
+place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher,
+as inevitably a haunter of the great meeting-ground,
+would in that case have seen him before. He
+paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for
+him even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat.
+He had come back for something&mdash;as a sequel to his
+earlier visit; and whatever he had come back for it had
+had time to be done. He might have arrived but last
+night or that morning; he had already made the difference.
+It was a great thing for Densher to get this answer.
+He held it close, he hugged it, quite leaned on
+it as he continued to circulate. It kept him going and
+going&mdash;it made him no less restless. But it explained&mdash;and
+that was much, for with explanations he might
+somehow deal. The vice in the air, otherwise, was too
+much like the breath of fate. The weather had
+changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea
+impossible, <i>because</i> of Lord Mark. It was because of
+him, <i>a fortiori</i>, that the palace was closed. Densher
+went round again twice; he found the visitor each time
+as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
+before him; the next time he was looking over his
+<i>Figaro</i>, which he had opened out. Densher didn't
+again stop, but left him apparently unconscious of his
+passage&mdash;on another repetition of which Lord Mark
+had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would
+be off that night; he had now gone to his hotel for
+arrangements. These things were as plain to Densher
+as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
+cleared for him&mdash;if cleared it was; there was something
+he didn't see, the great thing; but he saw so
+round it and so close to it that this was almost as
+good. He had been looking at a man who had done
+what he had come for, and for whom, as done, it
+temporarily sufficed. The man had come again to see
+Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit would
+have taken place just before or just after luncheon,
+and it was the reason why he himself had found her
+door shut.
+</p><p>
+He said to himself that evening, he still said even
+on the morrow, that he only wanted a reason, and that
+with this perception of one he could now mind, as he
+called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
+as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he
+asked himself why it should prevent this that he could
+feel, in connexion with the crisis, so remarkably
+blameless. He gave the appearances before him all
+the benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to
+accrue he shouldn't feel he had dodged it. But it
+wasn't a bit he who, that day, had touched her, and
+if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability so
+to think about it amounted for Densher during several
+hours to a kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration
+was heightened fairly, besides, by the visible conditions&mdash;sharp,
+striking, ugly to him&mdash;of Lord
+Mark's return. His constant view of it, for all the next
+hours, of which there were many, was as a demonstration
+on the face of it sinister even to his own actual
+ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil,
+seeing it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty,"
+to know more about it than he had so easily and so
+wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop on the
+poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal.
+Such a visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression,
+constituting precisely one or other of the stupid shocks
+he himself had so decently sought to spare her. Densher
+had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
+reflexion&mdash;which he positively, with occasion, might
+have brought straight out&mdash;that the only delicate
+and honourable way of treating a person in such a
+state was to treat her as <i>he</i>, Merton Densher, did.
+With time, actually&mdash;for the impression but deepened&mdash;this
+sense of the contrast, to the advantage
+of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief, and
+that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world&mdash;and
+he drew a long breath on it&mdash;as if a special
+danger for him had passed. Lord Mark had, without
+in the least intending such a service, got it straight
+out of the way. It was <i>he</i>, the brute, who had stumbled
+into just the wrong inspiration and who had
+therefore produced, for the very person he had wished
+to hurt, an impunity that was comparative innocence,
+that was almost like purification. The person he
+had wished to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably
+hanging about. To keep still meanwhile
+was, for this person, more comprehensively, to keep
+it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
+consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go
+back to the palace.
+</p><p>
+The day or two passed&mdash;stretched to three days;
+and with the effect, extraordinarily, that Densher felt
+himself in the course of them washed but the more
+clean. Some sign would come if his return should
+have the better effect; and he was at all events, in
+absence, without the particular scruple. It wouldn't
+have been meant for him by either of the women that
+he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
+impossible&mdash;the being again denied; for it made him
+practically answerable, and answerable was what he
+wasn't. There was no neglect either in absence, inasmuch
+as, from the moment he didn't get in, the one
+message he could send up would be some hope on
+the score of health. Since accordingly that sort of
+expression was definitely forbidden him he had only
+to wait&mdash;which he was actually helped to do by his
+feeling with the lapse of each day more and more
+wound up to it. The days in themselves were anything
+but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted, the
+fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of
+the world about was broken into smaller pieces. He
+walked up and down his rooms and listened to the
+wind&mdash;listened also to tinkles of bells and watched
+for some servant of the palace. He might get a note,
+but the note never came; there were hours when he
+stayed at home not to miss it. When he wasn't at
+home he was in circulation again as he had been at the
+hour of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the
+Square with the herd of refugees; he raked the approaches
+and the cafés on the chance the brute, as he
+now regularly imaged him, <i>might</i> be still there. He
+could only be there, he knew, to be received afresh;
+and that&mdash;one had but to think of it&mdash;would be
+indeed stiff. He had gone, however&mdash;it was proved;
+though Densher's care for the question either way
+only added to what was most acrid in the taste of his
+present ordeal. It all came round to what he was
+doing for Milly&mdash;spending days that neither relief
+nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What
+was it but abject for a man of his parts to be reduced
+to such pastimes? What was it but sordid for him,
+shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
+and to consider possible meetings? What was it but
+odious to find himself wondering what, as between
+him and another man, a possible meeting would produce?
+There recurred moments when in spite of
+everything he felt no straighter than another man.
+And yet even on the third day, when still nothing had
+come, he more than ever knew that he wouldn't
+have budged for the world.
+</p><p>
+He thought of the two women, in their silence, at
+last&mdash;he at all events thought of Milly&mdash;as probably,
+for her reasons, now intensely wishing him to
+go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
+else, in the air; but he didn't care for them
+any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay
+in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite
+perhaps of some final experience that would be, for
+the pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his
+one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue
+beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable,
+and the disagreeable would be a proof;
+a proof of his not having stayed for the thing&mdash;the
+agreeable, as it were&mdash;that Kate had named. The
+thing Kate had named was not to have been the
+odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of
+the odium as actual too that Kate was, for her
+comfort, just now well aloof. These were the first
+hours since her flight in which his sense of what she
+had done for him on the eve of that event was to
+incur a qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps
+base, to be thinking such things so soon; but one of
+the intimations of his solitude was that she had provided
+for herself. She was out of it all, by her act,
+as much as he was in it; and this difference grew,
+positively, as his own intensity increased. She had
+said in their last sharp snatch of talk&mdash;sharp though
+thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
+deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever
+yet spoken: "Letters? Never&mdash;<i>now</i>. Think of it.
+Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently caught her
+sense&mdash;into which he read, all the same, a strange
+inconsequence&mdash;they had practically wrapped their
+understanding in the breach of their correspondence.
+He had moreover, on losing her, done justice to her
+law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
+in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must
+have written had he spoken of themselves. That
+would have been a turbid strain, and her idea had
+been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner.
+Only it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease.
+And it left <i>him</i>, in the conditions, peculiarly alone.
+He was alone, that is, till, on the afternoon of his
+third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain, with
+his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed
+dreariness, for the mere eyes of others, at their
+worst, the grinning padrona threw open the door and
+introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound
+a difference, especially when he saw that his visitor
+was weighted. It appeared part of her weight that
+she was in a wet waterproof, that she allowed her
+umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman
+without consciousness or care, and that her face,
+under her veil, richly rosy with the driving wind,
+was&mdash;and the veil too&mdash;as splashed as if the rain
+were her tears.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder
+afterwards at the fewness of their steps. "She
+has turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+"You mean she's worse?"
+</p><p>
+The poor lady stood there as she had stopped;
+Densher had, in the instant flare of his eagerness, his
+curiosity, all responsive at sight of her, waved away,
+on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to relieve
+her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about
+through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the step
+she had taken and wishing it not to have been in
+the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I
+don't know <i>how</i> she is&mdash;and it's why I've come to
+you."
+</p><p>
+"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and
+it's quite&mdash;you make me feel&mdash;as if I had been
+wretchedly waiting for you."
+</p><p>
+She showed him again her blurred eyes&mdash;she had
+caught at his word. "Have you been wretched?"
+</p><p>
+Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It
+would have sounded for him like a complaint, and
+before something he already made out in his visitor
+he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her
+damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was
+great, and he felt she had brought it all with her.
+He answered that he had been patient and above all
+that he had been still. "As still as a mouse&mdash;you'll
+have seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together,
+than I've ever been in my life. It has seemed
+to me the only thing."
+</p><p>
+This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was
+straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her
+own light could answer. "It has been best. I've
+wondered for you. But it has been best," she said
+again.
+</p><p>
+"Yet it has done no good?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone."
+Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow,
+was deeply mature: "You <i>won't</i> go?"
+</p><p>
+"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
+</p><p>
+"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone
+now I can?"
+</p><p>
+She thought of it, and he could see even more of
+the relief she was taking from him. His presence,
+his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so
+meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably
+been to him&mdash;these things counted for her, now she
+had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that
+she still only stood there taking them all in. With it
+however popped up characteristically a throb of her
+conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal
+joy. It told Densher of the three days she on
+her side had spent. "Well, anything you do for me&mdash;<i>is</i>
+for her too. Only, only&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Only nothing now matters?"
+</p><p>
+She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact
+itself that he expressed. "Then you know?"
+</p><p>
+"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham waited&mdash;her face seemed to
+sound him. Then her own reply was strange. "She
+hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
+</p><p>
+"Not for three days?"
+</p><p>
+"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were
+all over. Not even by the faintest allusion."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean
+you haven't spoken about <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
+</p><p>
+"Well," he answered after a moment, "I <i>am</i> dead."
+</p><p>
+"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop
+of her arms on her waterproof.
+</p><p>
+It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself
+in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place,
+which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate
+had left&mdash;the sense of which, for that matter, by
+mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor&mdash;the
+very impotence of their extinction. And Densher
+had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but
+again: "Is she dying?"
+</p><p>
+It made her, however, as if these were crudities,
+almost material pangs, only say as before: "Then
+you know?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the
+marvel to me is that <i>you</i> do. I've no right in fact to
+imagine or to assume that you do."
+</p><p>
+"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same.
+I know."
+</p><p>
+"Everything?"
+</p><p>
+Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No&mdash;not
+everything. That's why I've come."
+</p><p>
+"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she
+hesitated and it affected him, he brought out in a
+groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned him from her
+to the place itself, which was a part of what was in
+him, was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever,
+of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association,
+for which he had hired it. <i>That</i> was not for
+telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so
+decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really
+have begun, by an effect already operating, to be a
+part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him,
+that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather,
+so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him
+her own abasement&mdash;that, at any rate, of grief; and
+made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he
+liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when
+she met his groan with an attenuation.
+</p><p>
+"We shall at all events&mdash;if that's anything&mdash;be
+together."
+</p><p>
+It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what
+I've ventured to feel. It's much." She replied in
+effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which,
+so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
+his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for
+it gave back to him something precious, over which,
+in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly
+closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to
+him, with her sole and single boldness&mdash;and also
+on grounds he hadn't then measured&mdash;that Mrs.
+Stringham was a person who <i>wouldn't</i>, at a pinch,
+in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another
+of the cases in which Kate was always showing. "You
+don't think then very horridly of me?"
+</p><p>
+And her answer was the more valuable that it came
+without nervous effusion&mdash;quite as if she understood
+what he might conceivably have believed. She
+turned over in fact what she thought, and that was
+what helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
+</p><p>
+It made him aware the next moment of how they
+had been planted there. She took off her cloak with
+his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat,
+removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage
+that the words she had just uttered to him were
+the one flower she had to throw. They were all her
+consolation for him, and the consolation even still
+depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate
+in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn,
+made by their meeting. The image she again evoked
+for him loomed in it but the larger. "She has turned
+her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in
+their silences, they were simply so leaving what he
+saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I don't mean not
+of me."
+</p><p>
+"Of nothing&mdash;of no one." And she went on,
+Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take
+it. "She doesn't <i>want</i> to die. Think of her age.
+Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think
+of all she is. Think of all she <i>has</i>. She lies there stiffening
+herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God&mdash;!"
+the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.
+</p><p>
+He wondered. "You thank God&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That she's so quiet."
+</p><p>
+He continued to wonder. "<i>Is</i> she so quiet?"
+</p><p>
+"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what
+she has never been. So you see&mdash;all these days. I
+can't tell you&mdash;but it's better so. It would kill me
+if she <i>were</i> to tell me."
+</p><p>
+"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
+</p><p>
+"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't
+want it."
+</p><p>
+"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she
+doesn't want it." He had a long pause, and they
+might have been thinking together of what they could
+even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not
+what he brought out. Milly's "grimness" and the
+great hushed palace were present to him; present
+with the little woman before him as she must have
+been waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm
+have <i>you</i> done her?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I
+don't know. I come and talk of her here with you."
+</p><p>
+It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly
+hate me?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. How <i>can</i> I? No one ever will."
+</p><p>
+"She'll never tell?"
+</p><p>
+"She'll never tell."
+</p><p>
+Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"She <i>is</i> magnificent."
+</p><p>
+His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it,
+so far as he could, all over. "Would she see me
+again?"
+</p><p>
+It made his companion stare. "Should you like
+to see her?"
+</p><p>
+"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her
+surprise, and it took him some time. "No."
+</p><p>
+"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
+</p><p>
+"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
+</p><p>
+She had for the moment her vision of this, but it
+collapsed. "I don't see what you can do."
+</p><p>
+"I don't either. But <i>she</i> might."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too
+late."
+</p><p>
+"Too late for her to see&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Too late."
+</p><p>
+The very decision of her despair&mdash;it was after all
+so lucid&mdash;kindled in him a heat. "But the doctor,
+all the while&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's
+proud of having been approved and coached by a
+great London man. He hardly in fact goes away;
+so that I scarce know what becomes of his other
+patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage;
+he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
+events. But she has barely consented to see him, and,
+though she has told him, generously&mdash;for she <i>thinks</i>
+of me, dear creature&mdash;that he may come, that he
+may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
+only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms,
+trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with
+the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways,
+in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable
+smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk
+of her."
+</p><p>
+"By her request?"
+</p><p>
+"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish.
+We talk of the price of provisions."
+</p><p>
+"By her request too?"
+</p><p>
+"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when
+she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort
+to me he might stay as much as we liked."
+</p><p>
+Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort
+to you!"
+</p><p>
+"None whatever. That, however," she added,
+"isn't his fault. Nothing's any comfort."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly
+feel, <i>I'm</i> not."
+</p><p>
+"No. But I didn't come for that."
+</p><p>
+"You came for <i>me</i>."
+</p><p>
+"Well then call it that." But she looked at him
+a moment with eyes filled full, and something came
+up in her the next instant from deeper still. "I came
+at bottom of course&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself.
+But if it's, as you say, too late for me to do anything?"
+</p><p>
+She continued to look at him, and with an irritation,
+which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself.
+"So I did say. But, with you here"&mdash;and she
+turned her vision again strangely about her&mdash;"with
+you here, and with everything, I feel we mustn't
+abandon her."
+</p><p>
+"God forbid we should abandon her."
+</p><p>
+"Then you <i>won't?</i>" His tone had made her flush
+again.
+</p><p>
+"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons <i>me?</i>
+What can I do if she won't see me?"
+</p><p>
+"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
+</p><p>
+"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you
+tell me. I shouldn't like it only to see her as you make
+me. I should like it if I could help her. But even
+then," Densher pursued without faith, "she would
+have to want it first herself. And there," he continued
+to make out, "is the devil of it. She <i>won't</i> want
+it herself. She <i>can't!</i>"
+</p><p>
+He had got up in his impatience of it, and she
+watched him while he helplessly moved. "There's
+one thing you can do. There's only that, and even
+for that there are difficulties. But there <i>is</i> that." He
+stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and
+he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was
+coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to
+utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in
+the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of
+rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her
+fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really know
+yourself what it is."
+</p><p>
+He did know what it was, and with it even, as she
+said&mdash;rather!&mdash;there were difficulties. He turned
+away on them, on everything, for a moment; he
+moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted
+channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite,
+blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance.
+Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact,
+for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was
+the first again to speak. When he did so, however,
+it was not in straight answer to her last remark&mdash;he
+only started from that. He said, as he came back
+to her, "Let me, you know, <i>see</i>&mdash;one must understand,"
+almost as if he had for the time accepted it.
+And what he wished to understand was where, on the
+essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
+Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't
+<i>he</i> be the one least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the
+worst, in the dark without him?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept
+me going. I wired the first night, and he answered
+like an angel. He'll come like one. Only he can't
+arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
+</p><p>
+"Well then that's something."
+</p><p>
+She considered. "Something&mdash;yes. She likes
+him."
+</p><p>
+"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which,
+when he was here in October&mdash;that night when she
+was in white, when she had people there and those
+musicians&mdash;she committed him to my care. It was
+beautiful for both of us&mdash;she put us in relation. She
+asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so,
+and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher said
+with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
+</p><p>
+"He liked <i>you</i>," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
+</p><p>
+"Ah I know nothing about that."
+</p><p>
+"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries
+and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him
+the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember
+telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
+he might really have been a great judge. I mean
+of the beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what
+he is&mdash;in having judged <i>her</i>. He hasn't," he went
+on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in her&mdash;which
+we must make the most of&mdash;can only be supremely
+beneficent."
+</p><p>
+He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in
+his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes
+sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance
+from the recognition he had a few moments before
+partly confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you
+like him!"
+</p><p>
+There was something for him in the sound of it.
+"Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself.
+Surely <i>you</i> like him. Surely, when he was here,
+we all liked him."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks.
+And I should think, with all the time you spent with
+him, you'd know it," she said, "yourself."
+</p><p>
+Densher stopped short, though at first without a
+word. "We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned
+her, even to sound her name, and nothing
+whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this
+picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an
+instant resisted it. "That was his professional propriety."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue
+in him, and it was something more besides." And
+he spoke with sudden intensity. "I couldn't <i>talk</i> to
+him about her!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+"I can't talk to any one about her."
+</p><p>
+"Except to <i>me</i>," his friend continued.
+</p><p>
+"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam
+of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept
+him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too&mdash;that
+is for his own words&mdash;he had quickly coloured:
+he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse
+with Kate. His visitor, for the minute, while
+their eyes met, might have been watching him hold
+it down. And he <i>had</i> to hold it down&mdash;the effort
+of which, precisely, made him red. He couldn't let
+it come up; at least not yet. She might make what she
+would of it. He attempted to repeat his statement, but
+he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
+nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him.
+Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"And <i>real</i>"&mdash;she had taken him right up with a
+huge emphasis&mdash;"was more impossible still." No
+doubt&mdash;he didn't deny it; and she had straightway
+drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I
+say&mdash;that there were immensities between you.
+Otherwise you'd have chattered."
+</p><p>
+"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both
+thinking of her."
+</p><p>
+"You were neither of you thinking of any one else.
+That's why you kept together."
+</p><p>
+Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but
+he came straight back to what he had originally said.
+"I haven't a notion, all the same, of what he thinks."
+She faced him, visibly, with the question into which
+he had already observed that her special shade of
+earnestness was perpetually flowering, right and left&mdash;"Are
+you <i>very</i> sure?"&mdash;and he could only note
+her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
+believe that he thinks she's gone."
+</p><p>
+She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter
+what I believe."
+</p><p>
+"Well, we shall see"&mdash;and he felt almost basely
+superficial. More and more, for the last five minutes,
+had he known she had brought something with
+her, and never in respect to anything had he had such
+a wish to postpone. He would have liked to put
+everything off till Thursday; he was sorry it was now
+Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
+wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly,
+who was dying; nor of Mrs. Stringham, who was
+sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of Kate either,
+for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
+swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus
+prolonged, had cast on it some influence under which
+it had ceased to act. She was as absent to his sensibility
+as she had constantly been, since her departure,
+absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and
+it was the first time, among the objects now surrounding
+him, that his sensibility so noted her. He knew
+soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and
+that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly
+be more so. "Meanwhile," he added for his companion,
+"it has been everything for me to see you."
+She slowly rose at the words, which might almost
+have conveyed to her the hint of his taking care.
+She stood there as if she had in fact seen him abruptly
+moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness would have
+been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground
+for insistence to her imagination of his state. It would
+take her moreover, she clearly showed him she was
+thinking, but a minute or two to insist. Besides, she
+had already said it. "Will you do it if <i>he</i> asks you?
+I mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will
+you give him"&mdash;oh she was earnest now!&mdash;"the
+opportunity to put it to you?"
+</p><p>
+"The opportunity to put what?"
+</p><p>
+"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
+</p><p>
+Densher felt himself&mdash;as had already once befallen
+him in the quarter of an hour&mdash;turn red to the top
+of his forehead. Turning red had, however, for him,
+as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
+his consciousness of it at the present moment was
+rather as a sign of his fear. It showed him sharply
+enough of what he was afraid. "If I deny what to
+her?"
+</p><p>
+Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for
+hadn't he all along been letting her see that he knew?
+"Why, what Lord Mark told her."
+</p><p>
+"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment&mdash;of
+seeing him as suddenly perverse. "I've been judging
+that you yourself know." And it was she who
+now blushed deep.
+</p><p>
+It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too
+by other things. "Then <i>you</i> know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's
+what has done it."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;I understand that. But you also know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+He had faltered again, but all she knew she now
+wanted to say. "I'm speaking," she said soothingly,
+"of what he told her. It's <i>that</i> that I've taken you as
+knowing."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
+</p><p>
+It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment,
+the quality of relief, as if he had supposed her
+thinking of something else. Thereupon, straightway,
+that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
+it for <i>true!</i>"
+</p><p>
+Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw
+that he had betrayed himself. Not, however, that it
+mattered, as he immediately saw still better. There
+it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there was
+no postponing. They were left with her idea&mdash;the
+one she was wishing to make him recognise. He had
+expressed ten minutes before his need to understand,
+and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
+he was to understand was no small matter; it might
+be larger even than as yet appeared.
+</p><p>
+He took again one of his turns, not meeting what
+she had last said; he mooned a minute, as he would
+have called it, at a window; and of course she could
+see that she had driven him to the wall. She did
+clearly, without delay, see it; on which her sense
+of having "caught" him became as promptly a
+scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What
+I mean is that he told her you've been all the while
+engaged to Miss Croy."
+</p><p>
+He gave a jerk round; it was almost&mdash;to hear it&mdash;the
+touch of a lash; and he said&mdash;idiotically, as he
+afterwards knew&mdash;the first thing that came into his
+head. "All <i>what</i> while?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness.
+"I only repeat to you what he told her."
+</p><p>
+Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped,
+had already caught himself up. "Pardon my brutality.
+Of course I know what you're talking about.
+I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained,
+"in the Piazza; only just saw him&mdash;through the
+glass at Florian's&mdash;without any words. In fact
+I scarcely know him&mdash;there wouldn't have been
+occasion. It was but once, moreover&mdash;he must have
+gone that night. But I knew he wouldn't have come
+for nothing, and I turned it over&mdash;what he would
+have come for."
+</p><p>
+Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
+</p><p>
+Densher approved. "He came to let her know
+that he knows better than she for whom it was she
+had a couple of months before, in her fool's paradise,
+refused him."
+</p><p>
+"How you <i>do</i> know!"&mdash;and Mrs. Stringham
+almost smiled.
+</p><p>
+"I know that&mdash;but I don't know the good it does
+him."
+</p><p>
+"The good, he thinks, if he has patience&mdash;not too
+much&mdash;may be to come. He doesn't know what he
+has done to her. Only <i>we</i>, you see, do that."
+</p><p>
+He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him&mdash;what
+she felt?"
+</p><p>
+"She was able&mdash;I'm sure of it&mdash;not to show anything.
+He dealt her his blow, and she took it without
+a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain, spoke by
+book, and it brought into play again her appreciation
+of what she related. "She's magnificent."
+</p><p>
+Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
+</p><p>
+"And <i>he</i>," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
+</p><p>
+"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on
+the stupid doom in it, they looked at each other.
+"Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
+</p><p>
+"So awfully&mdash;it's Maud Lowder's own view.
+And he was nice, in London," said Mrs. Stringham,
+"to <i>me</i>. One could almost pity him&mdash;he has had
+such a good conscience."
+</p><p>
+"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, but it wasn't&mdash;I could see from the only
+few things she first told me&mdash;that he meant <i>her</i> the
+least harm. He intended none whatever."
+</p><p>
+"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned.
+"He only of course meant harm to me."
+</p><p>
+"And good to himself&mdash;he thought that would
+come. He had been unable to swallow," Mrs. Stringham
+pursued, "what had happened on his other visit.
+He had been then too sharply humiliated."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I saw that."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received,
+as it were, while he was turned away."
+</p><p>
+"Perfectly," Densher said&mdash;"I've filled it out.
+And also that he has known meanwhile for <i>what</i> I
+was then received. For a stay of all these weeks.
+He had had it to think of."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely&mdash;it was more than he could bear. But
+he has it," said Mrs. Stringham, "to think of still."
+</p><p>
+"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself
+somehow, at this point, was having more to think of
+even than he had yet had&mdash;"only, after all, how has
+he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
+</p><p>
+"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
+</p><p>
+"He can only have acted&mdash;it would have been his
+sole safety&mdash;from full knowledge."
+</p><p>
+He had gone on without heeding her question;
+but, face to face as they were, something had none
+the less passed between them. It was this that, after
+an instant, made her again interrogative. "What
+do you mean by full knowledge?"
+</p><p>
+Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been
+since October?"
+</p><p>
+"I think he has been back to England. He came
+in fact, I've reason to believe, straight from there."
+</p><p>
+"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, to try again&mdash;with the help perhaps of a
+new fact. To make himself possibly right with her&mdash;a
+different attempt from the other. He had at any
+rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
+opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or
+perhaps indeed half an hour would be just what was
+most effective. It <i>has</i> been!" said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+Her companion took it in, understanding but too
+well; yet as she lighted the matter for him more,
+really, than his own courage had quite dared&mdash;putting
+the absent dots on several i's&mdash;he saw new questions
+swarm. They had been till now in a bunch,
+entangled and confused; and they fell apart, each
+showing for itself. The first he put to her was at
+any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs.
+Lowder."
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally
+upon news of Milly."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally,
+upon news of <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
+</p><p>
+"I've given her none that hasn't been decently
+good. This will have been the first."
+</p><p>
+"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
+</p><p>
+"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as
+she is."
+</p><p>
+He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs.
+Lowder written about him? Has she written that he
+has been with them?"
+</p><p>
+"She has mentioned him but once&mdash;it was in her
+letter before the last. Then she said something."
+</p><p>
+"And what did she say?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well
+it was in reference to Miss Croy. That she thought
+Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I should say
+rather that he was thinking of <i>her</i>&mdash;only it seemed
+this time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the
+way more open to him."
+</p><p>
+Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but
+he presently raised them to speak, and there was that
+in his face which proved him aware of a queerness in
+his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged
+to <i>propose</i> to her niece?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know what she means."
+</p><p>
+"Of course not"&mdash;he recovered himself; "and I
+oughtn't to seem to trouble you to piece together
+what I can't piece myself. Only I 'guess,'" he added,
+"I <i>can</i> piece it."
+</p><p>
+She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I
+dare say I can piece it too."
+</p><p>
+It was one of the things in her&mdash;and his conscious
+face took it from her as such&mdash;that from the moment
+of her coming in had seemed to mark for him,
+as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
+They had parted four days earlier with
+many things, between them, deep down. But these
+things were now on their troubled surface, and it
+wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up.
+Women were wonderful&mdash;at least this one was. But
+so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of
+all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what
+he had been feeling about the circle of petticoats.
+They were all <i>such</i> petticoats! It was just the fineness
+of his tangle. The sense of that, in its turn, for us too,
+might have been not unconnected with his putting
+to his visitor a question that quite passed over her
+remark. "Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our
+friend?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "<i>her</i> friend also.
+But not a single word that I know of."
+</p><p>
+He had taken it for certain she hadn't&mdash;the thing
+being after all but a shade more strange than his
+having himself, with Milly, never for six weeks mentioned
+the young lady in question. It was for that
+matter but a shade more strange than Milly's not having
+mentioned her. In spite of which, and however
+inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
+He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and
+the furthest he could get was by reverting for a minute
+to the man they had been judging. "How did he
+manage to get <i>at</i> her? She had only&mdash;with what had
+passed between them before&mdash;to say she couldn't
+see him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier,"
+the good lady explained with a slight embarrassment,
+"than at the other time."
+</p><p>
+"Easier?"
+</p><p>
+"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
+</p><p>
+"Yes. But exactly not <i>the</i> difference."
+</p><p>
+"Exactly not the difference of her having to be
+harsh. Perfectly. She could afford to be the opposite."
+With which, as he said nothing, she just impatiently
+completed her sense. "She had had <i>you</i>
+here for six weeks."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
+</p><p>
+"Besides, I think he must have written her first&mdash;written
+I mean in a tone to smooth his way. That it
+would be a kindness to himself. Then on the spot&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked?
+The horrid little beast!"
+</p><p>
+It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though
+quickening, as for hope, the intensity of her look at
+him. "Oh he went off without an alarm."
+</p><p>
+"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
+</p><p>
+"Ah that, certainly."
+</p><p>
+"Then it <i>was</i> mere base revenge. Hasn't he known
+her, into the bargain," the young man asked&mdash;"didn't
+he, weeks before, see her, judge her, feel her,
+as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than
+a few months to live?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at
+him in silence; and it gave more force to what she
+then remarkably added. "He has doubtless been
+aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself
+been aware."
+</p><p>
+"He has wanted her, you mean, just <i>because</i>&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He
+moved off, however, with a hot face, as soon as he
+had spoken, conscious again of an intention in his
+visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he
+had once more taken counsel of the dreariness without
+he turned to his companion. "Shall we have lights&mdash;a
+lamp or the candles?"
+</p><p>
+"Not for me."
+</p><p>
+"Nothing?"
+</p><p>
+"Not for me."
+</p><p>
+He waited at the window another moment and then
+faced his friend with a thought. "He <i>will</i> have proposed
+to Miss Croy. That's what has happened."
+</p><p>
+Her reserve continued. "It's you who must
+judge."
+</p><p>
+"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done
+so too&mdash;only <i>she</i>, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy's
+refusal of him will have struck him"&mdash;Densher continued
+to make it out&mdash;"as a phenomenon requiring
+a reason."
+</p><p>
+"And you've been clear to him <i>as</i> the reason?"
+</p><p>
+"Not too clear&mdash;since I'm sticking here and
+since that has been a fact to make his descent on
+Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has believed,"
+said Densher bravely, "that I may have been
+a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time
+have been up to something in Venice."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own.
+"'Up to' something? Up to what?"
+</p><p>
+"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To
+some deviltry. To some duplicity."
+</p><p>
+"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is
+a monstrous supposition." Her companion, after a
+stiff minute&mdash;sensibly long for each&mdash;fell away
+from her again, and then added to it another minute,
+which he spent once more looking out with his hands
+in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly knew,
+to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state
+for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
+left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined,
+for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights.
+These would have been an advantage mainly to herself.
+Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence
+of them. It came out in her very tone when at
+last she addressed him&mdash;so differently, for confidence&mdash;in
+words she had already used. "If Sir Luke
+himself asks it of you as something you can do for
+<i>him</i>, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been
+made so dreadfully to believe?"
+</p><p>
+Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he
+said: "You're absolutely certain then that she does
+believe it?"
+</p><p>
+"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation.
+"Judge!"
+</p><p>
+He took his time again to judge. "Do <i>you</i> believe
+it?"
+</p><p>
+He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her
+hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a
+pain to her discretion. She answered none the less,
+and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
+will inevitably depend more or less on your action.
+You can perfectly settle it&mdash;if you care. I promise
+to believe you down to the ground if, to save her life,
+you consent to a denial."
+</p><p>
+"But a denial, when it comes to that&mdash;confound
+the whole thing, don't you see!&mdash;of exactly what?"
+</p><p>
+It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but
+in fact she enlarged. "Of everything."
+</p><p>
+Everything had never even yet seemed to him so
+incalculably much. "Oh!" he simply moaned into
+the gloom.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir
+Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of
+other rigours. The weather changed, the stubborn
+storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for
+many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came
+into its own again and, with an almost audible paean,
+a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
+bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed
+and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was
+like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows,
+blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid
+stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced
+in this on the occasion of his going to the station
+to meet the great doctor. He went after consideration,
+which, as he was constantly aware, was at
+present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything.
+That was where the event had landed him&mdash;where
+no event in his life had landed him before. He had
+thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much
+more than he had acted; except indeed that he
+remembered thoughts&mdash;a few of them&mdash;which at
+the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
+almost like adventures. But anything like his actual
+state he had not, as to the prohibition of impulse,
+accident, range&mdash;the prohibition in other words of
+freedom&mdash;hitherto known. The great oddity was
+that if he had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially
+as an adventure, nothing could now less resemble
+one than the fact of his staying. It would be
+an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back,
+above all, to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done
+so; but there was something of the merely, the almost
+meanly, obliged and involved sort in his going
+on as he was. That was the effect in particular of
+Mrs. Stringham's visit, which had left him as with
+such a taste in his mouth of what he couldn't do. It
+had made this quantity clear to him, and yet had
+deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what,
+for a refuge, he possibly <i>could</i>.
+</p><p>
+It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he
+knew, to go to the station for Sir Luke. Nothing
+equally free, at all events, had he yet turned over so
+long. What then was his odious position but that
+again and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself
+under this consciousness as if it had been a tax
+levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time proposed
+to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate
+in his life. Such was simply the advantage it had
+actually got of him. He was afraid for instance that
+an advance to his distinguished friend might prove
+for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was
+afraid of it as a current that would draw him too
+far; yet he thought with an equal aversion of being
+shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally prevailed
+with him was the reflexion that, whatever
+might happen, the great man had, after that occasion
+at the palace, their young woman's brief sacrifice to
+society&mdash;and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal
+had brought it well to the surface&mdash;shown him
+marked benevolence. Mrs. Stringham's comments on
+the relation in which Milly had placed them made
+him&mdash;it was unmistakeable&mdash;feel things he perhaps
+hadn't felt. It was in the spirit of seeking a chance
+to feel again adequately whatever it was he had missed&mdash;it
+was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it went
+a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes,
+paced the platform before the train came in. Only,
+after it had come and he had presented himself at the
+door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything that
+followed&mdash;only, as the situation developed, the sense
+of an anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his
+apprehensions and hesitations even of the scant dignity
+they might claim. He could scarce have said if the
+visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
+might have suggested expectation, or made shorter
+work of surprise in presence of the fact.
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke had clean forgotten&mdash;so Densher read&mdash;the
+rather remarkable young man he had formerly
+gone about with, though he picked him up again, on
+the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man
+felt himself so picked, and the thing immediately
+affected him as the proof of a splendid economy.
+Opposed to all the waste with which he was now connected
+the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly
+to admonish him. The eminent pilgrim, in the train,
+all the way, had used the hours as he needed, thinking
+not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
+him. An exquisite case awaited him&mdash;of which,
+in this queer way, the remarkable young man was
+an outlying part; but the single motion of his face,
+the motion into which Densher, from the platform,
+lightly stirred its stillness, was his first renewed cognition.
+If, however, he had suppressed the matter
+by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress now,
+in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this
+became as a symbol of the whole pitch, so far as
+one might one's self be concerned, of his visit. One
+saw, our friend further meditated, everything that, in
+contact, he appeared to accept&mdash;if only, for much,
+not to trouble to sink it: what one missed was the
+inward use he made of it. Densher began wondering,
+at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
+make of the anomaly of their having there to separate.
+Eugenio had been on the platform, in the respectful
+rear, and the gondola from the palace, under his
+direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching mixture
+of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
+together. Densher didn't at all mind now that,
+he himself of necessity refusing a seat on the deep
+black cushions beside the guest of the palace, he had
+Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this susceptibility,
+he also knew, it was something to have
+left behind. All he did was to smile down vaguely
+from the steps&mdash;they could see him, the donkeys, as
+shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
+headshake, "go there now."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no
+more of it; so that the thing was splendid, Densher
+fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite inevitable
+and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to
+make of it that he supposed it might be for respect
+to the crisis. He didn't moreover afterwards make
+much more of anything&mdash;after the classic craft, that
+is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke
+from the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by
+which it presented, receding, a back, so to speak,
+rendered positively graceful by the high black hump
+of its <i>felze</i>. Densher watched the gondola out of sight&mdash;he
+heard Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the
+water, for the sharp firm swerve into a side-canal, a
+short cut to the palace. He had no gondola of his
+own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly&mdash;as
+in Venice it <i>is</i> humble&mdash;walked away,
+though not without having for some time longer
+stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
+him. It was strange enough, but he found himself
+as never yet, and as he couldn't have reckoned, in
+presence of the truth that was the truest about Milly.
+He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
+instantly made&mdash;for it was all in the air as he
+heard Pasquale's cry and saw the boat disappear&mdash;by
+the mere visibility, on the spot, of the personage
+summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been
+near the facts of her condition&mdash;which counted so
+as a blessing for him; he hadn't only, with all the
+world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
+within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness
+made up of smiles and silences and beautiful
+fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to
+breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
+now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in
+the direct interest of every one's good manner, every
+one's pity, every one's really quite generous ideal.
+It was a conspiracy of silence, as the <i>cliché</i> went, to
+which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
+of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain
+and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit
+or of speech that consented to reflect it. "The mere
+aesthetic instinct of mankind&mdash;!" our young man had
+more than once, in the connexion, said to himself;
+letting the rest of the proposition drop, but touching
+again thus sufficiently on the outrage even to taste involved
+in one's having to <i>see</i>. So then it had been&mdash;a
+general conscious fool's paradise, from which the
+specified had been chased like a dangerous animal.
+What therefore had at present befallen was that the
+specified, standing all the while at the gate, had now
+crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person
+and quite on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct.
+Densher's nerves, absolutely his heart-beats
+too, had measured the change before he on this occasion
+moved away.
+</p><p>
+The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain,
+of the chance grimly narrowed, had been made, at
+a stroke, intense, and this was to be the way he was
+now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
+making vision not only possible but inevitable, the
+one thing left to be thankful for was the breadth of
+Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should one be able to
+keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
+It was, however, far from plain to Densher for
+the first day or two that he was again to see his distinguished
+friend at all. That he couldn't, on any
+basis actually serving, return to the palace&mdash;this
+was as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature
+of his case, the fact of the publicity attaching to his
+proscription through his not having taken himself off.
+He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli gondola.
+As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption
+destined to meet Sir Luke about the town, where the
+latter would have neither time nor taste to lounge,
+nothing more would occur between them unless the
+great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His
+doing that, Densher further reflected, wouldn't even
+simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's having decided
+to&mdash;as they might say&mdash;turn him on. It would
+depend as well&mdash;for there would be practically some
+difference to her&mdash;on her actually attempting it;
+and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke would
+make of such an overture. Densher had for that
+matter his own view of the amount, to say nothing of
+the particular sort, of response it might expect from
+him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
+personage even to understand such an appeal. To
+what extent could he be prepared, and what importance
+in fine could he attach? Densher asked himself
+these questions, in truth, to put his own position
+at the worst. He should miss the great man completely
+unless the great man should come to see him, and the
+great man could only come to see him for a purpose
+unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all,
+and consequently there was nothing to hope.
+</p><p>
+It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this
+violence to all probability; but it pressed on him that
+there were few possible diversions he could afford
+now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was so odd
+as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not
+afraid of Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he
+clung to, based on a previous taste of the visitor's
+company, that <i>he</i> would somehow let him off. The
+truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and
+sounded in his tread, became by the fact of his presence
+the name and the form, for the time, of everything
+in the place; but it didn't, for the difference,
+sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned
+to Densher at the earlier season. His presence on
+the first occasion, not as the result of a summons, but
+as a friendly whim of his own, had had quite another
+value; and though our young man could scarce regard
+that value as recoverable he yet reached out in
+imagination to a renewal of the old contact. He didn't
+propose, as he privately and forcibly phrased the
+matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after
+all did want for himself. It was something&mdash;this
+stuck to him&mdash;that Sir Luke would have had for him
+if it hadn't been impossible. These were his worst
+days, the two or three; those on which even the sense
+of the tension at the palace didn't much help him
+not to feel that his destiny made but light of him. He
+had never been, as he judged it, so down. In mean
+conditions, without books, without society, almost
+without money, he had nothing to do but to wait.
+His main support really was his original idea, which
+didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth his
+predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent,
+if he but gave it time, some refinement of the horrible.
+It was just inventing meanwhile this suppression of
+Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign
+he knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham
+during her call on him no such answer as would
+have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had described
+as ready for him when <i>he</i> should be ready was
+therefore&mdash;if on no other ground than her want of
+this power to answer for him&mdash;not to be presented.
+The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
+</p><p>
+That was not, either, we hasten to declare&mdash;as
+Densher then soon enough saw&mdash;the idea with which
+Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For stand
+before him again he finally did; just when our friend
+had gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his
+power to absent himself from London obligations
+would have been reached. Four or five days, exclusive
+of journeys, represented the largest supposable
+sacrifice&mdash;to a head not crowned&mdash;on the part of
+one of the highest medical lights in the world; so that
+really when the personage in question, following up
+a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the doorway, it was
+to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
+like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful
+word, of the magnitude&mdash;he shrank from calling
+it anything else&mdash;of Milly's case. The great man had
+not gone then, and an immense surrender to her immense
+need was so expressed in it that some effect,
+some help, some hope, were flagrantly part of the
+expression. It was for Densher, with his reaction
+from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten
+things at once&mdash;the foremost being that just conceivably,
+since Sir Luke <i>was</I> still there, she had been
+saved. Close upon its heels, however, and quite as
+sharply, came the sense that the crisis&mdash;plainly even
+now to be prolonged for him&mdash;was to have none of
+that sound simplicity. Not only had his visitor not
+dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't dropped
+in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to
+show that during the brief remainder of his stay, the
+end of which was now in sight, as little as possible of
+that was to be looked for. The demonstration, such
+as it was, was in the key of their previous acquaintance,
+and it was their previous acquaintance that had
+made him come. He was not to stop longer than the
+Saturday next at hand, but there were things of interest
+he should like to see again meanwhile. It was for
+these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity
+of Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it,
+and a turn about, that he had looked his young man
+up&mdash;producing on the latter's part, as soon as the
+case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four
+hours, so defined itself, the most incongruous, yet
+most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in fact
+have been more monstrous on the surface&mdash;and
+Densher was well aware of it&mdash;than the relief he
+found during this short period in the tacit drop of
+all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
+nor asking for it. That was what had come out for
+him, on his visitor's entrance, even in the very seconds
+of suspense that were connecting the fact also
+directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had
+come to say he had saved her&mdash;he had come, as from
+Mrs. Stringham, to say how she might <i>be</i> saved&mdash;he
+had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
+was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous
+for all their distinctness, merged their identity
+in a bound of the heart just as immediate and
+which remained after they had passed. It simply
+did wonders for him&mdash;this was the truth&mdash;that Sir
+Luke was, as he would have said, quiet.
+</p><p>
+The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of
+a blest calm after a storm. He had been trying for
+weeks, as we know, to keep superlatively still, and
+trying it largely in solitude and silence; but he looked
+back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the
+right stillness was this particular form of society.
+They walked together and they talked, looked up
+pictures again and recovered impressions&mdash;Sir
+Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the
+dealers in old wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and
+mild drinks; blessed above all the grand weather, a
+bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light. Once
+or twice while they rested the great man closed his
+eyes&mdash;keeping them so for some minutes while his
+companion, the more easily watching his face for it,
+made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
+He had been up at night with her&mdash;he in person, for
+hours; but this was all he showed of it and was apparently
+to remain his nearest approach to an allusion.
+The extraordinary thing was that Densher could
+take it in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the
+image looking out of it; and yet that he could at
+the same time not intermit a throb of his response to
+accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience
+that held its own, and he continued to know why, in
+spite of his deserts, in spite of his folly, in spite of
+everything, he had so fondly hoped for it. He had
+hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
+because he had thus divined in it, should it come,
+some power to let him off. He was <i>being</i> let off; dealt
+with in the only way that didn't aggravate his responsibility.
+The beauty was also that this wasn't
+on system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it
+was just by being a man of the world and by knowing
+life, by feeling the real, that Sir Luke did him good.
+There had been in all the case too many women. A
+man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and
+he wondered what man, had he chosen, would have
+been more to his purpose than this one. He was large
+and easy&mdash;that was the benediction; he knew what
+mattered and what didn't; he distinguished between
+the essence and the shell, the just grounds and the
+unjust for fussing. One was thus&mdash;if one were concerned
+with him or exposed to him at all&mdash;in his
+hands for whatever he should do, and not much less
+affected by his mercy than one might have been by
+his rigour. The grand thing&mdash;it did come to that&mdash;was
+the way he carried off, as one might fairly
+call it, the business of making odd things natural.
+Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have exceeded
+the unexplained oddity, between them, of
+Densher's now complete detachment from the poor
+ladies at the palace; nothing could have exceeded
+the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
+abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done
+when they met at the station, nothing whatever of
+anything; and the effect of it, Densher would have
+said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
+doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as
+one might have taken a dose&mdash;except that the cue
+was pleasant in the taking.
+</p><p>
+That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion,
+why for the three or four days Densher again
+and again did so leave it; merely wondering a little, at
+the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced term
+of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion,
+the Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance
+at the station, our friend had to recognise the
+drop of his own borrowed ease, the result, naturally
+enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
+was that, on such lines as had served them, the
+support was Sir Luke's personal presence. Would he
+go without leaving some substitute for that?&mdash;and
+without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
+errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at
+the hour of his call, and what was truly prodigious at
+so supreme a moment was that&mdash;as had immediately
+to appear&mdash;no gleam of light on what he had been
+living with for a week found its way out of him. What
+he had been doing was proof of a huge interest as well
+as of a huge fee; yet when the Leporelli gondola again,
+and somewhat tardily, approached, his companion,
+watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed
+face as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from
+the highest authority, on the subject of the relevant, so
+that its blankness affected Densher of a sudden almost
+as a cruelty, feeling it quite awfully compatible,
+as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
+the suspense continued after they had passed together,
+as time was short, directly into the station, where
+Eugenio, in the field early, was mounting guard over
+the compartment he had secured. The strain, though
+probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple
+of minutes, prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's
+nerves that he involuntarily directed a long
+look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as only Eugenio
+could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the
+time to the right bestowal of his numerous effects,
+about which he was particular, and Densher fairly
+found himself, so far as silence could go, questioning
+the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate
+him now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that
+that personage exactly knew how little he satisfied
+him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir Luke&mdash;to
+the extent of the extraordinary things with which
+his facial habit was compatible. By the time, however,
+that Densher had taken from it all its possessor
+intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
+farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech;
+only on meeting his eyes could our young man see that
+they had never yet so completely looked at him. It
+was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
+one time than at another; but they looked longer, and
+this, even a shade of it, might mean on his part everything.
+It meant, Densher for ten seconds believed,
+that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at last
+spoken made him start.
+</p><p>
+"I shall come back."
+</p><p>
+"Then she's better?"
+</p><p>
+"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke
+repeated without heeding the question. He had
+dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
+still. "I bring you a message from Miss
+Theale," he said as if they hadn't spoken of her.
+"I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
+see her."
+</p><p>
+Densher's rebound from his supposition had a
+violence that his stare betrayed. "She asks me?"
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which
+the guard had closed; but he spoke again as he stood
+at the window, bending a little but not leaning out.
+"She told me she'd like it, and I promised that, as
+I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
+</p><p>
+Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but
+what he took brought the blood into his face quite as
+what he had had to take from Mrs. Stringham. And
+he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"She can receive you."
+</p><p>
+"And you're coming back&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to
+stay. I come to her."
+</p><p>
+"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see&mdash;saw
+the sense of his friend's words and saw beyond it
+as well. What Mrs. Stringham had announced, and
+what he had yet expected not to have to face, <i>had</i>
+then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but
+there it was, and the colourless compact form it was
+now taking&mdash;the tone of one man of the world to another,
+who, after what had happened, would understand&mdash;was
+but the characteristic manner of his appeal.
+Densher was to understand remarkably much;
+and the great thing certainly was to show that he
+did. "I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He
+brought that out, but in his pause, while they continued
+to look at each other, the train had slowly
+creaked into motion. There was time but for one
+more word, and the young man chose it, out of twenty,
+with intense concentration. "Then she's better?"
+</p><p>
+Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better."
+And he kept it at the window while the train
+receded, holding him with it still. It was to be his
+nearest approach to the utter reference they had
+hitherto so successfully avoided. If it stood for everything;
+never had a face had to stand for more. So
+Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply reflected;
+so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss
+it pushed him, even while conscious of retreating
+under the maintained observation of Eugenio.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK TENTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+"Then it has been&mdash;what do you say? a whole
+fortnight?&mdash;without your making a sign?"
+</p><p>
+Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December
+dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time
+he had been back; but he saw with it straightway that
+she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct&mdash;which
+was a system as well&mdash;of not admitting the
+possibility between them of small resentments, of
+trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the
+renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh sight of her
+have stirred him to his depths if something else, something
+no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred
+him still more. It was in seeing her that he felt what
+their interruption had been, and that they met across
+it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in
+time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
+had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were
+as different for her as she herself had immediately
+appeared: which was but his way indeed of taking in,
+with his thrill, that&mdash;even going by the mere first
+look&mdash;she had never been so handsome. That fact
+bloomed for him, in the firelight and lamplight that
+glowed their welcome through the London fog, as the
+flower of her difference; just as her difference itself&mdash;part
+of which was her striking him as older in a degree
+for which no mere couple of months could account&mdash;was
+the fruit of their intimate relation. If
+she was different it was because they had chosen together
+that she should be, and she might now, as a
+proof of their wisdom, their success, of the reality of
+what had happened&mdash;of what in fact, for the spirit
+of each, was still happening&mdash;been showing it to him
+for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered
+days, so still, had been, he was quite aware, the
+first point he should have to tackle; with which consciousness
+indeed he had made a clean breast of it in
+finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to
+his present visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the
+finer way; and it would doubtless have been to be
+noted that he needed no effort not to write to Kate.
+Venice was three weeks behind him&mdash;he had come
+up slowly; but it was still as if even in London he must
+conform to her law. That was exactly how he was
+able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to her
+feeling for the situation and explain his stretched
+delicacy. He had come to tell her everything, so far
+as occasion would serve them; and if nothing was
+more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits, his
+delay to reopen communication had kept pace with
+this resolve, so the inconsequence was doubtless at
+bottom but one of the elements of intensity. He was
+gathering everything up, everything he should tell
+her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he
+felt on the spot, he couldn't have brought it all with
+him before this afternoon. He <i>had</i> brought it, to the
+last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't be
+hard&mdash;as he in fact found&mdash;to produce, for Kate's
+understanding, his first reason.
+</p><p>
+"A fortnight, yes&mdash;it was a fortnight Friday; but
+I've only been keeping in, you see, with our wonderful
+system." He was so easily justified as that this
+of itself plainly enough prevented her saying she
+didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly
+still vivid for her; and such a gage of its equal vividness
+for himself was precisely what she must have
+asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
+remark that on the very face of it, she would remember,
+their wonderful system attached no premium to
+rapidities of transition. "I couldn't quite&mdash;don't
+you know?&mdash;take my rebound with a rush; and I
+suppose I've been instinctively hanging off to minimise,
+for you as well as for myself, the appearances
+of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I knew
+you'd understand." It was presently as if she really
+understood so well that she almost appealed from his
+insistence&mdash;yet looking at him too, he was not unconscious,
+as if this mastery of fitnesses was a strong
+sign for her of what she had done to him. He might
+have struck her as expert for contingencies in the very
+degree of her having in Venice struck <i>him</i> as expert.
+He smiled over his plea for a renewal with stages and
+steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and graduated;
+though&mdash;finely as she must respond&mdash;she
+met the smile but as she had met his entrance five
+minutes before. Her soft gravity at that moment&mdash;which
+was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
+charged with life to the brim and wishing
+not to overflow&mdash;had not qualified her welcome;
+what had done this being much more the presence in
+the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman
+who had introduced him and who had been interrupted
+in preparing the tea-table.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to
+appoint the tea-hour, five o'clock on Sunday, for his
+seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired him, without
+a signature, "Come on Sunday <i>before</i> tea&mdash;about a
+quarter of an hour, which will help us"; and he had
+arrived therefore scrupulously at twenty minutes to
+five. Kate was alone in the room and hadn't delayed
+to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily
+gathered, was to be, for the interval&mdash;not long but
+precious&mdash;engaged with an old servant, retired and
+pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
+was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs.
+They were to have the scrap of time, after the withdrawal
+of the footman, to themselves, and there was
+a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
+spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety
+of shades, it proclaimed itself indeed precious. And
+all without prejudice&mdash;that was what kept it noble&mdash;to
+Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful self-command.
+If he had his discretion she had her perfect
+manner, which was <i>her</i> decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he
+had, to finish with the question of his delay, furthermore
+observed, Mrs. Stringham would have written
+to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so
+that it wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them.
+They'd know he was no longer there.
+</p><p>
+"Yes, we've known it."
+</p><p>
+"And you continue to hear?"
+</p><p>
+"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I
+mean Aunt Maud does."
+</p><p>
+"Then you've recent news?"
+</p><p>
+Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day
+or two I believe. But haven't <i>you?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I've heard nothing." And it was now that
+he felt how much he had to tell her. "I don't get
+letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder does." With
+which he added: "Then of course you know." He
+waited as if she would show what she knew; but she
+only showed in silence the dawn of a surprise that she
+couldn't control. There was nothing but for him to
+ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
+</p><p>
+Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you <i>know?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"How should I, my dear&mdash;in the absence of everything?"
+And he himself stared as for light. "She's
+dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she slowly
+shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
+</p><p>
+It came out in Kate's face that there were several
+questions on her lips, but the one she presently put
+was: "Is it very terrible?"
+</p><p>
+"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly
+dying?" He had to think a moment. "Well, yes&mdash;since
+you ask me: very terrible to <i>me</i>&mdash;so far as,
+before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't
+think," he went on, "that&mdash;though I'll try&mdash;I <i>can</i>
+quite tell you what it was, what it is, for me. That's
+why I probably just sounded to you," he explained,
+"as if I hoped it might be over."
+</p><p>
+She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this
+time saw that, so far as telling her all was concerned,
+she would be divided between the wish and the reluctance
+to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
+unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing
+scruple of a respect for misfortune. The more she
+studied him too&mdash;and he had never so felt her closely
+attached to his face&mdash;the more the choice of an attitude
+would become impossible to her. There would
+simply be a feeling uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't
+be eagerness. This perception grew in him fast,
+and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment
+the quick forecast of her possibly breaking out
+at him, should he go too far, with a wonderful:
+"What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
+the sound&mdash;wouldn't it be open to him fairly to
+bring that out himself?&mdash;of a repudiation, for pity
+and almost for shame, of everything that in Venice had
+passed between them. Not that she would confess to
+any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
+or horror give her away; but it was in the air
+for him&mdash;yes&mdash;that she wouldn't want details, that
+she positively wouldn't take them, and that, if he
+would generously understand it from her, she would
+prefer to keep him down. Nothing, however, was
+more definite for him than that at the same time he
+must remain down but so far as it suited him. Something
+rose strong within him against his not being free
+with her. She had been free enough about it all, three
+months before, with <i>him</i>. That was what she was at
+present only in the sense of treating him handsomely.
+"I can believe," she said with perfect consideration,
+"how dreadful for you much of it must have
+been."
+</p><p>
+He didn't however take this up; there were things
+about which he wished first to be clear. "There's
+no other possibility, by what you now know? I mean
+for her life." And he had just to insist&mdash;she would
+say as little as she could. "She <i>is</i> dying?"
+</p><p>
+"She's dying."
+</p><p>
+It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that
+Lancaster Gate could make him any surer; yet what
+in the world, in the matter of Milly, wasn't strange?
+Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour&mdash;his
+present as well as his past. He could but do as he
+must. "Has Sir Luke Strett," he asked, "gone back
+to her?"
+</p><p>
+"I believe he's there now."
+</p><p>
+"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
+</p><p>
+She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to
+be; but she spoke otherwise after a minute. "You
+won't know, unless you've perhaps seen him yourself,
+that Aunt Maud has been to him."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add
+to it.
+</p><p>
+"For real news," Kate herself after an instant
+added.
+</p><p>
+"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
+</p><p>
+"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt
+Maud's trying again three days ago to see him that
+she heard at his house of his having gone. He had
+started I believe some days before."
+</p><p>
+"And won't then by this time be back?"
+</p><p>
+Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to
+know."
+</p><p>
+"He won't leave her then"&mdash;Densher had turned
+it over&mdash;"while she lives. He'll stay to the end.
+He's magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"I think <i>she</i> is," said Kate.
+</p><p>
+It had made them again look at each other long;
+and what it drew from him rather oddly was: "Oh
+you don't know!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, she's after all my friend."
+</p><p>
+It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the
+answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned
+with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of
+her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of
+it. You <i>were</i> sure of it."
+</p><p>
+"Of course I was sure of it."
+</p><p>
+And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which
+Densher, however, presently broke. "If you don't
+think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what do you think
+of Lord Mark's?"
+</p><p>
+She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
+</p><p>
+"You haven't seen him?"
+</p><p>
+"Not since he saw her."
+</p><p>
+"You've known then of his seeing her?"
+</p><p>
+"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"And have you known," Densher went on, "the
+rest?"
+</p><p>
+Kate wondered. "What rest?"
+</p><p>
+"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't
+stand&mdash;it was what then took place that simply
+killed her."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had
+turned pale, and he saw that, whatever her degree of
+ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't put on.
+"Mrs. Stringham hasn't said <i>that</i>."
+</p><p>
+He observed none the less that she didn't ask what
+had then taken place; and he went on with his contribution
+to her knowledge. "The way it affected her was
+that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
+all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a
+vagueness that made him pursue.
+</p><p>
+"One can see now that she was living by will&mdash;which
+was very much what you originally told me of
+her."
+</p><p>
+"I remember. That was it."
+</p><p>
+"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke
+down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow's
+dastardly stroke. He told her, the scoundrel,
+that you and I are secretly engaged."
+</p><p>
+Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know
+it!"
+</p><p>
+"That doesn't matter. <i>She</i> did by the time he had
+left her. Besides," Densher added, "he does know
+it. When," he continued, "did you last see him?"
+</p><p>
+But she was lost now in the picture before her.
+"<i>That</i> was what made her worse?"
+</p><p>
+He watched her take it in&mdash;it so added to her
+sombre beauty. Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham
+had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style;
+so that he continued consistently: "She learned it, you
+see, too soon&mdash;since of course one's idea had been
+that she might never even learn it at all. And she <i>had</i>
+felt sure&mdash;through everything we had done&mdash;of
+there not being between us, so far at least as you were
+concerned, anything she need regard as a warning."
+</p><p>
+She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't
+through anything <i>you</i> did&mdash;whatever that may have
+been&mdash;that she gained her certainty. It was by the
+conviction she got from me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you
+to take your share!"
+</p><p>
+"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of
+denying it?"
+</p><p>
+Her look and her tone made him for the instant
+regret his comment, which indeed had been the first
+that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what
+they would have called between them her straightness.
+Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty
+could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside
+the mark. "Of course I don't suppose anything
+but that we're together in our recognitions, our responsibilities&mdash;whatever
+we choose to call them. It
+isn't a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing
+invidiously among such impressions as
+it was our idea to give."
+</p><p>
+"It wasn't <i>your</i> idea to give impressions," said Kate.
+</p><p>
+He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its
+strained character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
+</p><p>
+It was perhaps not as going into it that she had
+another idea&mdash;an idea born, she showed, of the
+vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have been
+possible then to deny the truth of the information?
+I mean of Lord Mark's."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
+</p><p>
+"Why for you."
+</p><p>
+"To tell her he lied?"
+</p><p>
+"To tell her he's mistaken."
+</p><p>
+Densher stared&mdash;he was stupefied; the "possible"
+thus glanced at by Kate being exactly the alternative
+he had had to face in Venice and to put utterly
+away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a
+difference in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you
+mean, to do it? We <i>are</i>, my dear child," he said, "I
+suppose, still engaged."
+</p><p>
+"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her
+life&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of
+course, it was to be remembered, she had always
+simplified, and it brought back his sense of the degree
+in which, to her energy as compared with his
+own, many things were easy; the very sense that so
+often before had moved him to admiration. "Well,
+if you must know&mdash;and I want you to be clear about
+it&mdash;I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her
+face. The question of it&mdash;<i>as</i> possibly saving her&mdash;was
+put to me definitely enough; but to turn it
+over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+</p><p>
+"You mean she would have had no faith in your
+correction?" She had spoken with a promptitude
+that affected him of a sudden as almost glib; but he
+himself paused with the overweight of all he meant,
+and she meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
+</p><p>
+"I hadn't even a chance."
+</p><p>
+Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner
+of at once having it all before her and yet keeping
+it all at its distance. "She wouldn't see you?"
+</p><p>
+"Not after your friend had been with her."
+</p><p>
+She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
+</p><p>
+It made him also think, but with a difference.
+"She had turned her face to the wall."
+</p><p>
+This again for a moment hushed her, and they
+were both too grave now for parenthetic pity. But
+her interest came out for at least the minimum of
+light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
+</p><p>
+"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was
+miserably, prohibitively ill."
+</p><p>
+"Well, that was what she had been before."
+</p><p>
+"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted,
+"it didn't; and I don't pretend that she's not
+magnificent."
+</p><p>
+"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
+</p><p>
+He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear.
+But that's how it is," he wound up; "and there we
+are."
+</p><p>
+His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps
+sound him much more deeply, asking him above
+all two or three specific things. He had fairly fancied
+her even wanting to know and trying to find out how
+far, as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone,
+and how near, by the same token, they had come. He
+had asked himself if he were prepared to hear her do
+that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
+of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared
+for her ascertaining if her two or three prophecies
+had found time to be made true? He had fairly believed
+himself ready to say whether or no the overture
+on Milly's part promised according to the boldest of
+them had taken place. But what was in fact blessedly
+coming to him was that so far as such things were
+concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's
+pressure on the question of what had taken place
+remained so admirably general that even her present
+enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then that
+after Lord Mark's interference you never again
+met?"
+</p><p>
+It was what he had been all the while coming to.
+"No; we met once&mdash;so far as it could be called a
+meeting. I had stayed&mdash;I didn't come away."
+</p><p>
+"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
+</p><p>
+"Precisely"&mdash;he felt himself wonderful; "and I
+wanted to be no less. She sent for me, I went to her,
+and that night I left Venice."
+</p><p>
+His companion waited. "Wouldn't <i>that</i> then have
+been your chance?"
+</p><p>
+"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if
+before her there I had wanted to. What did it signify
+either? She was dying."
+</p><p>
+"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not
+just <i>because</i> she was dying?" She had however
+all her discretion. "But of course I know that seeing
+her you could judge."
+</p><p>
+"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see
+her! If I had denied you moreover," Densher said
+with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to it."
+</p><p>
+She took for a moment the intention of his face.
+"You mean that to convince her you'd have insisted
+or somehow proved&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"I mean that to convince <i>you</i> I'd have insisted or
+somehow proved&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince
+'me'?"
+</p><p>
+"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions,
+only to take it back afterwards."
+</p><p>
+With this quickly light came for her, and with it
+also her colour flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with
+me to make your denial a truth? You'd have 'chucked'
+me"&mdash;she embraced it perfectly&mdash;"to save your
+conscience?"
+</p><p>
+"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton
+Densher. "So you see how right I was not to
+commit myself, and how little I could dream of it.
+If it ever again appears to you that I <i>might</i> have done
+so, remember what I say."
+</p><p>
+Kate again considered, but not with the effect at
+once to which he pointed. "You've fallen in love
+with her."
+</p><p>
+"Well then say so&mdash;with a dying woman. Why
+need you mind and what does it matter?"
+</p><p>
+It came from him, the question, straight out of the
+intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity
+into which, from the first, from his entering the room,
+they had found themselves thrown; but it gave them
+their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is
+dead! Mrs. Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph."
+After which, in a tone still different, "For
+what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
+</p><p>
+"It was what I tried to make out before I went.
+I must tell you moreover that I had no doubt of its
+really being to give me, as you say, a chance. She
+believed, I suppose, that I <i>might</i> deny; and what, to
+my own mind, was before me in going to her was the
+certainty that she'd put me to my test. She wanted
+from my own lips&mdash;so I saw it&mdash;the truth. But I
+was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked
+me for it."
+</p><p>
+"She never wanted the truth"&mdash;Kate had a high
+headshake. "She wanted <i>you</i>. She would have
+taken from you what you could give her and been
+glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might
+have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you
+and felt you lie, and yet&mdash;since it was all for tenderness&mdash;she
+would have thanked you and blessed
+you and clung to you but the more. For that was
+your strength, my dear man&mdash;that she loves you
+with passion."
+</p><p>
+"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
+</p><p>
+"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was
+it to ask of you?" And then&mdash;quite without irony&mdash;as
+he waited a moment to say: "Was it just once
+more to look at you?"
+</p><p>
+"She had nothing to ask of me&mdash;nothing, that is,
+but not to stay any longer. She did to that extent
+want to see me. She had supposed at first&mdash;after
+he had been with her&mdash;that I had seen the propriety
+of taking myself off. Then since I hadn't&mdash;seeing
+my propriety as I did in another way&mdash;she found,
+days later, that I was still there. This," said Densher,
+"affected her."
+</p><p>
+"Of course it affected her."
+</p><p>
+Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib.
+"If it was somehow for <i>her</i> I was still staying, she
+wished that to end, she wished me to know how little
+there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
+wished herself to tell me so."
+</p><p>
+"And she did tell you so?"
+</p><p>
+"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
+</p><p>
+"And as <i>you</i> of course did."
+</p><p>
+"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration;
+"not as I did. I hadn't desired it in the
+least."
+</p><p>
+"You only went to oblige her?"
+</p><p>
+"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
+</p><p>
+"'Glad'?"&mdash;he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
+</p><p>
+"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it
+especially in having stayed. But that was all?" Kate
+went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
+</p><p>
+"That was really all&mdash;and in perfect kindness."
+</p><p>
+"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she
+asked of you such a&mdash;well, such an effort. That you
+mustn't wait&mdash;that was the point," Kate added&mdash;"to
+see her die."
+</p><p>
+"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
+</p><p>
+He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second.
+I paid her the visit&mdash;just like another."
+</p><p>
+"Like another person?"
+</p><p>
+"Like another visit."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the
+effect of slightly arresting his speech&mdash;an arrest she
+took advantage of to continue; making with it indeed
+her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against
+which he had braced himself. "Did she receive you&mdash;in
+her condition&mdash;in her room?"
+</p><p>
+"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received
+me just as usual: in that glorious great <i>salone</i>, in the
+dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner
+of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
+the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you
+remember what you originally said to me of her?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah I've said so many things."
+</p><p>
+"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she
+wouldn't taste of medicine. Well, she didn't."
+</p><p>
+"So that it was really almost happy?"
+</p><p>
+It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he
+partly was in feeling how nobody but Kate could
+have invested such a question with the tone that was
+perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently
+waited. "I don't think I can attempt to say now what
+it was. Some day&mdash;perhaps. For it would be worth
+it for us."
+</p><p>
+"Some day&mdash;certainly." She seemed to record
+the promise. Yet she spoke again abruptly. "She'll
+recover."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
+</p><p>
+She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she
+show anything of her feeling? I mean," Kate explained,
+"of her feeling of having been misled."
+</p><p>
+She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just
+mentioned that he would have rather to glide. "She
+showed nothing but her beauty and her strength."
+</p><p>
+"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of
+her strength?"
+</p><p>
+He seemed to look about for a use he could name;
+but he had soon given it up. "She must die, my dear,
+in her own extraordinary way."
+</p><p>
+"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you
+have that she was ever alienated."
+</p><p>
+"I have the proof that she refused for days and days
+to see me."
+</p><p>
+"But she was ill."
+</p><p>
+"That hadn't prevented her&mdash;as you yourself a
+moment ago said&mdash;during the previous time. If it
+had been only illness it would have made no difference
+with her."
+</p><p>
+"She would still have received you?"
+</p><p>
+"She would still have received me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from
+Mrs. Stringham."
+</p><p>
+"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+"Because you've told her?"
+</p><p>
+"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her
+nothing. She's a person who does see."
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too.
+She as well is prodigious. You see what interest in a
+man does. It does it all round. So you needn't be
+afraid."
+</p><p>
+"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+Kate moved from her place then, looking at the
+clock, which marked five. She gave her attention to
+the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge silver kettle,
+which had been exposed to its lamp and which she
+had not soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard.
+"Well, it's all most wonderful!" she exclaimed as she
+rather too profusely&mdash;a sign her friend noticed&mdash;ladled
+tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
+this occupation, coming nearer the table while she
+put in the steaming water. "You'll have some?"
+</p><p>
+He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant&mdash;the
+deprecation, by their old law, of betrayals of the
+intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
+done it!"
+</p><p>
+"Humbugged her?"
+</p><p>
+"Squared her. You've pleased her."
+</p><p>
+Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was
+thinking of something else, and his thought in a moment
+came out. "What a brute then I must be!"
+</p><p>
+"A brute&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"To have pleased so many people."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've
+done it to please <i>me</i>." But she was already, with her
+gleam, reverting a little. "What I don't understand is&mdash;won't
+you have any sugar?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, please."
+</p><p>
+"What I don't understand," she went on when she
+had helped him, "is what it was that had occurred to
+bring her round again. If she gave you up for days
+and days, what brought her back to you?"
+</p><p>
+She asked the question with her own cup in her
+hand, but it found him ready enough in spite of his
+sense of the ironic oddity of their going into it over the
+tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
+back. His visit, his presence there did it."
+</p><p>
+"He brought her back then to life."
+</p><p>
+"Well, to what I saw."
+</p><p>
+"And by interceding for you?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know
+what he did."
+</p><p>
+Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
+</p><p>
+"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically
+didn't speak of her."
+</p><p>
+Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
+</p><p>
+"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been
+before&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
+</p><p>
+"He understood," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+"But understood what?"
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully
+well."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, and made <i>her</i> understand? I see," she went
+on as he said nothing. "But how did he convince
+her?"
+</p><p>
+Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You
+must ask Sir Luke."
+</p><p>
+He stood looking at the fire and there was a time
+without sound. "The great thing," Kate then resumed,
+"is that she's satisfied. Which," she continued,
+looking across at him, "is what I've worked
+for."
+</p><p>
+"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, at peace with you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the
+fire.
+</p><p>
+"The peace of having loved."
+</p><p>
+He raised his eyes to her. "Is <i>that</i> peace?"
+</p><p>
+"Of having <i>been</i> loved," she went on. "That is.
+Of having," she wound up, "realised her passion. She
+wanted nothing more. She has had <i>all</i> she wanted."
+</p><p>
+Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a
+beautiful authority that he could for the time meet
+with no words. He could only again look at her,
+though with the sense in so doing that he made her
+more than he intended take his silence for assent.
+Quite indeed as if she did so take it she quitted the
+table and came to the fire. "You may think it hideous
+that I should now, that I should <i>yet</i>"&mdash;she made a
+point of the word&mdash;"pretend to draw conclusions.
+But we've not failed."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" he only again murmured.
+</p><p>
+She was once more close to him, close as she had
+been the day she came to him in Venice, the quickly
+returning memory of which intensified and enriched
+the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions
+nothing that she said, and what she said was, with
+it, visibly, a fruit of that knowledge. "We've succeeded."
+She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
+"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made
+him wince, but she insisted. "And you won't have
+loved <i>me</i>."
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He was to remain for several days under the deep
+impression of this inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged
+from moment to moment, but interrupted at
+its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
+Maud, who found them standing together near the
+fire. The bearings of the colloquy, however, sharp
+as they were, were less sharp to his intelligence,
+strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs.
+Lowder alone for which she soon gave him&mdash;or for
+which perhaps rather Kate gave him&mdash;full occasion.
+What had happened on her at last joining them was
+to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring
+to have him to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the
+opening of the door, had fallen apart with a certain
+suddenness, so that she had turned her hard fine eyes
+from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself,
+to his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's
+rare alertness. She instantly spoke to her
+aunt of what had first been uppermost for herself,
+inviting her thereby intimately to join them, and doing
+it the more happily also, no doubt, because the
+fact she resentfully named gave her ample support.
+"Had you quite understood, my dear, that it's full
+three weeks&mdash;?" And she effaced herself as if to
+leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view
+with this extravagance. Densher of course straightway
+noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was
+to make, no less, all of it he could; and their tracks,
+as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time
+their hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission,
+the measure of his scant eagerness. Kate
+had moved away as if no great showing were needed
+for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She
+had been entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf&mdash;a
+visitor she had been at one time suspected
+of favouring too much and who had now come back
+to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It
+wasn't that the fate of the other person, her exquisite
+friend, didn't, in its tragic turn, also concern herself:
+it was only that her acceptance of Mr. Densher as a
+source of information could scarcely help having an
+awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under
+Densher's eyes, and he marvelled on his side at the
+instant creation. It served her as the fine cloud that
+hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man
+was but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of
+his visit she had, for consideration, melted into it and
+out of sight.
+</p><p>
+He was taken up promptly with another matter&mdash;the
+truth of the remarkable difference, neither
+more nor less, that the events of Venice had introduced
+into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these
+weeks of their separation had caused quite richly to
+ripen for him. She had not sat down to her tea-table
+before he felt himself on terms with her that were
+absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second
+cup without her seeming herself, and quite wittingly,
+so to define and establish them. She regretted, but
+she quite understood, that what was taking place had
+obliged him to hang off; they had&mdash;after hearing
+of him from poor Susan as gone&mdash;been hoping for
+an early sight of him; they would have been interested,
+naturally, in his arriving straight from the scene. Yet
+she needed no reminder that the scene precisely&mdash;by
+which she meant the tragedy that had so detained and
+absorbed him, the memory, the shadow, the sorrow
+of it&mdash;was what marked him for unsociability. She
+thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the guise
+in which she had now adopted him, and it was the
+element of truth in the character that he found himself,
+for his own part, adopting. She treated him as
+blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
+and for him to feel that this opened for him a new
+chapter of frankness with her he scarce had also to
+perceive how it smoothed his approaches to Kate. It
+made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to
+be; it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association
+positively hostile to any other legend. It was quickly
+vivid to him that, were he minded, he could "work"
+this association: he had but to use the house freely for
+his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be
+out of it. Stranger than anything moreover was to be
+the way that by the end of a week he stood convicted
+to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lowder's
+view. He had somehow met it at a point that had
+brought him on&mdash;brought him on a distance that he
+couldn't again retrace. He had private hours of
+wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
+others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use.
+His only want of candour was Aunt Maud's wealth
+of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the
+worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
+himself&mdash;everything was too real; but it was none
+the less not false that he <i>had</i> been through a mill.
+</p><p>
+It was in particular not false for instance that when
+she had said to him, on the Sunday, almost cosily,
+from her sofa behind the tea, "I want you not to
+doubt, you poor dear, that I'm <i>with</i> you to the end!"
+his meeting her halfway had been the only course
+open to him. She was with him to the end&mdash;or she
+might be&mdash;in a way Kate wasn't; and even if it literally
+made her society meanwhile more soothing he
+must just brush away the question of why it shouldn't.
+Was he professing to her in any degree the possession
+of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in the world
+<i>could</i> he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his
+greatest reality? Such only was at bottom what there
+was between them, and two or three times over it
+made the hour pass. These were occasions&mdash;two
+and a scrap&mdash;on which he had come and gone without
+mention of Kate. Now that almost as never yet
+he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn of their
+affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn
+that when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly
+nothing else seemed to come up. He called upon her
+almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
+queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should
+require it. He liked her better; he was really behaving,
+he had occasion to say to himself, as if he liked
+her best. The thing was absolutely that she met <i>him</i>
+halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her
+vision, than her loquacity, than her sympathy. It
+appeared to gratify, to satisfy her to see him as he
+was; that too had its effect. It was all of course the
+last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a
+change by which he was completely <i>free</i> with this
+lady; and it wouldn't indeed have come about if&mdash;for
+another monstrosity&mdash;he hadn't ceased to be
+free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in
+especial of being alone with her he found himself
+uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible
+of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder
+gave him in fact, on the ground of what he must keep
+from her, but one uneasy moment. That was when,
+on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed herself,
+she referred to her regret that he mightn't have
+stayed to the end. He found his reason difficult to
+give her, but she came after all to his help.
+</p><p>
+"You simply couldn't stand it?"
+</p><p>
+"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see&mdash;!"
+But he paused.
+</p><p>
+"Besides what?" He had been going to say more&mdash;then
+he saw dangers; luckily however she had again
+assisted him. "Besides&mdash;oh I know!&mdash;men haven't,
+in many relations, the courage of women."
+</p><p>
+"They haven't the courage of women."
+</p><p>
+"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared&mdash;"if
+we hadn't come away for the special reason that
+you so frankly appreciated."
+</p><p>
+Densher had said nothing about his appreciation:
+hadn't his behaviour since the hour itself sufficiently
+shown it? But he presently said&mdash;he couldn't help
+going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss
+Croy would have stayed." And he saw again into the
+bargain what a marvel was Susan Shepherd. She did
+nothing but protect him&mdash;she had done nothing but
+keep it up. In copious communication with the friend
+of her youth she had yet, it was plain, favoured this
+lady with nothing that compromised him. Milly's
+act of renouncement she had described but as a change
+for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent,
+as even without her it might be known, so that
+she mustn't appear to conceal it; but she had suppressed
+explanations and connexions, and indeed,
+for all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented
+commendable fictions. Thus it was absolutely that
+he was at his ease. Thus it was that, shaking for ever,
+in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
+leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such
+comfort as came. She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud,
+questions that Kate hadn't; but this was just the
+difference, that from her he positively liked them.
+He had taken with himself on leaving Venice the
+resolution to regard Milly as already dead to him&mdash;that
+being for his spirit the only thinkable way to
+pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it
+was what suited her, and it wasn't for him to go, as
+they said in America, behind this; which imposed on
+him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
+interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and
+he would have nothing to do with it; the last thing
+he wished was to be unconscious of her&mdash;what he
+wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
+for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to
+hang about in London while the pain went on&mdash;what
+would that do but make his days impossible?
+His scheme was accordingly to convince himself&mdash;and
+by some art about which he was vague&mdash;that the
+sense of waiting had passed. "What in fact," he
+restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
+it? Let me assume the thing actually over&mdash;as it
+at any moment may be&mdash;and I become good again
+for something at least to somebody. I'm good, as it is,
+for nothing to anybody, least of all to <i>her</i>." He consequently
+tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking
+grimly about was a trial; but his plan was carried
+out, it may well be guessed, neither with marked success
+nor with marked consistency. The days, whether
+lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression
+of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life
+itself was the taste of suspense. That he <i>was</i> waiting
+was in short at the bottom of everything; and it required
+no great sifting presently to feel that if he took
+so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this
+was just for that reason.
+</p><p>
+She helped him to hold out, all the while that she
+was subtle enough&mdash;and he could see her divine it
+as what he wanted&mdash;not to insist on the actuality of
+their tension. His nearest approach to success was
+thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in
+default of any one better; her company eased his
+nerves even while they pretended together that they
+had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying
+girl in the past tense; they said no worse of her than
+that she had <i>been</i> stupendous. On the other hand,
+however&mdash;and this was what wasn't for Densher
+pure peace&mdash;they insisted enough that stupendous
+was the word. It was the thing, this recognition, that
+kept him most quiet; he came to it with her repeatedly;
+talking about it against time and, in particular, we
+have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
+as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost
+as if she herself enjoyed the perfection of the pathos;
+she sat there before the scene, as he couldn't help
+giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
+might have sat, during a play that made people cry,
+in the pit or the family-circle. What most deeply
+stirred her was the way the poor girl must have wanted
+to live.
+</p><p>
+"Ah yes indeed&mdash;she did, she did: why in pity
+shouldn't she, with everything to fill her world? The
+mere <i>money</i> of her, the darling, if it isn't too disgusting
+at such a time to mention that&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud mentioned it&mdash;and Densher quite
+understood&mdash;but as fairly giving poetry to the life
+Milly clung to: a view of the "might have been"
+before which the good lady was hushed anew to
+tears. She had had her own vision of these possibilities,
+and her own social use for them, and since
+Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her
+about them, what was the cruelty of the event but a
+cruelty, of a sort, to herself? That came out when
+he named, as <i>the</i> horrible thing to know, the fact of
+their young friend's unapproachable terror of the
+end, keep it down though she would; coming out
+therefore often, since in so naming it he found the
+strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its vividness,
+as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
+shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream
+of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking
+indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might
+imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in
+the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door
+from some object clutched for resistance. Densher,
+in a cold moment, so pictured the case for Mrs. Lowder,
+but no moment cold enough had yet come to
+make him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front
+so presented that had been, in Milly, heroic; presented
+with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud by this
+time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her.
+He had let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory,
+how he had been received on that occasion: with
+a positive effect&mdash;since she was indeed so perfectly
+the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her&mdash;of
+princely state.
+</p><p>
+Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques
+and cherubs, all gaiety and gilt, and that was
+warm at that hour too with a wealth of autumn sun,
+the state in question had been maintained and the
+situation&mdash;well, Densher said for the convenience of
+exquisite London gossip, sublime. The gossip&mdash;for
+it came to as much at Lancaster Gate&mdash;wasn't the
+less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
+the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much
+drawn aside. He himself for that matter took in the
+scene again at moments as from the page of a book.
+He saw a young man far off and in a relation inconceivable,
+saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath,
+but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something
+immense and holding himself painfully together
+not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen
+was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
+and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher
+had known. He had known then at the same time
+what the young man had been conscious of, and he was
+to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
+lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew
+he had gathered all&mdash;that passed between them
+mutely as in the intervals of their associated gaze they
+exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far as
+association could go, but it was far enough when
+she knew the essence. The essence was that something
+had happened to him too beautiful and too
+sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
+sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't
+coherently express. It would have required an
+explanation&mdash;fatal to Mrs. Lowder's faith in him&mdash;of
+the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
+scene, they just stood at the door. They had
+the sense of the presence within&mdash;they felt the
+charged stillness; after which, their association deepened
+by it, they turned together away.
+</p><p>
+That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became
+by the end of a week the very principle of reaction:
+so that he woke up one morning with such a sense
+of having played a part as he needed self-respect
+to gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster
+Gate that, as a haunted man&mdash;a man haunted with
+a memory&mdash;he was harmless; but the degree to
+which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained
+his new aspect laid upon him practically the weight
+of a declaration. What he hadn't in the least stated
+her own manner was perpetually stating; it was as
+haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting
+him down. There offered itself however to his
+purpose such an element as plain honesty, and he had
+embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper corrective.
+They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas
+this year was, as in the London of so many other
+years, disconcertingly mild; the still air was soft, the
+thick light was grey, the great town looked empty,
+and in the Park, where the grass was green, where
+the sheep browsed, where the birds multitudinously
+twittered, the straight walks lent themselves to slowness
+and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it fast
+this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour,
+and then went with it to the nearest post-office
+and fixed it fast in a telegram; thinking of it moreover
+as a sacrifice only because he had, for reasons,
+felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
+to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than
+on the occasion of past appeals; which was precisely
+why he&mdash;perhaps innocently&mdash;made his telegram
+persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
+for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic;
+but there was a good deal of it in one way and another,
+representing as it did a rich impulse and costing
+him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
+later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he
+measured watchfully one of their old alleys, he might
+have been supposed by a cynical critic to be reckoning
+his chance of getting his money back. He was
+waiting&mdash;but he had waited of old; Lancaster Gate
+as a danger was practically at hand&mdash;but she had
+risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller now,
+with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which
+indeed he was graver as he lingered and looked out.
+</p><p>
+Kate came at last by the way he had thought least
+likely, came as if she had started from the Marble
+Arch; but her advent was response&mdash;that was the
+great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable
+to him, even after Aunt Maud's responses,
+as nothing had been since his return to London. She
+had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
+begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct
+of what he might be again intending to press upon
+her she had decided&mdash;though not with ease&mdash;to deprive
+him of his chance. He would have of course,
+she knew, other chances, but she perhaps saw the
+present as offering her special danger. This, in fact,
+Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he had
+so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he
+waited, in all that the conditions had to say to him
+of their simpler and better time. The shortest day
+of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
+place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much
+to their purpose as the days of sunny afternoons
+when they had taken their first trysts. This and
+that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare
+boughs over the couple of chairs in which they had
+sat of old and in which&mdash;for they really could sit
+down again&mdash;they might recover the clearness of
+their prime. It was to all intents however this very
+reference that showed itself in Kate's face as, with
+her swift motion, she came toward him. It helped
+him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
+nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only
+by showing him afresh how terribly well she looked.
+It had been all along, he certainly remembered, a
+phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her, at
+particular moments, handsomer than ever before;
+one of these for instance being still present to him
+as her entrance, under her aunt's eyes, at Lancaster
+Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
+from America; and another her aspect on the same
+spot two Sundays ago&mdash;the light in which she struck
+the eyes he had brought back from Venice. In the
+course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got
+it the other times, his apprehension of the special
+stamp of the fortune of the moment.
+</p><p>
+Whatever it had been determined by as the different
+hours recurred to him, it took on at present a
+prompt connexion with an effect produced for him in
+truth more than once during the past week, only now
+much intensified. This effect he had already noted
+and named: it was that of the attitude assumed by
+his friend in the presence of the degree of response
+on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she
+couldn't possibly have failed to notice. She <i>had</i>
+noticed it, and she had beautifully shown him so;
+wearing in its honour the finest shade of studied serenity,
+a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of
+time. Everything of course was relative, with the
+shadow they were living under; but her condonation
+of the way in which he now, for confidence, distinguished
+Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer.
+She had so by her own air consecrated the distinction,
+invidious in respect to herself though it might be; and
+nothing, really, more than this demonstration, could
+have given him had he still wanted it the measure of
+her superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this
+superiority alone that on the winter noon gave smooth
+decision to her step and charming courage to her
+eyes&mdash;a courage that deepened in them when he had
+presently got to what he did want. He had delayed
+after she had joined him not much more than long
+enough for him to say to her, drawing her hand into
+his arm and turning off where they had turned of old,
+that he wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments
+of not quite believing he should ever again be
+so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
+whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own
+belief was in high happiness for them if they would
+only have patience; though nothing at the same time
+could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was
+only make-believe of course, with what had taken
+place for them, that they couldn't meet at home; she
+spoke of their opportunities as suffering at no point.
+He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished
+the present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot,
+beneath a great wintry tree, he let his entreaty come
+sharp.
+</p><p>
+"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost.
+We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our feeling <i>for</i>
+ourselves and for each other, not to wait another day.
+Our marriage will&mdash;fundamentally, somehow, don't
+you see?&mdash;right everything that's wrong, and I
+can't express to you my impatience. We've only to
+announce it&mdash;and it takes off the weight."
+</p><p>
+"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if
+not understanding, though she had listened to him
+without confusion.
+</p><p>
+"To accomplish it then&mdash;to-morrow if you will;
+<i>do</i> it and announce it as done. That's the least part
+of it&mdash;after it nothing will matter. We shall be so
+right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
+wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness.
+It will seem a bad dream."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him without flinching&mdash;with the
+look she had brought at his call; but he felt now the
+strange chill of her brightness. "My dear man, what
+has happened to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, that I can bear it no longer. <i>That's</i> simply
+what has happened. Something has snapped, has
+broken in me, and here I am. It's <i>as</i> I am that you
+must have me."
+</p><p>
+He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it;
+but he saw her also not consider it. Yet he saw her,
+felt her, further&mdash;he heard her, with her clear voice&mdash;try
+to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see,
+you know, what has changed." She had a large
+strange smile. "We've been going on together so
+well, and you suddenly desert me?"
+</p><p>
+It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so
+'well'? You've touches, upon my soul&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"I call it perfect&mdash;from my original point of view.
+I'm just where I was; and you must give me some
+better reason than you do, my dear, for <i>your</i> not
+being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're
+only right as to what has been between us so long as
+we do wait. I don't think we wish to have behaved
+like fools." He took in while she talked her imperturbable
+consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
+to see her stand there and breathe into their mild
+remembering air. He had brought her there to be
+moved, and she was only immoveable&mdash;which was
+not moreover, either, because she didn't understand.
+She understood everything, and things he
+refused to; and she had reasons, deep down, the
+sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too
+again most of all her strange significant smile. "Of
+course if it's that you really <i>know</i> something&mdash;?" It
+was quite conceivable and possible to her, he could
+see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she
+meant, and he only looked at her in gloom. His
+gloom however didn't upset her. "You do, I believe,
+only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy
+to me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should
+have no delicacy in hearing it, so that if you can <i>tell</i>
+me you know&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended
+on it.
+</p><p>
+"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't,
+I grant you, in that case wait; and I can see what you
+mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I don't even
+ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content
+with your moral certainty."
+</p><p>
+By this time it had come over him&mdash;it had the
+force of a rush. The point she made was clear, as
+clear as that the blood, while he recognised it,
+mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
+</p><p>
+"You've not an idea?"
+</p><p>
+"I've not an idea."
+</p><p>
+"I'd consent," she said&mdash;"I'd announce it to-morrow,
+to-day, I'd go home this moment and announce
+it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an idea
+straight <i>from</i> you, I mean as your own, given me in
+good faith. There, my dear!"&mdash;and she smiled
+again. "I call that really meeting you."
+</p><p>
+If it <i>was</i> then what she called it, it disposed of his
+appeal, and he could but stand there with his wasted
+passion&mdash;for it was in high passion that he had from
+the morning acted&mdash;in his face. She made it all out,
+bent upon her&mdash;the idea he didn't have, and the
+idea he had, and his failure of insistence when it
+brought up <i>that</i> challenge, and his sense of her personal
+presence, and his horror, almost, of her lucidity.
+They made in him a mixture that might have
+been rage, but that was turning quickly to mere cold
+thought, thought which led to something else and
+was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
+she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had
+before this, between them, saved their position. When
+she had come nearer to him, when, putting her hand
+upon him, she made him sink with her, as she leaned
+to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
+irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion.
+She had an advantage with his passion now.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+He had said to her in the Park when challenged on
+it that nothing had "happened" to him as a cause
+for the demand he there made of her&mdash;happened he
+meant since the account he had given, after his return,
+of his recent experience. But in the course of a few
+days&mdash;they had brought him to Christmas morning&mdash;he
+was conscious enough, in preparing again to
+seek her out, of a difference on that score. Something
+had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking
+the night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not
+absolutely first, involved was his immediately again
+putting himself in relation with her. The fact itself
+had met him there&mdash;in his own small quarters&mdash;on
+Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once
+affected him as implying that consequence. So far
+as he on the spot and for the next hours took its
+measure&mdash;a process that made his night mercilessly
+wakeful&mdash;the consequences possibly implied were
+numerous to distraction. His spirit dealt with them,
+in the darkness, as the slow hours passed; his intelligence
+and his imagination, his soul and his sense,
+had never on the whole been so intensely engaged.
+It was his difficulty for the moment that he was
+face to face with alternatives, and that it was
+scarce even a question of turning from one to the
+other. They were not in a perspective in which they
+might be compared and considered; they were, by
+a strange effect, as close as a pair of monsters of
+whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot
+breath and the huge eyes. He saw them at once and
+but by looking straight before him; he wouldn't
+for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
+his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation
+was still&mdash;was not, for the slow hours a matter
+of restless motion. He lay long, after the event, on
+the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white
+light of convenience that he hated, he had thrown
+himself without undressing. He stared at the buried
+day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
+Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself
+somehow determined. The common wisdom had
+had its say to him&mdash;that safety in doubt was <i>not</i> action;
+and perhaps what most helped him was this
+very commonness. In his case there was nothing of
+<i>that</i>&mdash;in no case in his life had there ever been less:
+which association, from one thing to another, now
+worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath
+and his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element
+of the rare which he felt to be the sign of his crisis.
+And that is why, dressed with more state than usual
+and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
+Christmas day.
+</p><p>
+Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared,
+carried with it a certain complexity. We should have
+known, walking by his side, that his final prime decision
+hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
+Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was
+none the less urgent. His prime decision was for another
+matter, to which impatience, once he was on
+the way, had now added itself; but he remained sufficiently
+aware that he must compromise with the perhaps
+excessive earliness. This, and the ferment set up
+within him, were together a reason for not driving; to
+say nothing of the absence of cabs in the dusky festal
+desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
+walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had
+his interval thus to turn over his view&mdash;the view to
+which what had happened the night before had not
+sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just mentioned
+was to be offered within the next few minutes
+another item to assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house,
+when he reached it, a brougham was drawn up&mdash;at
+the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought
+him for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't
+long, but it was long enough to flash upon him a revelation
+in the light of which he caught his breath. The
+carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a
+day Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the
+great doctor was back. This would prove something
+else, in turn, still more intensely, and it was in the act
+of the double apprehension that Densher felt himself
+turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a
+projectile that has suddenly been met by another: he
+stared at the strange truth that what he wanted <i>more</i>
+than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness who had
+just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be
+in his presence and to hear his voice&mdash;which was the
+spasm of his consciousness that produced the flash.
+Fortunately for him, on the spot, there supervened
+something in which the flash went out. He became
+aware within this minute that the coachman on the
+box of the brougham had a face known to him,
+whereas he had never seen before, to his knowledge,
+the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
+nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box
+was just the face that, in coming and going at Lancaster
+Gate, he would vaguely have noticed, outside, in
+attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
+Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote
+from his own, presented herself for news; and
+news, in the house, she was clearly getting, since her
+brougham had stayed. Sir Luke <i>was</i> then back&mdash;only
+Mrs. Lowder was with him.
+</p><p>
+It was under the influence of this last reflexion
+that Densher again delayed; and it was while he
+delayed that something else occurred to him. It was
+all round, visibly&mdash;given his own new contribution&mdash;a
+case of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate,
+for quicker knowledge, might have come out with her
+aunt. The possibility that in this event she might be
+sitting in the carriage&mdash;the thing most likely&mdash;had
+had the effect, before he could check it, of bringing
+him within range of the window. It wasn't there he
+had wished to see her; yet if she <i>was</i> there he couldn't
+pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
+made out was that if some one was there it
+wasn't Kate Croy. It was, with a sensible shock
+for him, the person who had last offered him a conscious
+face from behind the clear plate of a café in
+Venice. The great glass at Florian's was a medium less
+obscure, even with the window down, than the air of
+the London Christmas; yet at present also, none the
+less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions
+could occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest&mdash;which,
+he disgustedly remembered, his back as
+quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as his special
+privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and
+touched the bell with a keen consciousness of being
+habitually looked at by Kate's friend from positions
+of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for the time
+the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
+young man had in a manner assisted at the
+departure of the disconcerted, since Lord Mark was
+not looking disconcerted now any more than he had
+looked from his bench at his café. Densher was
+thinking that <i>he</i> seemed to show as vagrant while
+another was ensconced. He was thinking of the
+other as&mdash;in spite of the difference of situation&mdash;more
+ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him
+above all as the friend of the person with whom his
+recognition had, the minute previous, associated
+him. The man was seated in the very place in which,
+beside Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate,
+and that was a sufficient identity. Meanwhile at any
+rate the door of the house had opened and Mrs.
+Lowder stood before him. It was something at least
+that <i>she</i> wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in
+all her affluence; with presence of mind both to decide
+at once that Lord Mark, in the brougham, didn't
+matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
+word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there
+to listen to her passage with the gentleman who had
+rung. "<i>I'll</i> tell Mr. Densher; you needn't wait!"
+And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on
+the steps.
+</p><p>
+"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early.
+I couldn't not come to learn."
+</p><p>
+"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On
+my way," he added, "to Lancaster Gate."
+</p><p>
+"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and
+he saw her face was attuned. It made him, with what
+she had just before said, know all, and he took the
+thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
+functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her
+medium with him and that yet had now a fresh glow.
+"So you <i>have</i> had your message?"
+</p><p>
+He knew so well what she meant, and so equally
+with it what he "<i>had</i> had" no less than what he
+hadn't, that, with but the smallest hesitation, he
+strained the point. "Yes&mdash;my message."
+</p><p>
+"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded
+her wonderful wings."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;folded them."
+</p><p>
+It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as
+she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent
+for self-control. "Unless it's more true," she
+accordingly added, "that she has spread them the
+wider."
+</p><p>
+He again but formally assented, though, strangely
+enough, the words fitted a figure deep in his own
+imagination. "Rather, yes&mdash;spread them the
+wider."
+</p><p>
+"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now
+with a look, he feared, that did a little warn her off.
+</p><p>
+"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve,
+"entitled to direct news. Ours came late last
+night: I'm not sure otherwise I shouldn't have gone
+to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to <i>me?</i>"
+</p><p>
+He had had a minute by this time to think further,
+and the window of the brougham was still within
+range. Her rich "me," reaching him moreover
+through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on
+his chest. "Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed
+squared, and the extent of it just now perversely
+enough took away his breath. His look from where
+they stood embraced the aperture at which the person
+sitting in the carriage might have shown, and he saw
+his interlocutress, on her side, understand the question
+in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
+you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive
+parley with the image of his condition that now flourished
+in her, almost hypocritical. It sounded as if
+he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
+exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had
+suddenly&mdash;since the night before&mdash;dried up in him,
+and he had never been aware of a deeper reserve.
+</p><p>
+But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely
+alone. I should otherwise never have dreamed;
+feeling, dear friend, but too much!" Failing on her
+lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
+with which she had the next moment condolingly
+pressed his own. "Dear friend, dear friend!"&mdash;she
+was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be still
+more so: which was what made her immediately continue.
+"Or wouldn't you this evening, for the sad
+Christmas it makes us, dine with me <i>tête-à-tête?</i>"
+</p><p>
+It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her&mdash;making
+the difference, to his relief, of several
+hours; but it also rather mystified him. This however
+didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall you
+mind if I don't tell you at once?"
+</p><p>
+"Not in the least&mdash;leave it open: it shall be as
+you may feel, and you needn't even send me word.
+I only <i>will</i> mention that to-day, of all days, I shall
+otherwise sit there alone."
+</p><p>
+Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
+</p><p>
+"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs.
+Lowder, "is spending her Christmas in the bosom of
+her more immediate family."
+</p><p>
+He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his
+face might show. "You mean she has left you?"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the
+enquiry with a consciousness in which he saw a reflexion
+of events. He was made sure by it, even at
+the moment and as he had never been before, that
+since he had known these two women no confessed
+nor commented tension, no crisis of the cruder sort
+would really have taken form between them: which
+was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered
+her boat. The situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's
+present expression lighted up by contrast that superficial
+smoothness; which afterwards, with his time to
+think of it, was to put before him again the art, the
+particular gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed,
+so intimately familiar for him, as her talent for life.
+The peace, within a day or two&mdash;since his seeing
+her last&mdash;had clearly been broken; differences, deep
+down, kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as
+deep, had been shaken to the surface by some exceptional
+jar; with which, in addition, he felt Lord
+Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season
+vaguely associated. The talent for life indeed, it at
+the same time struck him, would probably have
+shown equally in the breach, or whatever had occurred;
+Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a
+strain rather than a stroke. Of these quick thoughts,
+at all events, that lady was already abreast. "She
+went yesterday morning&mdash;and not with my approval,
+I don't mind telling you&mdash;to her sister:
+Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean, who lives
+somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs&mdash;that
+I should have to say such things to-day!&mdash;are
+a constant worry; so that Kate, in consequence&mdash;well,
+of events!&mdash;has simply been called in. My
+own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with <i>such</i> events
+she need have, in her situation, next to nothing to
+do."
+</p><p>
+"But she differed with you?"
+</p><p>
+"She differed with me. And when Kate differs
+with you&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point
+in the scale of hypocrisy at which he could ask himself
+why a little more or less should signify. Besides,
+with the intention he had had he <i>must</i> know. Kate's
+move, if he didn't know, might simply disconcert
+him; and of being disconcerted his horror was by
+this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
+allude to events at all calamitous."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;only horrid and vulgar."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure,
+had discovered in free speech to him a momentary
+balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I suppose
+you know, a dreadful horrible father."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Densher again.
+</p><p>
+"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come
+upon Marian, and Marian has shrieked for help."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his
+curiosity compromised for an instant with his discretion.
+"Come upon her&mdash;for money?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh for that of course always. But, at <i>this</i> blessed
+season, for refuge, for safety: for God knows what.
+He's <i>there</i>, the brute. And Kate's with them. And
+that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the steps,
+"is her Christmas."
+</p><p>
+She had stopped again at the bottom while he
+thought of an answer. "Yours then is after all rather
+better."
+</p><p>
+"It's at least more decent." And her hand once
+more came out. "But why do I talk of <i>our</i> troubles?
+Come if you can."
+</p><p>
+He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
+</p><p>
+"And now&mdash;I dare say&mdash;you'll go to church?"
+</p><p>
+She had asked it, with her good intention, rather
+in the air and by way of sketching for him, in the line
+of support, something a little more to the purpose
+than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
+finishing off their intensities of expression that he
+found himself to all appearance receiving her hint as
+happy. "Why yes&mdash;I think I will": after which,
+as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had
+opened from within, he was free to turn his back. He
+heard the door, behind him, sharply close again and
+the vehicle move off in another direction than his own.
+</p><p>
+He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite
+of which indeed he was at the end of ten minutes
+aware of having walked straight to the south. That,
+he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
+there had formed itself in his mind, even while
+Aunt Maud finally talked, an instant recognition of
+his necessary course. Nothing was open to him but
+to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than
+the influence of the step she had taken on the emotion
+itself that possessed him. Her complications,
+which had fairly, with everything else, an awful
+sound&mdash;what were they, a thousand times over, but
+his own? His present business was to see that they
+didn't escape an hour longer taking their proper
+place in his life. He accordingly would have held
+his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he
+had just lied to Mrs. Lowder&mdash;a term it perversely
+eased him to keep using&mdash;even more than was necessary.
+To what church was he going, to what church,
+in such a state of his nerves, <i>could</i> he go?&mdash;he pulled
+up short again, as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs.
+Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And yet the desire
+queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word.
+He was just then however by a happy chance in the
+Brompton Road, and he bethought himself with a
+sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He had
+but to turn the other way and he should find himself
+soon before it. At the door then, in a few minutes,
+his idea was really&mdash;as it struck him&mdash;consecrated:
+he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid service&mdash;the
+flocking crowd told of it&mdash;which glittered and
+resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights
+and the swell of organ and choir. It didn't
+match his own day, but it was much less of a discord
+than some other things actual and possible. The
+Oratory in short, to make him right, would do.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon&mdash;dusk
+thick from an early hour&mdash;had gathered
+when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
+gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present
+himself in Chelsea at luncheon-time and also
+remembering that he must attempt independently to
+make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
+achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim
+void of the club library, with nobody, up or down, to
+be seen, and there after a while, closing his eyes,
+recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during
+the night. Before doing this indeed he had written&mdash;it
+was the first thing he did&mdash;a short note, which,
+in the Christmas desolation of the place, he had managed
+only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a
+messenger. He wished it carried by hand, and he was
+obliged, rather blindly, to trust the hand, as the messenger,
+for some reason, was unable to return with a
+gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to
+face with Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room
+he found to his relief that his notification had reached
+her. She was expectant and to that extent prepared;
+which simplified a little&mdash;if a little, at the present
+pass, counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to
+him from the moment of his coming in, and vivid
+partly by their difference, a difference sharp and suggestive,
+from those in which he had hitherto constantly
+seen her. He had seen her but in places comparatively
+great; in her aunt's pompous house, under
+the high trees of Kensington and the storied ceilings
+of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great
+occasion, as the centre itself of the splendid Piazza:
+he had seen her there, on a still greater one, in his
+own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with her,
+having state and ancientry even in their poorness;
+but Mrs. Condrip's interior, even by this best view of
+it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as
+a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and
+charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
+stranger&mdash;a stranger to the little Chelsea street&mdash;who
+was making the best of a queer episode and a
+place of exile. The extraordinary thing was that at
+the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly
+a stranger in it than she.
+</p><p>
+A part of the queerness&mdash;this was to come to him
+in glimpses&mdash;sprang from the air as of a general
+large misfit imposed on the narrow room by the scale
+and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments
+were, for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals
+of what would, in the case of Mrs. Condrip at
+least, have been called better days. The curtains that
+overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables
+that stayed circulation, the chimney-ornaments that
+reached to the ceiling and the florid chandelier that almost
+dropped to the floor, were so many mementoes
+of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy
+mother. Whatever might have been in itself
+the quality of these elements Densher could feel the
+effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
+blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly
+almost to the point of the sinister. They failed to
+accommodate or to compromise; they asserted their
+differences without tact and without taste. It was
+truly having a sense of Kate's own quality thus
+promptly to see them in reference to it. But that
+Densher had this sense was no new thing to him, nor
+did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded
+of it. He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination
+so constantly played him, that he was, so far as
+her present tension went, very specially sorry for her&mdash;which
+was not the view that had determined his
+start in the morning; yet also that he himself would
+have taken it all, as he might say, less hard. <i>He</i>
+could have lived in such a place; but it wasn't given
+to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
+anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness
+that they could somehow make shift. His natural,
+his inevitable, his ultimate home&mdash;left, that is,
+to itself&mdash;wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and
+impossible as what was just round them, though
+doubtless in less ample masses. As he took in moreover
+how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the
+creature she was if what was just round them hadn't
+mismatched her, hadn't made for her a medium involving
+compunction in the spectator, so, by the
+same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation
+with her companions there, such a fact as filled him
+at once, oddly, both with assurance and with suspense.
+If he himself, on this brief vision, felt her as
+alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they
+not feel her and how above all must she not feel them?
+</p><p>
+Densher could ask himself that even after she had
+presently lighted the tall candles on the mantel-shelf.
+This was all their illumination but the fire, and she
+had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet left
+play, visibly, to her implication between them, in
+their trouble and failing anything better, of the presumably
+genial Christmas hearth. So far as the genial
+went this had in strictness, given their conditions, to
+be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
+nothing but that he must promptly see her and that
+he hoped she might be able to make it possible; but
+he understood from the first look at her that his
+promptitude was already having for her its principal
+reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few
+minutes," he explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she
+had let you know, though I rather gathered she had;
+and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
+It was because I was so struck at the moment with
+your having, as she did tell me, so suddenly come
+here."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine
+in the contracted firelight, with her hands in her
+lap, Kate considered what he had said. He had
+spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir
+Luke Strett's door. "She has let me know nothing.
+But that doesn't matter&mdash;if it's what <i>you</i> mean."
+</p><p>
+"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but
+what he went on with, after a pause during which she
+waited, was apparently not the rest of that. "She
+had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late
+last night. But to me the poor lady hasn't wired.
+The event," he added, "will have taken place yesterday,
+and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
+and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow
+morning. So that Mrs. Stringham, I judge, is left
+to face in some solitude the situation bequeathed to
+her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke
+couldn't stay."
+</p><p>
+Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal
+of the sense that he was gaining time. "Was
+your telegram from Sir Luke?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I've had no telegram."
+</p><p>
+She wondered. "But not a letter&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Not from Mrs. Stringham&mdash;no." He failed
+again however to develop this&mdash;for which her forbearance
+from another question gave him occasion.
+From whom then had he heard? He might at last,
+confronted with her, really have been gaining time;
+and as if to show that she respected this impulse she
+made her enquiry different. "Should you like to
+go out to her&mdash;to Mrs. Stringham?"
+</p><p>
+About that at least he was clear. "Not at all.
+She's alone, but she's very capable and very courageous.
+Besides&mdash;!" He had been going on, but he
+dropped.
+</p><p>
+"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of
+course one remembers Eugenio."
+</p><p>
+She had uttered the words as definitely to show
+them for not untender; and he showed equally every
+reason to assent. "One remembers him indeed, and
+with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value
+to her&mdash;he's capable of anything. What I was going
+to say," he went on, "is that some of their people
+from America must quickly arrive."
+</p><p>
+On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to
+satisfy him. "Mr. Someone-or-other, the person
+principally in charge of Milly's affairs&mdash;her first
+trustee, I suppose&mdash;had just got there at Mrs. Stringham's
+last writing."
+</p><p>
+"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to
+me&mdash;I mean the last time before this morning.
+I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said, "they'll do."
+</p><p>
+"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as
+if it wasn't what each was most thinking of. Kate
+presently got however a step nearer to that. "But if
+you had been wired to by nobody what then this
+morning had taken you to Sir Luke?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh something else&mdash;which I'll presently tell
+you. It's what made me instantly need to see you;
+it's what I've come to speak to you of. But in a
+minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at
+seeing you in this place." He got up as he spoke;
+she herself remained perfectly still. His movement
+had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with his
+back to it, to look down on her from where he stood,
+he confined himself to his point. "Is it anything very
+bad that has brought you?"
+</p><p>
+He had now in any case said enough to justify her
+wish for more; so that, passing this matter by, she
+pressed her own challenge. "Do you mean, if I
+may ask, that <i>she</i>, dying&mdash;?" Her face, wondering,
+pressed it more than her words.
+</p><p>
+"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said.
+"What has come to me is what, as I say, I came expressly
+to tell you. I don't mind letting you know,"
+he went on, "that my decision to do this took for
+me last night and this morning a great deal of thinking
+of. But here I am." And he indulged in a smile
+that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her as
+mechanical.
+</p><p>
+She went straighter with him, she seemed to
+show, than he really went with her. "You didn't
+want to come?"
+</p><p>
+"It would have been simple, my dear"&mdash;and he
+continued to smile&mdash;"if it had been, one way or the
+other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took, I admit
+it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of
+difficult and portentous forms. It came up for me
+really&mdash;well, not at all for my happiness."
+</p><p>
+This word apparently puzzled her&mdash;she studied
+him in the light of it. "You look upset&mdash;you've
+certainly been tormented. You're not well."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;well enough!"
+</p><p>
+But she continued without heeding. "You hate
+what you're doing."
+</p><p>
+"My dear girl, you simplify"&mdash;and he was now
+serious enough. "It isn't so simple even as that."
+</p><p>
+She had the air of thinking what it then might be.
+"I of course can't, with no clue, know what it is."
+She remained none the less patient and still. "If
+at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably
+quite at sea. One doesn't, with the best will
+in the world, understand." And then as Densher
+had a pause which might have stood for all the
+involved explanation that, to his discouragement,
+loomed before him: "You <i>haven't</i> decided what to
+do."
+</p><p>
+She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he
+didn't instantly say otherwise. But he said so after
+a look at her. "Oh yes&mdash;I have. Only with this sight
+of you here and what I seem to see in it for you&mdash;!"
+And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned
+from one part of the room to another.
+</p><p>
+"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
+</p><p>
+It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is
+it for anything awful you've had to come?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything
+<i>you</i> may have. Don't mind," she continued, "the
+'sight of me here,' nor whatever&mdash;which is more
+than I yet know myself&mdash;may be 'in it' for me.
+And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in
+trouble I can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can
+absolutely even do it."
+</p><p>
+"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of
+your wish&mdash;! I suppose I'm in trouble&mdash;I suppose
+that's it." He said this with so odd a suddenness
+of simplicity that she could only stare for it&mdash;which
+he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could
+his vagueness. "And yet I oughtn't to be." Which
+sounded indeed vaguer still.
+</p><p>
+She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my
+own business, anything very awful?"
+</p><p>
+"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you
+find it so. I mean if you find my idea&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?"
+A sound of impatience&mdash;the form of a laugh&mdash;at
+last escaped her. "I can't find it anything at all till
+I know what you're talking about."
+</p><p>
+It brought him then more to the point, though it
+did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug
+before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile
+to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement
+a recall of another time&mdash;the hour in Venice,
+the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd
+had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was
+sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as
+now, what he might say and mightn't. Yet the present
+occasion after all was somehow the easier. He
+tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while
+he stopped before his companion. "The communication
+I speak of can't possibly belong&mdash;so far as its
+date is concerned&mdash;to these last days. The postmark,
+which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable,
+for anything else, that she wrote&mdash;!" He dropped,
+looking at her as if she'd understand.
+</p><p>
+It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?"
+But Kate took an instant's thought. "Aren't we
+agreed that there was never any one in the world like
+her?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly
+enough. "There was never any one in the world like
+her."
+</p><p>
+Kate, from her chair, always without a movement,
+raised her eyes to the unconscious reach of his own.
+Then when the latter again dropped to her she added
+a question. "And won't it further depend a little on
+what the communication is?"
+</p><p>
+"A little perhaps&mdash;but not much. It's a communication,"
+said Densher.
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean a letter?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand&mdash;in
+hers unmistakeably."
+</p><p>
+Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh perfectly."
+</p><p>
+It was as if his tone for this prompted&mdash;with a
+slight strangeness&mdash;her next demand. "Have you
+had many letters from her?"
+</p><p>
+"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight
+at her. "And very, very short ones."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter.
+Three lines would be enough if you're sure you remember."
+</p><p>
+"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued,
+"I've seen her hand in other ways. I seem
+to recall how you once, before she went to Venice,
+showed me one of her notes precisely <i>for</i> that. And
+then she once copied me something."
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask
+you for the detail of your reasons. One good one's
+enough." To which however she added as if precisely
+not to speak with impatience or with anything like
+irony: "And the writing has its usual look?"
+</p><p>
+Densher answered as if even to better that description
+of it. "It's beautiful."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;it <i>was</i> beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer
+to him still, further remarked, "it's not news to
+us now that she was stupendous. Anything's possible."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, anything's possible"&mdash;he appeared oddly
+to catch at it. "That's what I say to myself. It's
+what I've been believing you," he a trifle vaguely
+explained, "still more certain to feel."
+</p><p>
+She waited for him to say more, but he only, with
+his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this
+time to the single window of the room, where in the
+absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn.
+He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the
+small sordid London street&mdash;for sordid, with his
+other association, he felt it&mdash;as he had lost himself,
+with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of the
+Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording
+consciousness that when he had last been driven to
+such an attitude the very depth of his resistance to the
+opportunity to give Kate away was what had so driven
+him. His waiting companion had on that occasion
+waited for him to say he <i>would</i>; and what he had
+meantime glowered forth at was the inanity of such
+a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
+minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus
+familiarly presented&mdash;rested as with a view of their
+expression, a reference to things unimparted, links
+still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make
+them out as she would. The result of her tension was
+that she again took him up. "You received&mdash;what
+you spoke of&mdash;last night?"
+</p><p>
+It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet
+Street&mdash;earlier by an hour than usual&mdash;I found it
+with some other letters on my table. But my eyes
+went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the
+door. I recognised it, knew what it was, without
+touching it."
+</p><p>
+"One can understand." She listened with respect.
+His tone however was so singular that she presently
+added: "You speak as if all this while you <i>hadn't</i>
+touched it."
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since,
+I'd been touching nothing else. I quite firmly," he
+pursued as if to be plainer, "took hold of it."
+</p><p>
+"Then where is it?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh I have it here."
+</p><p>
+"And you've brought it to show me?"
+</p><p>
+"I've brought it to show you."
+</p><p>
+So he said with a distinctness that had, among his
+other oddities, almost a sound of cheer, yet making
+no movement that matched his words. She could
+accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while
+his own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill
+with another thought. "But now that you've done
+so you feel you don't want to."
+</p><p>
+"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell
+me nothing."
+</p><p>
+She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were
+an unreasonable child. "It seems to me I tell you
+quite as much as you tell me. You haven't yet even
+told me how it is that such explanations as you require
+don't come from your document itself." Then
+as he answered nothing she had a flash. "You mean
+you haven't read it?"
+</p><p>
+"I haven't read it."
+</p><p>
+She stared. "Then how am I to help you with
+it?"
+</p><p>
+Again leaving her while she never budged he paced
+five strides, and again he was before her. "By telling
+me <i>this</i>. It's something, you know, that you wouldn't
+tell me the other day."
+</p><p>
+She was vague. "The other day?"
+</p><p>
+"The first time after my return&mdash;the Sunday I
+came to you. What's he doing," Densher went on,
+"at that hour of the morning with her? What does
+his having been with her there mean?"
+</p><p>
+"Of whom are you talking?"
+</p><p>
+"Of that man&mdash;Lord Mark of course. What does
+it represent?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, my dear&mdash;and with you. It comes more or
+less to the same thing; and it's what you didn't tell
+me the other day when I put you the question."
+</p><p>
+Kate tried to remember the other day. "You
+asked me nothing about any hour."
+</p><p>
+"I asked you when it was you last saw him&mdash;previous,
+I mean, to his second descent at Venice. You
+wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a matter
+comparatively more important I let it pass. But the
+fact remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't
+told me."
+</p><p>
+Two things in this speech appeared to have reached
+Kate more distinctly than the others. "I 'wouldn't
+say'?&mdash;and you 'let it pass'?" She looked just
+coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping
+something back."
+</p><p>
+"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not
+even telling me now. All I want to know," he nevertheless
+explained, "is whether there was a connexion
+between that proceeding on his part, which was practically&mdash;oh
+beyond all doubt!&mdash;the shock precipitating
+for her what has now happened, and anything
+that had occurred with him previously for yourself.
+How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">V</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the
+candles and sat down, the first movement she had
+made. "Are you trying to fix it on me that I must
+have told him?"
+</p><p>
+She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay&mdash;which
+he showed he immediately took in.
+"My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix' anything; but
+I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
+What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
+</p><p>
+"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
+</p><p>
+She shook her head as if in recovery, within the
+minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason.
+There was in it&mdash;and for his reason really&mdash;one of
+those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
+often before made, over some point of difference, her
+own terms with him. Practically she was making
+them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably,
+all the same, he was accepting it. She stood
+there close to him, with something in her patience
+that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke
+more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He
+hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal
+was none the less the quieter. "What's he doing,
+from ten o'clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs.
+Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's
+staying there?"
+</p><p>
+"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it.
+"'Staying'?&mdash;since when?"
+</p><p>
+"Since day before yesterday. He was there before
+I came away." And then she explained&mdash;confessing
+it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident&mdash;like Aunt
+Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas,
+but it isn't after all so monstrous. <i>We</i> stayed&mdash;and,
+with my having come here, she's sorry now&mdash;because
+we neither of us, waiting from day to day
+for the news you brought, seemed to want to be with
+a lot of people."
+</p><p>
+"You stayed for thinking of&mdash;Venice?"
+</p><p>
+"Of course we did. For what else? And even a
+little," Kate wonderfully added&mdash;"it's true at least
+of Aunt Maud&mdash;for thinking of you."
+</p><p>
+He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way.
+But whom," he enquired, "has Lord Mark stayed for
+thinking of?"
+</p><p>
+"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace
+matter. He has some rooms which he has
+had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
+let&mdash;such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed
+want of money, he hasn't had it in him, in
+spite of everything, not to jump at."
+</p><p>
+Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything?
+In spite of what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being
+scarcely supposed to do that sort of thing."
+</p><p>
+"To try to get money?"
+</p><p>
+"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently
+however he has had for some reason to do what
+he can. He turned at a couple of days' notice out of
+his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt
+Maud, who's deeply in his confidence about all such
+matters, said: 'Come then to Lancaster Gate&mdash;to
+sleep at least&mdash;till, like all the world, you go to the
+country.' He was to have gone to the country&mdash;I
+think to Matcham&mdash;yesterday afternoon: Aunt
+Maud, that is, told me he was."
+</p><p>
+Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through
+this statement, beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive.
+"Told you, you mean, so that you needn't leave
+the house?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;so far as she had taken it into her head
+that his being there was part of my reason."
+</p><p>
+"And <i>was</i> it part of your reason?"
+</p><p>
+"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here&mdash;as
+I knew there would be&mdash;without it. So that," she
+said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad I am here:
+even if for all the good I do&mdash;!" She implied however
+that that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as
+you tell me, get off then to Matcham; though he may
+possibly, if it is possible, be going this afternoon. But
+what strikes me as most probable&mdash;and it's really,
+I'm bound to say, quite amiable of him&mdash;is that he
+has declined to leave Aunt Maud, as I've been so
+ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone. If moreover
+he has given up Matcham for her it's a <i>procédé</i>
+that won't please her less. It's small wonder therefore
+that she insists, on a dull day, in driving him
+about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
+"what may happen between them; but that's all I see
+in it."
+</p><p>
+"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher
+returned, "something that, while I'm with you
+at least, I always take from you as the truth itself."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully
+extracting the sting of his reservation; then she
+spoke with a quiet gravity that seemed to show how fine
+she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
+everything else, its effect. They were still closely face
+to face, and, yielding to the impulse to which he
+hadn't yielded just before, he laid his hands on her
+shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
+little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more
+mingled things, all difficult, than he could speak.
+Then bending his head he applied his lips to her
+cheek. He fell, after this, away for an instant, resuming
+his unrest, while she kept the position in which,
+all passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration.
+It didn't prevent her, however, from offering
+him, as if what she had had was enough for
+the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet
+lucid connexion and as she made it sat down again.
+"I've been trying to place exactly, as to its date,
+something that did happen to me while you were in
+Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me&mdash;spoke
+out."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled
+round.
+</p><p>
+"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it,
+by having refused to meet him as he wanted&mdash;as he
+pressed&mdash;I plead guilty to being so. Would you have
+liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
+would have kept him from going?"
+</p><p>
+It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you
+know he was going?"
+</p><p>
+"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that&mdash;even
+if it doesn't fit your strange suppositions&mdash;I should
+have given him just the same answer if I had known.
+If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust
+upon you, that's simply because it's not a matter in
+the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope
+that if I've satisfied you about it," she continued,
+"it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
+</p><p>
+"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest."
+But the next moment he pursued: "He saw something.
+He guessed."
+</p><p>
+"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he
+was unfortunately the one person we hadn't deceived,
+I can't contradict you."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;of course not. But <i>why</i>," Densher still
+risked, "was he unfortunately the one person&mdash;?
+He's not really a bit intelligent."
+</p><p>
+"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a
+mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as&mdash;all
+things considered and when it came to the point&mdash;my
+attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and
+on his conviction he acted."
+</p><p>
+Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's
+conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature.
+"Do you mean because you had appeared to him to
+have encouraged him?"
+</p><p>
+"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise
+where <i>were</i> we?"
+</p><p>
+"'Where'&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"You and I. What I appeared to him, however,
+hadn't mattered. What mattered was how I appeared
+to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
+that he has had all along his impression of <i>you</i>. You
+can't help it," she said, "but you're after all&mdash;well,
+yourself."
+</p><p>
+"As much myself as you please. But when I took
+myself to Venice and kept myself there&mdash;what,"
+Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
+</p><p>
+"Your being in Venice and liking to be&mdash;which is
+never on any one's part a monstrosity&mdash;was explicable
+for him in other ways. He was quite capable
+moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
+</p><p>
+"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
+</p><p>
+"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder
+now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second
+descent, hadn't convinced him&mdash;all the more that
+my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back
+convinced." And then as her companion still showed
+a face at a loss: "I mean after he had seen Milly,
+spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
+</p><p>
+"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
+</p><p>
+"That you were sincere. That it was <i>her</i> you
+loved." It came to him from her in such a way that
+he instantly, once more, turned, found himself yet
+again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return
+here," she meanwhile continued, "had it from him.
+And that's why you're now so well with Aunt Maud."
+</p><p>
+He only for a minute looked out in silence&mdash;after
+which he came away. "And why <i>you</i> are." It was
+almost, in its extremely affirmative effect between
+them, the note of recrimination; or it would have
+been perhaps rather if it hadn't been so much more
+the note of truth. It was sharp because it was true,
+but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
+so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel.
+That made, while they faced each other over it without
+speech, the gravity of everything. It was as if
+there were almost danger, which the wrong word
+might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better
+purpose: he drew, standing there before her, a
+pocket-book from the breast of his waistcoat and he
+drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which
+her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the
+receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the
+less odd for being visibly instinctive and unconscious,
+carried the hand containing his letter behind him.
+What he thus finally spoke of was a different matter.
+"Did I understand from Mrs. Lowder that your father's
+in the house?"
+</p><p>
+If it never had taken her long in such excursions
+to meet him it was not to take her so now. "In the
+house, yes. But we needn't fear his interruption"&mdash;she
+spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in
+bed."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean with illness?"
+</p><p>
+She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill.
+He's a marvel. He's only&mdash;endless."
+</p><p>
+Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you
+with him?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely,
+had it all. "By our making your visit as little of an
+affair as possible for him&mdash;and for Marian too."
+</p><p>
+"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't&mdash;could
+I?&mdash;not have come."
+</p><p>
+"No, you couldn't not have come."
+</p><p>
+"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as
+possible?"
+</p><p>
+Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day,
+put ugly words into my mouth. I've enough of my
+trouble without it."
+</p><p>
+"I know&mdash;I know!" He spoke in instant pleading.
+"It's all only that I'm as troubled <i>for</i> you. When
+did he come?"
+</p><p>
+"Three days ago&mdash;after he hadn't been near her
+for more than a year, after he had apparently, and
+not regrettably, ceased to remember her existence;
+and in a state which made it impossible not to take
+him in."
+</p><p>
+Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such
+want&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"No, not of food, of necessary things&mdash;not even,
+so far as his appearance went, of money. He looked
+as wonderful as ever. But he was&mdash;well, in terror."
+</p><p>
+"In terror of what?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know. Of somebody&mdash;of something.
+He wants, he says, to be quiet. But his quietness is
+awful."
+</p><p>
+She suffered, but he couldn't not question.
+"What does he do?"
+</p><p>
+It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
+</p><p>
+Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it.
+"What <i>has</i> he done?"
+</p><p>
+It made her slowly rise, and they were once more
+fully face to face. Her eyes held his own and she was
+paler than she had been. "If you love me&mdash;now&mdash;don't
+ask me about father."
+</p><p>
+He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because
+I love you that I'm here. It's because I love
+you that I've brought you this." And he drew from
+behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
+</p><p>
+But her eyes only&mdash;though he held it out&mdash;met
+the offer. "Why you've not broken the seal!"
+</p><p>
+"If I had broken the seal&mdash;exactly&mdash;I should
+know what's within. It's for <i>you</i> to break the seal
+that I bring it."
+</p><p>
+She looked&mdash;still not touching the thing&mdash;inordinately
+grave. "To break the seal of something to
+you from <i>her?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by
+whatever you think of it."
+</p><p>
+"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you
+yourself think?" And then as he didn't answer:
+"It seems to me <i>I</i> think you know. You have your
+instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
+</p><p>
+Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation,
+an accusation for which he was prepared
+and which there was but one way to face. "I have
+indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried
+it out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the
+hour." He held up his letter and seemed now to insist
+more than to confess. "This thing had been
+timed."
+</p><p>
+"For Christmas Eve?"
+</p><p>
+"For Christmas Eve."
+</p><p>
+Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season
+of gifts!" After which, as he said nothing, she went
+on: "And had been written, you mean, while she
+could write, and kept to <i>be</i> so timed?"
+</p><p>
+Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again
+didn't reply. "What do <i>you</i> mean by the proof?"
+</p><p>
+"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved.
+But I won't," she said, "break your seal."
+</p><p>
+"You positively decline?"
+</p><p>
+"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly:
+"I know without."
+</p><p>
+He had another pause. "And what is it you
+know?"
+</p><p>
+"That she announces to you she has made you
+rich."
+</p><p>
+His pause this time was longer. "Left me her
+fortune?"
+</p><p>
+"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But
+money to a large amount. I don't care," Kate went
+on, "to know how much." And her strange smile
+recurred. "I trust her."
+</p><p>
+"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
+</p><p>
+"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought.
+"That wouldn't, on my part, have been playing fair
+with her. And I did," she added, "play fair."
+</p><p>
+Densher, who had believed her&mdash;he couldn't help
+it&mdash;continued, holding his letter, to face her. He
+was much quieter now, as if his torment had somehow
+passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and
+that's why&mdash;since we talk of proofs&mdash;I want to give
+<i>you</i> one. I've wanted to let you see&mdash;and in preference
+even to myself&mdash;something I feel as sacred."
+</p><p>
+She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
+</p><p>
+"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by
+which I can peculiarly recognise&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he
+dropped.
+</p><p>
+"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice.
+You were capable in Venice of an act of splendid
+generosity."
+</p><p>
+"And the privilege you offer me with that document
+is my reward?"
+</p><p>
+He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol
+of my attitude."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear,
+is that you're afraid of yourself. You've had to
+take yourself in hand. You've had to do yourself
+violence."
+</p><p>
+"So it is then you meet me?"
+</p><p>
+She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from
+which her hand still stayed itself. "You absolutely
+<i>desire</i> me to take it?"
+</p><p>
+"I absolutely desire you to take it."
+</p><p>
+"To do what I like with it?"
+</p><p>
+"Short of course of making known its terms. It
+must remain&mdash;pardon my making the point&mdash;between
+you and me."
+</p><p>
+She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke
+it. "Trust me." Taking from him the sacred script
+she held it a little while her eyes again rested on
+those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
+before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is
+to know."
+</p><p>
+"Oh I <i>know!</i>" said Merton Densher.
+</p><p>
+"Well then if we both do&mdash;!" She had already
+turned to the fire, nearer to which she had moved,
+and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing into the
+flame. He started&mdash;but only half&mdash;as to undo her
+action: his arrest was as prompt as the latter had been
+decisive. He only watched, with her, the paper burn;
+after which their eyes again met. "You'll have it all,"
+Kate said, "from New York."
+</p><p>
+It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard
+from New York that she paid him a visit one morning
+at his own quarters&mdash;coming not as she had
+come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but
+as a need recognised in the first instance by herself,
+even though also as the prompt result of a missive
+delivered to her. This had consisted of a note from
+Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed
+him by an eminent American legal firm, a
+firm of whose high character he had become conscious
+while in New York as of a thing in the air
+itself, and whose head and front, the principal executor
+of Milly Theale's copious will, had been duly
+identified at Lancaster Gate as the gentleman hurrying
+out, by the straight southern course, before the
+girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's
+act on receipt of the document in question&mdash;an act
+as to which and to the bearings of which his
+resolve had had time to mature&mdash;constituted in strictness,
+singularly enough, the first reference to Milly,
+or to what Milly might or might not have done, that
+had passed between our pair since they had stood
+together watching the destruction, in the little vulgar
+grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand.
+They had at the time, and in due deference now, on
+his part, to Kate's mention of her responsibility for
+his call, immediately separated, and when they met
+again the subject was made present to them&mdash;at all
+events till some flare of new light&mdash;only by the intensity
+with which it mutely expressed its absence.
+They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
+often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January
+and a part of February, actually become for
+them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's stay at
+Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances
+from her aunt which would have been a mystery to
+Densher had he not been admitted, at Lancaster
+Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view
+of them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there
+said to him as if she really despised ideas&mdash;which she
+didn't; "and I've taken up with my own, which is to
+give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
+<i>has</i> had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but
+as she's as proud as the deuce she'll come back when
+she has found some reason&mdash;having nothing in common
+with her disgust&mdash;of which she can make a
+show. She calls it her holiday, which she's spending
+in her own way&mdash;the holiday to which, once a year or
+so, as she says, the very maids in the scullery have a
+right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
+not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides,
+she's quite decent; she comes often&mdash;whenever
+I make her a sign; and she has been good, on
+the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself,
+I don't complain. She has really been, poor
+dear, very much what one hoped; though I needn't,
+you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell <i>you</i>, after
+all, you clever creature, what that was."
+</p><p>
+It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity
+for this that Densher's appearances under
+the good lady's roof markedly, after Christmas, interspaced
+themselves. The phase of his situation
+that on his return from Venice had made them for
+a short time almost frequent was at present quite obscured,
+and with it the impulse that had then acted.
+Another phase had taken its place, which he would
+have been painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise
+set on its feet, but of which the steadily rising
+tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite high and
+dry. There had been a moment when it seemed
+possible that Mrs. Stringham, returning to America
+under convoy, would pause in London on her way
+and be housed with her old friend; in which case he
+was prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance.
+But this danger passed&mdash;he had felt it a danger, and
+the person in the world whom he would just now
+have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed
+away westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote
+to her, having broken, in this respect, after Milly's
+death, the silence as to the sense of which, before that
+event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
+answered him from Venice twice, and had had time
+to answer him twice again from New York. The last
+letter of her four had come by the same post as the
+document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into
+the question of also enclosing that. His correspondence
+with Milly's companion was somehow already
+presenting itself to him as a feature&mdash;as a factor,
+he would have said in his newspaper&mdash;of the time
+whatever it might be, long or short, in store for him;
+but one of his acutest current thoughts was apt to be
+devoted to his not having yet mentioned it to Kate.
+She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever
+hear?"&mdash;so that he hadn't been brought to the
+point. This he described to himself as a mercy, for
+he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the same
+personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce,
+scarce even wincing while he recognised it as
+the one connexion in which he wasn't straight. He
+had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental image&mdash;he
+saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of
+waters, the bottomless grey expanse of straightness.
+The fact that he had on several recent occasions taken
+with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that was each time
+to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
+say than for what they did&mdash;this fact failed somehow
+to mitigate for him a strange consciousness of exposure.
+There was something deep within him that he
+had absolutely shown to no one&mdash;to the companion
+of these walks in particular not a bit more than he
+could help; but he was none the less haunted, under
+its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It
+was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
+good faith; and it was queer enough that on his
+emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd,
+he should figure himself as hidden from view. That
+represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
+delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all
+events knew&mdash;what Kate did know, and she was
+also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of
+which it was as if his <i>act</i>, so deeply associated with
+her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad
+on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed
+it with Kate, was the very element of that menace:
+to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their
+final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury
+in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge
+of each other that they couldn't undo.
+</p><p>
+Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these
+days a question of arms was limited, this might have
+been the intimate expedient to which they were actually
+resorting. It had its value, in conditions that
+made everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea
+Park&mdash;where Mrs. Lowder now never drove&mdash;he
+had adopted the usual means, in sequestered alleys,
+of holding her close to his side. She could make
+absences, on her present footing, without having
+too inordinately to account for them at home&mdash;which
+was exactly what gave them for the first time
+an appreciable margin. He supposed she could always
+say in Chelsea&mdash;though he didn't press it&mdash;that
+she had been across the town, in decency, for a look
+at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons
+at Lancaster Gate for her not being able to plead
+the look at her other relatives. It was therefore between
+them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
+which for that matter also they made in various ways
+no little show of cherishing as such. They made the
+show indeed in every way but the way of a large use&mdash;an
+inconsequence that they almost equally gave time
+to helping each other to regard as natural. He put
+it to his companion that the kind of favour he now
+enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful warmth
+of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground
+from under their feet. He was too horribly trusted&mdash;they
+had succeeded too well. He couldn't in short
+make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
+Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that
+lady without tying his hands. Kate saw what he
+meant just as he saw what she did when she admitted
+that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing,
+in the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence.
+It was special at present&mdash;she was handsomely used;
+she confessed accordingly to a scruple about misapplying
+her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found&mdash;and
+all unconsciously now&mdash;the way to baffle them.
+It wasn't however that they didn't meet a little,
+none the less, in the southern quarter, to point for
+their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They
+crossed the river; they wandered in neighbourhoods
+sordid and safe; the winter was mild, so that, mounting
+to the top of trams, they could rumble together
+to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time
+their minutes had never been so counted it struck Densher
+that by a singular law their tone&mdash;he scarce
+knew what to call it&mdash;had never been so bland. Not
+to talk of what they <i>might</i> have talked of drove them
+to other ground; it was as if they used a perverse
+insistence to make up what they ignored. They concealed
+their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm
+of their manner; they took precautions for the courtesy
+they had formerly left to come of itself; often,
+when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
+off, with the aftersense of their change. He would
+have described their change&mdash;had he so far faced it
+as to describe it&mdash;by their being so damned civil.
+That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
+point to which they had brought them, a touch almost
+of the droll. What danger had there ever been of
+their becoming rude&mdash;after each had long since made
+the other so tremendously tender? Such were the
+things he asked himself when he wondered what in
+particular he most feared.
+</p><p>
+Yet all the while too the tension had its charm&mdash;such
+being the interest of a creature who could bring
+one back to her by such different roads. It was her
+talent for life again; which found in her a difference
+for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition
+up; she but made of it something new. Frankly
+moreover she had never been more agreeable nor in
+a way&mdash;to put it prosaically&mdash;better company:
+he felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined
+basis&mdash;which he even hesitated whether to
+measure as reduced or as extended; as if at all events
+he were admiring her as she was probably admired
+by people she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned
+that she would still have something fresh for him;
+yet this was what she had&mdash;that on the top of a tram
+in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner.
+What a person she would be if they <i>had</i> been rich&mdash;with
+what a genius for the so-called great life, what
+a presence for the so-called great house, what a grace
+for the so-called great positions! He might regret
+at once, while he was about it, that they weren't
+princes or billionaires. She had treated him on their
+Christmas to a softness that had struck him at the
+time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold
+thick, but stretched a little thin; at present, however,
+she gave him the impression of a contact multitudinous
+as only the superficial can be. She had throughout
+never a word for what went on at home. She came
+out of that and she returned to it, but her nearest
+reference was the look with which, each time, she
+bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated prohibition:
+"It's what I <i>have</i> to see and to know&mdash;so
+don't touch it. That but wakes up the old evil, which
+I keep still, in my way, by sitting by it. I go now&mdash;leave
+me alone!&mdash;to sit by it again. The way to pity
+me&mdash;if that's what you want&mdash;is to believe in me.
+If we could really <i>do</i> anything it would be another
+matter."
+</p><p>
+He watched her, when she went her way, with the
+vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried. It was
+confused and obscure, but how, with her head high,
+it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
+might at these moments have been swaying a little
+aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket. It
+was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as
+this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day
+of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly
+rapid. They contained for him the contradiction that,
+whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general
+to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that
+made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
+to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while
+the days melted, something rare went with them.
+This something was only a thought, but a thought
+precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made
+the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the
+hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his
+intimate companion was the last person he might have
+shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
+left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but
+came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding
+it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner
+and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
+handling them, handling <i>it</i>, as a father, baffled and
+tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was
+before him&mdash;in his dread of who else might see it.
+Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words,
+that he should never, never know what had been in
+Milly's letter. The intention announced in it he should
+but too probably know; only that would have been,
+but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it.
+The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would
+have given her act. This turn had possibilities that,
+somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination
+had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It
+had made of them a revelation the loss of which was
+like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes&mdash;his
+pledge given not to save it&mdash;into the fathomless
+sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of
+something sentient and throbbing, something that,
+for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a
+faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished
+when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought
+and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there
+till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively
+coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden
+it&mdash;doubtless by the same process with which they
+would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was
+somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the
+sacred hush that he couldn't complain. He had given
+poor Kate her freedom.
+</p><p>
+The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood
+there on the occasion we have already named, was
+that she was now in high possession of it. This
+would have marked immediately the difference&mdash;had
+there been nothing else to do it&mdash;between their
+actual terms and their other terms, the character of
+their last encounter in Venice. That had been <i>his</i>
+idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few
+marks they had in common were, from the first moment,
+to his conscious vision, almost pathetically
+plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
+around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as
+before, in an air in which her words at the moment
+itself fell flat, to an interest in the place and a curiosity
+about his "things"; there was a recall in the way
+in which, after she had failed a little to push up her
+veil symmetrically and he had said she had better
+take it off altogether, she had acceded to his suggestion
+before the glass. It was just these things that
+were vain; and what was real was that his fancy
+figured her after the first few minutes as literally
+now providing the element of reassurance which had
+previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
+who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for
+that matter very prompt use of it. "You see I've not
+hesitated this time to break your seal."
+</p><p>
+She had laid on the table from the moment of her
+coming in the long envelope, substantially filled,
+which he had sent her enclosed in another of still
+ampler make. He had however not looked at it&mdash;his
+belief being that he wished never again to do
+so; besides which it had happened to rest with its
+addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and it was
+only into her eyes that her remark made him look,
+declining any approach to the object indicated. "It's
+not 'my' seal, my dear; and my intention&mdash;which
+my note tried to express&mdash;was all to treat it to you
+as not mine."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine
+then?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs&mdash;that of the
+good people in New York, the authors of our communication.
+If the seal is broken well and good;
+but we <i>might</i>, you know," he presently added, "have
+sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied,"
+he smiled with his heart in his mouth,
+"by an absolutely kind letter."
+</p><p>
+Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which
+a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical
+hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on
+the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
+sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a
+flicker of possibilities. She was&mdash;merely to put it at
+that&mdash;intelligent enough for anything. "Is it what
+you're proposing we <i>should</i> do?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah it's too late to do it&mdash;well, ideally. Now,
+with that sign that we <i>know</i>&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"But you don't know," she said very gently.
+</p><p>
+"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to
+what would have been the handsome way. Its being
+dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one's
+assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof
+of this in the state of the envelope&mdash;<i>that</i> would have
+been really satisfying."
+</p><p>
+She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope
+proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on
+the insufficiency of the sum?"
+</p><p>
+Densher smiled again as for the play, however
+whimsical, of her humour. "Well yes&mdash;something
+of that sort."
+</p><p>
+"So that if cognisance <i>has</i> been taken&mdash;so far as
+I'm concerned&mdash;it spoils the beauty?"
+</p><p>
+"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed
+in the hope&mdash;which I confess I entertained&mdash;that
+you'd bring the thing back to me as you had received
+it."
+</p><p>
+"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
+</p><p>
+"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself.
+I wanted&mdash;oh yes, if that's what you wish to
+ask me&mdash;to see what you'd do."
+</p><p>
+"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my
+departure from delicacy?"
+</p><p>
+He continued steady now; a kind of ease&mdash;from
+the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn't
+yet have named&mdash;had come to him. "Well, I wanted&mdash;in
+so good a case&mdash;to test you."
+</p><p>
+She was struck&mdash;it showed in her face&mdash;by his
+expression. "It <i>is</i> a good case. I doubt whether a
+better," she said with her eyes on him, "has ever been
+known."
+</p><p>
+"The better the case then the better the test!"
+</p><p>
+"How do you know," she asked in reply to this,
+"what I'm capable of?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken
+I should have known sooner."
+</p><p>
+"I see"&mdash;she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't
+have known at all. And you wouldn't have known,
+either, what I do know."
+</p><p>
+"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if
+you've been moved to correct my ignorance I very
+particularly request you not to."
+</p><p>
+She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect
+of the corrections? Can you only do it by doing it
+blindly?"
+</p><p>
+He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak
+of my doing?"
+</p><p>
+"Why the only thing in the world that I take you
+as thinking of. Not accepting&mdash;what she has done.
+Isn't there some regular name in such cases? Not
+taking up the bequest."
+</p><p>
+"There's something you forget in it," he said after
+a moment. "My asking you to join with me in doing
+so."
+</p><p>
+Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same
+time didn't make her less firm. "How can I 'join'
+in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
+</p><p>
+"How? By a single word."
+</p><p>
+"And what word?"
+</p><p>
+"Your consent to my giving up."
+</p><p>
+"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent
+you."
+</p><p>
+"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that
+well," he said.
+</p><p>
+She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you
+won't give up if I <i>don't</i> consent?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes. I do nothing."
+</p><p>
+"That, as I understand, is accepting."
+</p><p>
+Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
+</p><p>
+"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the
+money."
+</p><p>
+"I won't touch the money."
+</p><p>
+It had a sound&mdash;though he had been coming to it&mdash;that
+made for gravity. "Who then in such an
+event <i>will?</i>"
+</p><p>
+"Any one who wants or who can."
+</p><p>
+Again a little she said nothing: she might say too
+much. But by the time she spoke he had covered
+ground. "How can I touch it but <i>through</i> you?"
+</p><p>
+"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can
+renounce it except through you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she
+explained, "in my power."
+</p><p>
+"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"In what way?"
+</p><p>
+"In the way I show&mdash;and the way I've always
+shown. When have I shown," he asked as with a
+sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
+must feel&mdash;so that you needn't wish to appear to
+spare me in it&mdash;how you 'have' me."
+</p><p>
+"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously
+laughed, "to put me so thoroughly up to it!"
+</p><p>
+"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you
+up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago,
+I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty
+is therefore in every way complete."
+</p><p>
+It had come to the point really that they showed
+each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between
+them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror
+of their further conflict. Something even rose between
+them in one of their short silences&mdash;something
+that was like an appeal from each to the other
+not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
+before them, but which of them must meet it first?
+"Thank you!" Kate said for his word about her
+freedom, but taking for the minute no further action
+on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them,
+and during another slow moment their very sense
+of it cleared the air.
+</p><p>
+There was an effect of this in the way he soon
+went on. "You must intensely feel that it's the
+thing for which we worked together."
+</p><p>
+She took up the remark, however, no more than if
+it were commonplace; she was already again occupied
+with a point of her own. "Is it absolutely true&mdash;for
+if it is, you know, it's tremendously interesting&mdash;that
+you haven't so much as a curiosity about
+what she has done for you?"
+</p><p>
+"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath
+on it?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;but I don't understand. It seems to me
+in your place&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do
+you know of my place? Pardon me," he at once
+added; "my preference is the one I express."
+</p><p>
+She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought.
+"But won't the facts be published?"
+</p><p>
+"'Published'?"&mdash;he winced.
+</p><p>
+"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
+</p><p>
+It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next
+minute another insistence. "Your desire is to escape
+everything?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+"And do you need no more definite sense of what
+it is you ask me to help you to renounce?"
+</p><p>
+"My sense is sufficient without being definite.
+I'm willing to believe that the amount of money's
+not small."
+</p><p>
+"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
+</p><p>
+"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly
+pursued, "it would inevitably not be meagre."
+</p><p>
+Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy
+of her. It's what she was herself&mdash;if you remember
+what we once said <i>that</i> was."
+</p><p>
+He hesitated&mdash;as if there had been many things.
+But he remembered one of them. "Stupendous?"
+</p><p>
+"Stupendous." A faint smile for it&mdash;ever so
+small&mdash;had flickered in her face, but had vanished
+before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had
+shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled&mdash;but
+that made her continue. She continued gently. "I
+think that what it really is must be that you're afraid.
+I mean," she explained, "that you're afraid of <i>all</i> the
+truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
+indeed can you be more? And you're afraid&mdash;it's
+wonderful!&mdash;to be in love with her."
+</p><p>
+"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe
+that now&mdash;for the time she lived. I believe it
+at least for the time you were there. But your change
+came&mdash;as it might well&mdash;the day you last saw her;
+she died for you then that you might understand her.
+From that hour you <i>did</i>." With which Kate slowly
+rose. "And I do now. She did it <i>for</i> us." Densher
+rose to face her, and she went on with her thought.
+"I used to call her, in my stupidity&mdash;for want of
+anything better&mdash;a dove. Well she stretched out her
+wings, and it was to <i>that</i> they reached. They cover us."
+</p><p>
+"They cover us," Densher said.
+</p><p>
+"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound
+up. "That's what I've done for you."
+</p><p>
+His look at her had a slow strangeness that had
+dried, on the moment, his tears. "Do I understand
+then&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her
+head. "No&mdash;for I see. You'll marry me without
+the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
+consent <i>you</i> don't."
+</p><p>
+"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it
+frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. "Well, you
+lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny."
+</p><p>
+Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no
+smile this time to spare. "Precisely&mdash;so that I must
+choose."
+</p><p>
+"You must choose."
+</p><p>
+Strange it was for him then that she stood in his
+own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond
+any that had ever made his breath come slow,
+he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that
+can save you from my choice."
+</p><p>
+"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes"&mdash;and she gave a nod at the long envelope
+on the table&mdash;"your surrender of that."
+</p><p>
+"What is it then?"
+</p><p>
+"Your word of honour that you're not in love
+with her memory."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;her memory!"
+</p><p>
+"Ah"&mdash;she made a high gesture&mdash;"don't speak
+of it as if you couldn't be. I could in your place;
+and you're one for whom it will do. Her memory's
+your love. You <i>want</i> no other."
+</p><p>
+He heard her out in stillness, watching her face
+but not moving. Then he only said: "I'll marry you,
+mind you, in an hour."
+</p><p>
+"As we were?"
+</p><p>
+"As we were."
+</p><p>
+But she turned to the door, and her headshake was
+now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"
+</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4 align="center">THE END</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4 align="center">The Riverside Press</h4>
+<h4 align="center">CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS</h4>
+<h4 align="center">U . S . A</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
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+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume II
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2009 [EBook #30059]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOLUME II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Adcock. Special thanks to The Internet
+Archive: American Libraries, and Project Gutenberg Australia
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+BY HENRY JAMES
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+1909
+
+
+Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SIXTH
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+"I say, you know, Kate--you _did_ stay!" had been Merton Densher's
+punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
+of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
+see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
+recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
+helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
+flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
+street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
+corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
+to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
+But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquent
+at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck
+him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his
+absence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved them
+to face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.
+That it would require some handling, that they should still have to
+deal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the
+great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
+consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had
+twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and
+the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He
+had arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the
+moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the
+station, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had
+praised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered frankly
+enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care
+to-day who saw her, and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow,
+inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
+would become a baser creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It
+was none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed
+their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
+obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,
+with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise
+to Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and had
+suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea
+that had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but
+nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in the
+refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the
+notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "have
+something" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
+come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
+
+He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
+hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
+to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
+there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
+rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
+nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
+Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
+and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
+they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
+did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
+which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit,
+the truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that
+once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop
+there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't
+be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
+deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,
+respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further
+fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
+single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
+the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
+garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
+seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
+coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
+love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
+happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
+how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
+Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
+would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
+one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
+red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
+She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
+coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
+yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
+such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
+of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
+that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
+did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
+well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
+him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
+and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.
+
+She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
+convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
+that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
+he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
+effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
+night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
+the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
+He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
+to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
+believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
+Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
+made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
+court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from
+such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
+suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
+subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
+names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
+love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
+have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
+course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
+whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
+he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
+money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
+the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
+bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
+produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
+change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
+without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
+lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
+might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
+something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
+tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
+personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
+almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
+Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
+waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
+had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
+all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
+master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
+final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
+the impossible.
+
+She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
+had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
+their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
+for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
+unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
+interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
+They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
+with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
+again, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and
+tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
+frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
+halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
+an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
+for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
+might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
+touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
+as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
+pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
+service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
+it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
+brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
+the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
+thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
+that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
+still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
+interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
+about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
+her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
+which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
+more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
+blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
+better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
+superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
+exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
+appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
+look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
+remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
+the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
+the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
+inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
+he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
+it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
+picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
+independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadful
+closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
+breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
+into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
+together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
+probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
+reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
+thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
+Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
+mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.
+
+What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
+by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
+greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
+new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
+there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
+answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
+however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
+things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
+individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
+moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
+went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
+phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
+group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
+persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
+to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
+pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
+him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
+that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
+yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
+fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
+some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
+separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
+aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
+later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
+pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
+put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
+part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and
+looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
+for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
+first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
+full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
+sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
+street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
+managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
+or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
+there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
+but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
+sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.
+
+He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
+direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
+a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
+though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
+from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
+added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
+troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
+really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
+of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
+what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
+first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
+at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
+than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
+part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
+meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
+weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
+the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
+Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
+stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
+this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
+for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
+with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
+he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
+when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
+sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than
+as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under
+providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
+concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,
+even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
+question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her
+appeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He
+recalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,
+funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
+itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt
+himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of
+her very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
+solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that
+time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--a
+surprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. It
+meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least
+out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made
+him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.
+
+"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And
+she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
+quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
+surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'll
+leave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of
+betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite
+the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it
+will be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask
+to-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my
+cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."
+
+He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
+now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
+that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
+This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
+questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
+about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
+Milly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
+popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
+felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
+advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
+had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
+know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
+foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
+scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
+the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
+not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
+weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
+after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
+meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
+that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
+might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
+them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
+hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
+their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
+this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
+preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
+at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.
+
+
+II
+
+It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
+when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
+the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of
+a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
+appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
+parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
+and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
+fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with
+the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
+American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,
+they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One
+couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,
+please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to
+help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak
+to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:
+Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate
+embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
+perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece
+than as receiving it in a steady light. He had always felt, however,
+that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he
+imaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even before
+his absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when
+we're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
+that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and
+the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to
+prevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a
+truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his
+immediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted
+questions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her
+patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for
+instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do
+nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
+possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms
+of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some
+occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me
+these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so
+accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And
+it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He
+was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you
+see we can't work it anyhow."
+
+If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was
+because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown
+himself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you
+hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully
+good-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You're
+quite right--so long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
+lucidly, that the dear things couldn't _help_, simply as charming
+friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but they
+won't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend
+always helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by this
+time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she
+particularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,
+make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
+made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, they
+could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of
+the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the
+first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of
+them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in
+truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,
+on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just
+what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"
+
+It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
+come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at
+her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
+back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he
+knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
+Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one
+of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but
+visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of
+blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and
+Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,
+that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular
+time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.
+But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him
+now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They
+_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and
+the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They
+connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in
+him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it
+amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he
+could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her
+inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine
+as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where
+their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse
+independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will
+you take me just as I am?"
+
+She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified
+to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he
+found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant
+into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with
+him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't
+spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only
+believe in me, and it will be beautiful."
+
+He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
+didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
+with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
+as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to
+say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she
+closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she
+could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response
+her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited
+by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
+appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
+they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
+certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger
+than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was
+that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity
+making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
+and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to
+swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact
+only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up
+more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,
+and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted
+was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow
+suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more
+consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
+certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of
+indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."
+
+"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"
+
+He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the
+first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after
+all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
+at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most
+people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,
+without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no
+more money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or than
+he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would
+be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some
+months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how
+their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity
+than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand
+he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her
+indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was
+would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that
+she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other
+terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sevres, of complicated
+brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact
+by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed
+her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he
+would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any
+_definite_ sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
+"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after
+all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
+there is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as we
+play with her."
+
+"She doesn't want to play with _me_, my dear," Kate lucidly replied;
+"she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares
+for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value.
+_This_ has a value--her being as she has been about us to-day. I
+believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself
+while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'--not a bit."
+
+"What is it then," the young man returned--"from the moment it isn't
+her blessing and a cheque?"
+
+Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is
+something in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn't
+propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a
+thing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really
+but one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about
+us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in
+detail we fight her."
+
+"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this,
+"that it's in detail we deceive her"--a speech that, as soon as he had
+uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
+to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
+
+Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,
+whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to
+make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she
+explained, "meet here."
+
+Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If
+Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come
+back at all?"
+
+"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's
+in love with you."
+
+But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make
+out, you know, that every one's in love with me."
+
+She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
+
+"You said just now Miss Theale."
+
+"I said she liked you--yes."
+
+"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued:
+"Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for
+_this_--as from myself."
+
+"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the
+implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general
+prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"
+
+Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well
+tell her all."
+
+It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a
+manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her
+anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;
+make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see that
+you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."
+
+But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I
+see, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged if
+I do! It _is_," he said with feeling, "a game."
+
+"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up--or I
+give _you_--if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."
+
+"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked,
+"what good does it do?"
+
+Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what--?"
+
+"Does my pleasing her--does anything. I _can't_," he impatiently
+declared, "please her."
+
+Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency;
+but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere
+complaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him
+under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and
+took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her
+form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met
+it, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified _all_ things so to
+possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these
+terms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
+everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments to
+one of her previous--and as positively seemed--her most precious ideas.
+"You accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love with you. Well,
+if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That's the good
+she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you--so that she'll help
+us to go on."
+
+Densher stared--she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basis
+does it make for my seeing _her?_"
+
+"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
+
+"Don't mind my leading her on?"
+
+She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading _you_."
+
+"Well, she won't--so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that
+'help,'" he pursued, "with what she knows?"
+
+"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
+
+He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
+
+"Prevent her helping you. She's _like_ that," Kate Croy explained.
+
+It took indeed some understanding. "Making nothing of the fact that I
+love another?"
+
+"Making everything," said Kate. "To console you."
+
+"But for what?"
+
+"For not getting your other."
+
+He continued to stare. "But how does she know--?"
+
+"That you _won't_ get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she
+doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of
+Aunt Maud's stand. _That_"--Kate was lucid--"gives her the chance to be
+nice to you."
+
+"And what does it give _me_," the young man none the less rationally
+asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"
+
+Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his
+violence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there
+are reasons. I mean others."
+
+"What others?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you," the girl added,
+"are enough to go on with."
+
+"To go on to what?"
+
+"Why, to seeing her again--say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on
+all grounds, is no more than decent of you."
+
+He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had
+passed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but it
+had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in
+the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindling
+consequence. "Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes," said
+Densher, "her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
+independently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received."
+
+It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you see. I shall meet you
+there."
+
+"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why she should wish to
+receive you for it."
+
+"She receives me for myself--that is for _her_ self. She thinks no end
+of me. That I should have to drum it into you!"
+
+Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's beyond me."
+
+Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She regards me as
+already--in these few weeks--her dearest friend. It's quite separate.
+We're in, she and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that, as
+if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out
+at last her own real light. "She doesn't of course know I care for
+_you_. She thinks I care so little that it's not worth speaking of."
+That he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made quickly clear, and
+Kate hailed the effect with surprise. "Have you been supposing that she
+does know--?"
+
+"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you show
+me--and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her." She uttered at
+this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. "You
+_have_ denied it to her?"
+
+She threw up her arms at his being so backward. "'Denied it'? My dear
+man, we've never spoken of you."
+
+"Never, never?"
+
+"Strange as it may appear to your glory--never."
+
+He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs. Lowder have spoken?"
+
+"Very probably. But of _you_. Not of me."
+
+This struck him as obscure. "How does she know me but as part and
+parcel of you?"
+
+"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, to
+have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it.
+Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation--that is
+out of my being in danger from you--by not having so much as suspected
+or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it
+and sinking it--if she only does so hard enough. Therefore _she_, in
+her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise
+than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed
+either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say,
+distinguished you."
+
+"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that they must have made it out
+for themselves?"
+
+"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's so
+funnily bumping against us on Tuesday."
+
+"She doesn't see from _that_--?"
+
+"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that
+you regard me with a complacent eye--for you show it, I think, always
+too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too
+much; I don't perhaps--to please you completely where others are
+concerned--show it enough."
+
+"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher demanded.
+
+It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. "Not where
+_you_ are concerned. Beyond seeing that you're rather gone," she went
+on, "Milly only sees that I'm decently good to you."
+
+"Very good indeed she must think it!"
+
+"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate smiled, "as very good
+indeed."
+
+The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining."
+
+"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essential
+plea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she
+added, "I _will_ explain."
+
+"And what will I do?"
+
+"Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here in
+truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment,
+took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had
+returned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that,
+Aunt Maud's liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn't
+spoil their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they should
+probably find it would help them. But she came back to Milly too. "Mind
+you go to see her."
+
+Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. "Then I may come
+again?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud--as much as you like. But we can't again," said Kate,
+"play her _this trick_. I can't see you here alone."
+
+"Then where?"
+
+"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
+
+"And what good will that do me?"
+
+"Try it and you'll see."
+
+"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher asked. "Say you are, how
+will that give us privacy?"
+
+"Try it--you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage as
+we can."
+
+"That's precisely what _I_ feel. It strikes me we might manage better."
+His idea of this was a thing that made him an instant hesitate; yet he
+brought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to _me?_"
+
+It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarce
+generous in expecting her definitely to answer, and by looking to him
+to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him
+feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that he
+thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of
+his flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
+again on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. It
+might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her
+mind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it will
+make."
+
+Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was
+stupid--the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But he
+made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
+bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle but
+strong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that the
+difference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"
+
+Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her
+more marked shows of impatience; with which in fact she sharply closed
+their discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and she
+accompanied him to the top of the stairs with an air of having so put
+their possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubts
+perverse. "I verily believe I _shall_ hate you if you spoil for me the
+beauty of what I see!"
+
+
+III
+
+He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw;
+and the very next occasion had for him still other surprises than that.
+He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the
+telegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with
+them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate even
+though in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting American
+friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American
+friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to
+the last bitterness. This apprehension, however, we hasten to add,
+enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
+the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after
+his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came
+in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the
+hour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as he
+was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
+field. He had thus had with her several bewildering
+moments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
+him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
+he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
+supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
+achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
+herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
+you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
+the article required was what might especially have caused him to
+stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
+dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
+it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
+all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
+his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
+small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
+truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
+feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
+comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
+ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
+quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
+avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
+This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
+discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
+him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
+being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
+that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
+that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
+"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
+convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
+irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
+already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
+ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
+afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
+gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
+impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
+keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
+been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the
+world as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
+welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her
+few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the
+amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a
+plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of
+America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the
+idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred
+to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her
+favourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this
+helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and
+blameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
+absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by
+the beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support
+all round, for no young man could have been less formidable than the
+person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The
+ostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, as
+prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his
+own reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--a
+relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving nor
+lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess,
+the girl had to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from head
+to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again
+the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually
+and consummately reckoned.
+
+That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon,
+under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to
+the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this
+estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so
+that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
+plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in
+respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a
+person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way
+to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the
+character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
+was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things
+all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet
+criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
+last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
+Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
+performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
+parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
+the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
+actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
+performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
+jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
+accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
+as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
+much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
+point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
+almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
+having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
+he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
+at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
+came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
+_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
+mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
+expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
+fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
+the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
+as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
+intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
+double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
+sign to the person in the house she loved best.
+
+The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
+on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
+gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
+presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
+like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
+opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
+"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
+contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
+two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what now
+offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless
+and full of the compunction of having had to come alone. Her companion,
+at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough,
+and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
+regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was the
+first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,
+without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she called
+it--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if the
+young man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been
+wholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
+dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar
+to the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Any
+knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
+supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the most
+privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a manner
+invented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caught
+her in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her
+by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a
+friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp
+flashlight or two?
+
+He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with
+interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as
+he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his
+pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction. The ear of
+society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
+paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he
+appeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settled
+himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the
+full revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if
+he could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
+gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What
+touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air
+of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
+career. There was of course more said about the heroine than if she
+hadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range
+of Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two
+wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,
+professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
+to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
+obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
+been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
+of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
+smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
+benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
+she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
+would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
+in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
+to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
+indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
+He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
+them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
+came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
+a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
+they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
+striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
+keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
+himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
+that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
+and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
+than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
+scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
+New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
+complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
+relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
+perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
+of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
+if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
+country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
+herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
+the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
+with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
+The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that
+they saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in the
+States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taught
+the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native
+product. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she was
+weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that
+New York, in having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck. There
+_were_ plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were
+awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank
+goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the
+Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to be
+calculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
+without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
+announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her
+young friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no
+manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the
+moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
+good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at a
+certain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest
+approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left
+them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly
+addressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least little
+bit--about my friend."
+
+He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs.
+Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn
+meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
+couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,
+but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't know
+enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,
+as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously
+appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
+immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then
+present."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it
+expressed he failed at the time to make out.
+
+"You weren't present _then_, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
+"You don't know," she continued with mellow gaiety, "how far things may
+have gone."
+
+It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had
+more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
+it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
+foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
+foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
+affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
+produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
+as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
+already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
+perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
+precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
+opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
+long."
+
+It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
+for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
+that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
+wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."
+
+"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
+to keep well with him.
+
+He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
+knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
+endlessly more to see."
+
+"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
+archness.
+
+"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
+impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
+about her."
+
+"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
+firmness.
+
+"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
+often quite prove the depth of the impression?"
+
+He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
+they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
+deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
+for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
+authority about her."
+
+Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
+had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
+easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
+sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
+and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
+half so much."
+
+The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
+fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross
+circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
+companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
+old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
+the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
+fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
+for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
+communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
+determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
+though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
+thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
+things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
+Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
+own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
+feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
+of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
+happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
+don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
+followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
+this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
+was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
+than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
+in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
+little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
+harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
+it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
+by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
+gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
+had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
+There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
+the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
+and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
+characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
+scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
+in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
+feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
+nature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
+be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
+Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
+of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
+only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
+inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
+American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
+creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
+marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
+
+So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
+thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
+society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
+independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
+civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
+within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
+there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
+the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
+world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
+of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
+struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
+Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
+imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
+practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
+aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
+relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
+London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
+your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
+away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
+She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
+having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
+_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
+developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
+but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
+
+Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
+pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
+light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
+property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
+also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
+Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
+glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
+feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
+only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
+passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
+life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
+entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
+observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
+on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
+drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
+if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
+feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
+admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
+somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
+this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
+from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
+her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
+that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
+she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
+stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
+Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
+was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
+Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
+practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
+friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
+unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
+take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
+perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
+This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
+might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
+measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
+covered ground.
+
+
+IV
+
+The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
+element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
+upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
+this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight.
+Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room;
+he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
+foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this
+general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks
+to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that
+intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;
+whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs
+sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.
+Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small
+sofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,
+of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know each
+other--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; and
+she arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to put
+Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
+world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the
+profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;
+there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he
+could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other
+hand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see on
+the spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
+in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. I
+mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you
+she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
+
+He took this in such patience as he could muster. "What in the world's
+the matter with her?"
+
+But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here has
+been just a reason for her funking it."
+
+"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher asked again.
+
+"Why just what I've told you--that she likes you so much."
+
+"Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?"
+
+Kate cast about--it would take so long to explain. "And perhaps it's
+true that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
+
+"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visibly
+preoccupied and worried."
+
+"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be only for that."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. "Why, if it's
+anything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, and
+she has done all she need to be civil."
+
+"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite beautifully civil."
+
+It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was
+already, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on two
+different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other
+makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell Milly all about you."
+
+"Well then," said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, "I'm glad I
+felt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to
+her?"
+
+"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's all," Kate declared,
+"as it should be."
+
+"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically suggested, "that she
+isn't getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on _this?_"
+And then as Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On our present
+disregard for appearances."
+
+"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make
+them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged
+that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had
+indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instance
+another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to
+respond just in order to make that impression."
+
+"Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! I
+hope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean
+judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as
+thrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,
+Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do you
+mean she's as ill as she looks?"
+
+Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech
+deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her
+own--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
+Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could
+scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.
+She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing her
+too--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on
+the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled
+up. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the night
+before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
+farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a
+day or two later. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
+When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
+They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
+brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
+man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
+Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
+She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
+you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
+hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
+doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
+out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
+
+Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
+she has had?"
+
+"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
+
+"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"
+
+"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
+to lose. And she wants more."
+
+"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
+"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"
+
+"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
+somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
+oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
+all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
+certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
+success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
+she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
+a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
+of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
+facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
+Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
+_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
+"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
+assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
+plain."
+
+Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
+then on earth can I do her?"
+
+Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
+
+"And for what?"
+
+"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
+care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
+it made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
+there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
+compassion. "She has nothing."
+
+"Not all the young dukes?"
+
+"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
+does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
+"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
+life. Oh she has you arranged!"
+
+"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
+rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
+
+"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
+
+"Then why shan't I be?"
+
+"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
+_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."
+
+"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
+
+"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
+the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
+you're therefore what I use most."
+
+He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
+which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
+he asked.
+
+Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
+think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
+
+"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
+has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
+really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
+spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
+conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
+a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
+days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
+has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."
+
+"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
+her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."
+
+"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
+short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
+she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."
+
+Kate on her side did this justice. "No--that's the beauty of her."
+
+"The beauty--?"
+
+"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your
+watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you
+convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
+won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won't
+taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know."
+
+"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?
+In what extraordinary state _is_ she?"
+
+Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. "I
+believe that if she's ill at all she's very ill. I believe that if
+she's bad she's not a _little_ bad. I can't tell you why, but that's
+how I see her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll have it
+all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think she'll have it all."
+
+Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having
+thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid.
+"You 'think' and you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
+without an inkling of her complaint?"
+
+"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't want
+knowledge. She moreover herself doesn't want one to want it: she has,
+as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a
+kind of--I don't know what to call it--intensity of pride. And then and
+then--" But with this she faltered.
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for you, my dear,"
+Kate continued, "that you're as sound as a bell."
+
+"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather good then for yourself too
+that you're as strong as the sea."
+
+She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their
+young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at
+least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the
+personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that
+very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the
+poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good
+they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this. "How
+we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were
+the facts. "From illness I keep away."
+
+"But you don't--since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the
+midst of it."
+
+"Ah I'm only watching--!"
+
+"And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!"
+
+"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of
+what I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon."
+
+She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the
+hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning
+brought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a case
+for surgery?"
+
+"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come
+to that. Of course she's in the highest hands."
+
+"The doctors are after her then?"
+
+"She's after _them_--it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it
+now--she sees Sir Luke Strett."
+
+It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an
+instant: "One seems to guess."
+
+Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you."
+
+For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it
+before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl."
+
+"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You
+understand moreover just how much--and just how little."
+
+"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand."
+
+"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has
+been your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making up
+to her goes, plenty of others will."
+
+Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing
+their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown,
+amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility.
+"Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free."
+
+"But so are you, my dear!"
+
+She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had
+sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at
+her. "You're prodigious!"
+
+"Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave a
+further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby
+had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately
+finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the
+announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
+less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the
+visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly
+rose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And then
+for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back from
+America."
+
+"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as he
+mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He
+recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have
+appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, he
+knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficial
+resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was
+the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and
+experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a
+thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of
+curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to
+which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask
+Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs.
+Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.
+
+"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?--as I seemed to hear outside, from
+below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable voice."
+
+"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell," the girl explained,
+"and was compelled to disappoint us."
+
+"Ah 'disappoint'--rather!" And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on
+Densher. "She isn't really bad, I trust?"
+
+Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in
+Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with
+whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without
+visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was
+doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was
+aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I think not. I've
+just been reassuring Mr. Densher," she added--"who's as concerned as
+the rest of us. I've been calming his fears."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark again--and again it was just as good. That was for
+Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the
+others: "_My_ fears would want calming. We must take great care of her.
+This way?"
+
+She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave
+them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy.
+What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently
+with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time
+quite ready for her. "It's _he_ who's your aunt's man?"
+
+"Oh immensely."
+
+"I mean for _you._"
+
+"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There he is. Now you can judge."
+
+"Judge of what?"
+
+"Judge of him."
+
+"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked. "I've nothing to do with
+him."
+
+"Then why do you ask about him?"
+
+"To judge of you--which is different."
+
+Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. "To take the
+measure, do you mean, of my danger?"
+
+He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare say, of Miss
+Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her--?"
+
+"With his interest in me?"
+
+"With her own interest in you," Densher said while she reflected. "If
+that interest--Mrs. Lowder's--takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
+rather to look out for the forms _he_ takes?"
+
+Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh he takes them easily,"
+she answered. "The beauty is that she doesn't trust him."
+
+"That Milly doesn't?"
+
+"Yes--Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really."
+
+Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he
+cheats?"
+
+"Yes," said Kate--"that's the way people are. What they think of their
+enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with
+what they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind, however,"
+she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt Maud's security, though she doesn't
+yet fully recognise it--besides being Milly's own."
+
+"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?"
+
+She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. "You oughtn't to
+make me say too much. But I'm glad I don't."
+
+"Don't say too much?"
+
+"Don't care for Lord Mark."
+
+"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which
+he added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
+
+"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her again
+impatient.
+
+Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, I
+suppose, one of the dukes."
+
+"Mercy, no--far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities,
+'in' it. Milly, it's true," she said, to be exact, "has no natural
+sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
+or know who's who or what's what."
+
+"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason for liking _me_."
+
+"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate, "who at least know
+what I lose."
+
+Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "And
+Aunt Maud--why shouldn't _she_ know? I mean that your friend there
+isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
+
+"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's
+undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get."
+
+"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.
+
+"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this;
+"because perhaps in the line of that alone--as he has no money--more
+could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the
+sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his
+family and at the other end of the string. _The_ thing's his genius."
+
+"And do you believe in that?"
+
+"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had
+yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so
+that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in
+time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
+
+"Political?"
+
+"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it
+when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,
+without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an
+effect without his being in any traceable way a cause."
+
+"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality,
+"isn't agreeable--?"
+
+"Oh but it is!"
+
+"Not surely for every one."
+
+"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you may have reasons--and
+men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not."
+
+"Then there you are!"
+
+"Yes, precisely--that takes, on his part, genius."
+
+Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus
+promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been
+found, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
+suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and
+overflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the
+future she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you are
+stupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--and
+then you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--except
+that you're so much too good for what she builds _for_. Even 'society'
+won't know how good for it you are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond
+it. You'd have to pull it uphill--it's you yourself who are at the top.
+The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read?
+You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
+ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've a
+subscription!"
+
+She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in
+answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their
+essential wealth of life. "It's you who draw me out. I exist in you.
+Not in others."
+
+It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself
+pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "See
+here, you know: don't, _don't_--!"
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
+
+She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. "So you think
+you'll kill _me_ in time to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the
+next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she
+had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come
+back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely
+connected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a
+distance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him before
+they joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understand
+she meant his way with Milly.
+
+He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had
+brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this
+light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
+undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitely
+tell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"
+
+She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though
+quite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growing
+intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
+yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me."
+
+"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
+
+"She doesn't suppose it."
+
+"How then can she imagine you never named her?"
+
+"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her. I've told her everything.
+She's in possession of reasons that will perfectly do."
+
+Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you exactly as I take
+them?"
+
+"Exactly as you take them."
+
+"She's just such another victim?"
+
+"Just such another. You're a pair."
+
+"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we can console each other?"
+
+"Ah something _may_ indeed happen," she returned, "if you'll only go
+straight!"
+
+He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you mean
+by going straight?"
+
+"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, and
+you'll see. You'll have me perfectly, always, to refer to."
+
+"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
+
+It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her back. There you are.
+You won't be able to say I haven't made it smooth for you."
+
+He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the
+queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous
+silken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"
+
+He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had
+caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her
+attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and
+who was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by
+Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened before
+any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found
+time to say to him with furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another
+was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew
+near to him with an almost reproachful "Come and talk to _me!_"--a
+challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness of
+their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the
+same he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs.
+Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as
+looking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which he
+afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few
+words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This
+impression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
+something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps
+a slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her "Good-night,
+sir!" as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing
+more to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this
+time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personage
+had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently--with
+a view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs on
+Milly--proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred
+was that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word for
+himself. It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she both
+detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he
+hadn't yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal.
+
+"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really interesting."
+
+"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly not forget her.
+But you must remember that, so far as her 'interest' is concerned, I
+myself discovered, I--as was said at dinner--invented her."
+
+"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't taken out the
+patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press of other things, too much
+neglect her."
+
+Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate's, he
+asked himself quickly if it mightn't help him with her. He at any rate
+could but try. "You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
+you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to me. _She_ keeps me up--she
+has had so much to say about them."
+
+He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his
+passage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring to
+herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
+if her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw his
+intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance;
+she only said imperturbably: "Yes, she'll herself do anything for her
+friend; so that she but preaches what she practises."
+
+Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate's devotion
+went. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in face
+of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself
+of the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate's mastery of
+the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
+What might really _become_ in all this of the American girl was
+therefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose none
+of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so
+far as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all the
+same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming."
+
+Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a chance."
+
+"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's--naturally now--leaving
+town and, as I take it, going abroad."
+
+Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing
+with this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "till
+she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving him
+uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall go
+too."
+
+He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And what
+good will that do _me?_"
+
+"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll come out to us."
+
+"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
+
+"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
+
+"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed
+putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he
+rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make
+of it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "to
+consider."
+
+"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
+
+"And pray what's that?"
+
+"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I'm
+treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I can
+smooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And her
+fortune's a real fortune."
+
+Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he
+felt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funny
+if it hadn't been so grave--with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
+derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm much obliged to you
+for the handsome offer--"
+
+"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it
+does--but there's no reason it shouldn't to _you_. Mind you,
+moreover"--she kept it up--"I'm not one who talks in the air. And you
+owe me something--if you want to know why."
+
+Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her
+consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive
+an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that
+she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
+while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this
+light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of
+course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
+inviting me for instance to-night--!"
+
+"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," she
+added, "how far I've gone for you."
+
+He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he
+laughed again as he could. "I see how far you're going."
+
+"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for
+you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only
+made him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has the
+weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with
+surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you."
+Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which,
+speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see
+what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to
+make me right!"
+
+The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had
+left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,
+under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the
+square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his
+brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
+Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had
+affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He
+made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
+starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
+Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
+very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
+Milly was successfully deceived.
+
+
+V
+
+To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
+see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
+visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
+face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
+with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
+Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
+been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
+excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
+American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
+in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
+both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
+mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
+the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
+other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
+her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
+a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
+him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
+oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
+interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
+appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
+was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
+in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
+perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
+breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
+good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
+ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
+which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
+in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
+reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
+patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
+thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
+acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of
+this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one
+way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had
+not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the
+night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed of
+being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of
+man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor
+evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one
+concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He liked
+Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He
+liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the
+evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had never
+known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,
+whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff
+not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he
+find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea of
+working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise
+much interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
+positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
+
+Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a
+margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his
+burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
+involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for
+him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This was
+simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully
+recovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
+had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the
+world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class was
+from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_
+ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable
+than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her in
+Kate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to
+Densher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from the
+National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore
+scarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much for
+her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
+simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy
+acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
+been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
+was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
+rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
+with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
+her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
+see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
+that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
+enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
+of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
+thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
+expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
+might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
+mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
+hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
+_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
+if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
+surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
+perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
+want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
+of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
+his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
+apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
+of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
+within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
+understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
+which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
+couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
+acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
+could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
+It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
+let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
+explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
+she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
+the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for
+insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
+reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
+Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
+personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
+a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
+disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
+was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
+appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
+been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
+exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
+much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
+for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
+out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
+whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
+ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
+longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
+then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
+Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
+hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
+quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
+round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
+it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
+situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
+that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
+as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
+honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
+
+Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
+the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
+quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
+straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
+charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
+conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
+he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
+unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
+spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
+because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
+came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
+an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
+immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
+almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
+to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
+had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
+value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
+so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
+his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
+if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
+quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
+_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
+what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
+on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
+on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
+miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
+whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
+himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
+him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
+would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
+was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
+difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
+with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
+was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
+_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
+would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
+but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
+virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
+this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
+would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
+extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
+complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
+loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
+length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
+abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
+presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one
+nothing but good.
+
+Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the
+immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have
+wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
+Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She
+would absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shall
+ever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be less
+delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be free
+to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better
+reason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
+failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross than
+doing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the
+fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own,
+on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her
+with the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in the
+impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
+above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as
+she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Densher
+therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a
+pure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this pure
+pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things
+she seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not
+all the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant in
+the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the
+question of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she did
+that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for
+_you_--that's all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall
+never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worry
+about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in
+short, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even now
+while you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_
+justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was folded
+finely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions and
+her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings,
+but he wouldn't have that to-day. As he thought of the way in which,
+the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently "jawing," he
+accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
+apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
+events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
+London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
+as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
+and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
+Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
+this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
+the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
+fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
+interrupted encounter in New York.
+
+At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
+them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
+sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
+their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
+originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
+remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
+time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
+whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
+have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
+of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
+beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
+steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
+and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
+which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
+communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
+themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
+to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
+face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
+their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
+the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
+control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
+the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
+the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
+freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
+acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman
+could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experiment
+went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as
+the marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a word
+about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question
+for them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
+comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night before
+appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he
+fairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
+course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown
+him by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt
+with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
+conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before
+going further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite so
+much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came
+up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never
+renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument against
+that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little
+eloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.
+
+Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that
+she was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Over
+the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the merit
+of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the
+chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to her
+freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, _I?_
+Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was to do, it thus
+appeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was just
+what would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar
+brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
+heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She
+would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incur
+whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue to
+be exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. It
+wouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn't
+before him one of those rare cases of exaltation--food for fiction,
+food for poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
+care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if
+Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in my
+society, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to make
+my society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a different
+impression if she _had_ so reasoned. All of which, none the less,
+didn't prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to
+be whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do you
+begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
+
+She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she
+would, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed view
+of the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. They
+weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks
+somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we've
+only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's done
+and the wind's in our sails."
+
+"May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you come
+back?"
+
+She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the wind
+turns. And what do you do with your summer?"
+
+"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work
+in your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of the
+pleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."
+
+"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different time
+from ours. If you could but have worked while we've been working--"
+
+"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn't so great
+with me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, in
+either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--you
+all," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real
+physical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. My
+labour's comparatively light."
+
+"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like mine."
+
+"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
+
+"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested. Oh I could go far."
+
+He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?--since you've got here, as I
+learn, the whole place in your pocket."
+
+"Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed so
+what you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'm
+watching over its future, that I can't help being anxious and careful.
+I want--in the interest itself of what I've had and may still have--not
+to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again
+to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,"
+she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her
+statement--"I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ return? Can you promise one that?"
+
+Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if
+bargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"
+
+He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he
+checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to
+social life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of a
+mob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should you
+come here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear
+for us--if it isn't a question of climate."
+
+She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't a question--?"
+
+"Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going
+somewhere for that."
+
+"For better air?"--she remembered. "Oh yes, one certainly wants to get
+out of London in August."
+
+"Rather, of course!"--he fully understood. "Though I'm glad you've hung
+on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
+"once more."
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently asked.
+
+It pulled him up an instant--representing, as he saw it might have
+seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was
+proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
+was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll find ready to
+surround you with sympathy."
+
+It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him
+afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
+
+"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we _shall_ feel for you will be
+much nearer worship."
+
+"As near then as you like!" With which at last Kate's name was sounded.
+"The people I'd most come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
+for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me."
+
+"So she has to _me_," said Densher. "I feel," he added as she at first
+answered nothing, "that, quite contrary to anything I originally
+expected, I've made a good friend of her."
+
+"I didn't expect it either--its turning out as it has. But I did," said
+Milly, "with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I'd do anything"--she
+kept it up--"for Kate."
+
+Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might
+for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the
+ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together
+and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at
+that moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do for
+Kate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he
+felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness
+stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his
+silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for
+Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
+trying the next minute but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself.
+"Of course I know what friends you are--and of course I understand," he
+permitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person so
+charming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean her
+working for your return."
+
+"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm really on her hands."
+
+He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show
+he knew. "Ah she's very masterful."
+
+"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
+
+"No--that's not the way. At any rate it isn't hers," he smiled. He
+remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways
+was just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no further
+than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of
+representing a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to call
+know."
+
+"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The words
+gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for
+his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
+to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity.
+Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far--if it _was_
+too far--without being false. His observation was one he would
+perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and
+before Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how just
+here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up
+not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly put
+there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to
+turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have
+given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled
+for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August
+afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy
+carriage-wheels and of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great
+shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded
+by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a
+due display of diminished prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
+Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
+
+"It's only my own carriage; it does that--isn't it wonderful?--every
+day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our
+hearts, very amusing." She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
+of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on
+the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed
+a brave show. "Is it very awful?"
+
+It was to Densher's eyes--save for its absurd heaviness--only
+pleasantly pompous. "It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I
+know? You're mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
+wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your
+carriage--well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one."
+But she was going out, and he mustn't stand in her way. What had
+happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was going
+out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said
+she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive--that in fact
+there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her
+to-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why the
+carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these
+things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they
+found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompany
+her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the
+matter--on the basis, that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
+happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have
+described in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The
+system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought him
+headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now
+it was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or the
+other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
+him longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watching
+himself wait. He couldn't keep that up for ever; and since one thing or
+the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
+became conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settled
+itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a
+firm object in the stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure.
+It's a charming idea."
+
+She gave no look to thank him--she rather looked away; she only said at
+once to her servant, "In ten minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the
+man went out, "We'll go somewhere--I shall like that. But I must ask of
+you time--as little as possible--to get ready." She looked over the
+room to provide for him, keep him there. "There are books and
+things--plenty; and I dress very quickly." He caught her eyes only as
+she went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.
+
+Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have
+said; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing to
+oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that
+she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige
+_her;_ which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite
+round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he
+stood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more--remained
+with several very living little matters to think about. One of these
+was the phenomenon--typical, highly American, he would have said--of
+Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had sought
+refuge--refuge from another question--in the almost exclusive
+contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even
+to a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous for
+his young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone--since she
+hadn't mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more
+advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn't an American
+girl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate _would_ have
+done it, though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
+spontaneous. And then in addition Kate _had_ done it--or things very
+like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate--even if his ostensibly not
+being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any
+rate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate,
+was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to
+anything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
+herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved about
+the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at
+his disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
+whereas Kate was backward--backward still, comparatively, as an English
+girl--and yet advanced in a high degree. However--though this didn't
+straighten it out--Kate was of course two or three years older; which
+at their time of life considerably counted.
+
+Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander;
+yet without keeping at bay for long the sense of having rounded his
+corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option
+of taking advantage of Milly's absence to retrace his steps. If he
+might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he
+couldn't turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his
+consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue
+was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss
+Theale's servant had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had met,
+obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door,
+he loudly announced as Miss Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped
+short at sight of Densher--only, after an instant, as the young man saw
+with free amusement, not from surprise and still less from
+discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation--Miss Theale had
+gone to prepare to drive--on receipt of which the servant effaced
+himself.
+
+"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
+
+"Yes--with your approval; which I've taken, as you see, for granted."
+
+"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!" She was thoroughly
+consistent and handsome about it.
+
+"What I mean is of course," he went on--for he was sensibly affected by
+her gaiety--"at your so lively instigation."
+
+She had looked about the room--she might have been vaguely looking for
+signs of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aid
+in taking a decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you like."
+She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made
+a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. "So much so as that? Do
+you know I think I won't wait?"
+
+"Not to see her--after coming?"
+
+"Well, with you in the field--! I came for news of her, but she must be
+all right. If she _is_--"
+
+But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?" He was moved to say
+more. "It's not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to me
+it's you." She struck him as making light of a matter that had been
+costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't both be quite just.
+Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn't want at
+all events to feel a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing--and shall not,
+I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
+
+Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his
+words; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he really
+needn't get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked
+it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she better--if she's able to
+see you?"
+
+"She assures me she's in perfect health."
+
+Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On which she added: "It won't
+have been really for illness that she stayed away last night."
+
+"For what then?"
+
+"Well--for nervousness."
+
+"Nervousness about what?"
+
+"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the
+next moment. "I've told you that."
+
+He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it
+was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: "What have you told
+_her?_"
+
+She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered
+where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even
+stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
+feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying
+things--! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. "Ask _her_, if
+you like; you're free--she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
+trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have told. I'm all right
+with her," said Kate. "So there you are."
+
+"If you mean _here_ I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable. If you
+also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you're so
+far right as that she certainly does believe in you."
+
+"Well then take example by her."
+
+"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued. "She's driving me
+out for you."
+
+"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity, "you can do it a
+little for _her_. I'm not afraid," she smiled.
+
+He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it
+and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in
+this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
+relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, a
+question of words. "I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But
+for you I'll do anything."
+
+"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
+
+He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to it?"
+
+"To 'it'? To what?"
+
+"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that, you know, that I'm
+letting you do--well, God knows what with me."
+
+She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense of
+which she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in me
+then, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gone
+further?"
+
+"Break off with you?"
+
+"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay and
+explain to her why it is."
+
+He wondered--as if it struck him. "What would you say?"
+
+"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that there's nothing for me
+but to bear with you as I best may."
+
+He considered of this. "How much do you abuse me to her?"
+
+"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
+
+Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought to mind her attitude."
+
+"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."
+
+He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
+itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
+back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
+and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
+now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
+here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"
+
+Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
+But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."
+
+"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.
+
+"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
+many conditions."
+
+She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
+pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
+suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
+any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
+being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
+circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
+speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
+begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
+translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"
+
+She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
+than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
+
+"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled
+something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
+his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
+check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
+she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
+deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
+renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
+where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
+victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
+dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
+was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
+he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
+he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
+she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
+
+"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
+with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
+understand."
+
+She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
+before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
+enough, you know, without understanding too much."
+
+"You don't need to see."
+
+He required then a last injunction. "I must simply go it blind?"
+
+"You must simply be kind to her."
+
+"And leave the rest to you?"
+
+"Leave the rest to _her_," said Kate disappearing.
+
+It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three
+minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,
+so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
+throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for
+an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
+fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
+like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their
+friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he
+said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his
+corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.
+
+She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed
+over whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see
+_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
+Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it
+should now be wholly left.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH
+
+I
+
+When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her
+meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to
+face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the
+warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again
+feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the
+quarter of his courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the two
+women stood there showing each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd
+had received their great doctor's visit, which had been clearly no
+small affair for her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
+in place, against communication and betrayal, as she now practically
+confessed, the barrier of their invited guests. "You've been too dear.
+With what I see you're full of you treated them beautifully. _Isn't_
+Kate charming when she wants to be?"
+
+Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in a high fine spasm,
+with different dangers, had now quite let itself go. She had to make an
+effort to reach a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh she
+was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham added. "She knew."
+
+Milly braced herself--but conscious above all, at the moment, of a high
+compassion for her mate. She made her out as struggling--struggling in
+all her nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself, given her
+nature, could only be a torment. Milly gathered from the struggle how
+much there was of the pity, and how therefore it was both in her
+tenderness and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
+Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression instantly steadied
+the girl. Ruefully asking herself on what basis of ease, with the drop
+of their barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt the
+question met with a relief that was almost joy. The basis, the
+inevitable basis, was that she was going to be sorry for Susie, who, to
+all appearance, had been condemned in so much more uncomfortable a
+manner to be sorry for _her_. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow would hurt Mrs.
+Stringham, but how could her own ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at
+all events, on the spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
+the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture of an
+energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate knew," she asked, "that you
+were full of Sir Luke Strett?"
+
+"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice; she seemed to want
+to help me through." Which the good lady had no sooner said, however,
+than she almost tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly with
+a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she saw one had been taken up
+with something. When I say she knows I should say she's a person who
+guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side, heroic. "But _she_
+doesn't matter, Milly."
+
+The girl felt she by this time could face anything. "Nobody matters,
+Susie. Nobody." Which her next words, however, rather contradicted.
+"Did he take it ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
+just what he wanted--to have it out, so much more simply, with _you_?"
+
+"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs. Stringham delicately
+quavered.
+
+"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on, "and didn't he think you
+the most charming person I could possibly have referred him to for an
+account of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together and in fact
+fall quite in love, so that it will really be a great advantage for you
+to have me as a common ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end
+of a good thing of me."
+
+"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham pleadingly murmured; yet
+showing as she did so that she feared the effect even of deprecation.
+
+"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?--altogether, whatever he may
+say, a lovely acquaintance to have made? You're just the right people
+for me--I see it now; and do you know what, between you, you must do?"
+Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: "You
+must simply see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out together.
+I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and we'll be--the three of us,
+with whatever others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you
+like!--a sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying a
+feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence that her young
+friend almost saw her--and scarcely withheld the observation--as taking
+it for "a part of the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
+she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate awfully interesting,
+isn't he?--which is so much to the good. We haven't at least--as we
+might have, with the way we tumbled into it--got hold of one of the
+dreary."
+
+"Interesting, dearest?"--Mrs. Stringham felt her feet firmer. "I don't
+know if he's interesting or not; but I do know, my own," she continued
+to quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you could possibly
+desire."
+
+"Certainly--that's it. Like all the world."
+
+"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very much more deeply and
+intelligently."
+
+"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the way, Susie, I want you.
+So 'buck' up, my dear. We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't
+worry."
+
+"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face registered the
+sublimity of her lie.
+
+It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her companion went to her,
+met by her with an embrace in which things were said that exceeded
+speech. Each held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
+unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning the torment of
+helplessness, the woe for Milly of having _her_, at such a time, to
+think of. Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
+friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it
+more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing
+in fact came to the proof between them but that they could thus cling
+together--except indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of
+protection and support was all the younger woman's own. "I don't ask
+you," she presently said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what he
+told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that I had left him to
+you, nor what passed between you about me in any way. It wasn't to get
+that out of you that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
+freely--for there are things I don't want to know. I shall see him
+again and again and shall know more than enough. All I do want is that
+you shall see me through on _his_ basis, whatever it is; which it's
+enough--for the purpose--that you yourself should know: that is with
+him to show you how. I'll make it charming for you--that's what I mean;
+I'll keep you up to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
+you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me. There. It's
+understood. We keep each other going, and you may absolutely feel of me
+that I shan't break down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a dig
+of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
+
+"He told me I _can_ help you--of course he told me that," Susie, on her
+side, eagerly contended. "Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I
+come out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful--nothing, nothing,
+nothing," the poor lady passionately protested. "Only that you must do
+as you like and as he tells you--which _is_ just simply to do as you
+like."
+
+"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to time go to him. But
+that's of course doing as I like. It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I
+like going to him."
+
+Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave a clutch at the account
+of their situation that most showed it as workable. "That's what _will_
+be charming for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me--to help
+you to do as you like."
+
+"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed, "to save me from the
+consequences? Of course," she added, "there must first _be_ things I
+like."
+
+"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham more bravely said. "I
+think there _are_ some--as for instance just this one. I mean," she
+explained, "really having us so."
+
+Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable about _him_, and
+him the same about you? Yes--I shall get the good of it."
+
+Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a slight confusion.
+"Which of them are you talking of?"
+
+Milly wondered an instant--then had a light. "I'm not talking of Mr.
+Densher." With which moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you can
+be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better."
+
+"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you
+know," Susie continued, "whom he reminds me of? Of _our_ great man--Dr.
+Buttrick of Boston."
+
+Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she dropped him after a
+tributary pause. "What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr.
+Densher?"
+
+It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her
+friend's, that Susie produced her answer. "I think he's very handsome."
+
+Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of
+a teacher with a pupil. "Well, that will do for the first time. I
+_have_ done," she went on, "what I wanted."
+
+"Then that's all _we_ want. You see there are plenty of things."
+
+Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best is not to know--that
+includes them all. I don't--I don't know. Nothing about
+anything--except that you're _with_ me. Remember that, please. There
+won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's
+all right."
+
+The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain
+Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the reassuring. "Most
+certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees
+no reason--"
+
+"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly had taken it straight
+up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed
+of it otherwise. "Oh of course I know _that_." She spoke as if her
+friend's point were small.
+
+Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he
+didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."
+
+"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but
+she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited
+the word.
+
+It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"
+
+"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
+anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."
+
+It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
+am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
+it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
+more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
+what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
+her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
+was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
+begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
+special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
+descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
+star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
+cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
+twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
+the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
+watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
+and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
+fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
+oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
+contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
+greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
+during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
+in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
+the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
+it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
+capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
+the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
+
+The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
+imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
+with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
+passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
+yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
+had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
+certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
+silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
+however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
+the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
+Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
+account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
+she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
+give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
+might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
+herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
+behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
+herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
+she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
+inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
+it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
+that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
+observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
+purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
+She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
+the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
+intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
+as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
+contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
+vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
+least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
+she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
+be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
+to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."
+
+"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."
+
+"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
+There's something that will prevent her."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
+
+"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's
+doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent
+form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept
+_her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that
+these same things, at such times, made still more for business,
+arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of
+servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said,
+"if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for
+her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative
+margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would
+have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when
+Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her
+addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman
+summoned by the pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were
+sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given
+their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's
+interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her
+about Milly.
+
+"He had wished it himself?"
+
+"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter
+of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"
+said Mrs. Stringham.
+
+"Do you mean in her case?"
+
+"He says it _isn't_ a case."
+
+"What then is it?"
+
+"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed
+it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my
+knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something
+she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.
+She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."
+
+"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
+
+"He didn't tell me."
+
+"And you didn't ask?"
+
+"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He
+gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He
+_is_, thank God, interested."
+
+"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed
+with kindness.
+
+Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean
+that he sees what he can do with me."
+
+Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For _her_."
+
+"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to
+the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for
+her is to be happy."
+
+"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore," Mrs.
+Lowder handsomely asked, "should we cry so hard about it?"
+
+"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange, so beyond us. I mean
+if she can't be."
+
+"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. "She _shall_ be."
+
+"Well--if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we _can_ help."
+
+Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way, what Sir Luke Strett
+thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque
+ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
+dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by
+one, into her capacious apron. "But is that all he came to you for--to
+tell you she must be happy?"
+
+"That she must be _made_ so--that's the point. It seemed enough, as he
+told me," Mrs. Stringham went on; "he makes it somehow such a grand
+possible affair."
+
+"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
+
+"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as
+_my_ part. The rest's his own."
+
+"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
+
+"I don't know. _His_ business. He means to keep hold of her."
+
+"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must be very much of one."
+
+Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. "It's only
+that it isn't _the_ case she herself supposed."
+
+"It's another?"
+
+"It's another."
+
+"Examining her for what she supposed he finds something else?"
+
+"Something else."
+
+"And what does he find?"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from knowing!"
+
+"He didn't tell you that?"
+
+But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I mean is that if it's
+there I shall know in time. He's considering, but I can trust him for
+it--because he does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
+
+"He's in other words not sure?"
+
+"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he means. She's to get away
+now, but to come back to him in three months."
+
+"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he oughtn't meanwhile to scare
+us."
+
+It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled in the great
+doctor's cause. This came out at least in her glimmer of reproach.
+"Does it scare us to enlist us for her happiness?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it scares _me_. I'm always
+scared--I may call it so--till I understand. What happiness is he
+talking about?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you know!"
+
+She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the
+latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
+light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
+with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
+is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
+
+"The point is will it _cure?_"
+
+"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"
+
+"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
+declared.
+
+"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
+
+"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.
+
+"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
+
+Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
+which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
+spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
+something to know he thinks it good for us."
+
+"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
+him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
+have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
+see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
+for nothing."
+
+"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
+propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
+him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
+but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
+had from you night before last."
+
+"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
+
+"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
+now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
+
+"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
+anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
+Densher."
+
+"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
+fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
+
+"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
+all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
+to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
+returned."
+
+"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "till you've seen him."
+
+"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision.
+"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
+care for her?"
+
+Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
+put in the way of it."
+
+"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
+You have him, one feels, in your hand."
+
+Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
+impression of him?"
+
+"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."
+
+Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
+wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
+a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."
+
+It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
+her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
+mean Kate cares for _him?_"
+
+That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
+enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
+her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
+whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
+decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
+surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
+Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
+suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
+A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
+been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
+liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
+felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
+thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
+in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
+She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
+"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
+things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
+weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
+rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."
+
+"Deny that she cares for him?"
+
+"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
+absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."
+
+Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean--if she asks?"
+
+"To Milly, naturally. No one else _will_ ask."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, "Milly won't."
+
+Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
+
+"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for _me_. I lie badly."
+
+"_I_ lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, "when, as
+sometimes will happen, there's nothing else so good. One must always do
+the best. But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we can work it
+out." Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some
+minutes, more enrolled and inflamed--presently felt in her what had
+made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the
+time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason
+for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud
+too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying.
+What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a
+little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this
+appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth
+about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the
+state of her affections, which might be removed--this was apparently
+the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham
+saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate's delusion--by arts,
+however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it
+perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?--success in which
+indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately,
+her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones
+what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a
+dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present--a
+cloud of questions out of which Maud Manningham's large seated self
+loomed, however, as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact for
+the consultative relation something of the form of an oracle. From the
+oracle the sound did come--or at any rate the sense did, a sense all
+accordant with the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
+sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall
+be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"--a view into which Mrs. Stringham
+could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange to
+say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at least to Kate's
+good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself
+in short not caring what became of Kate--only convinced at bottom of
+the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't
+pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
+She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even
+beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough
+plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must
+stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at
+dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an
+instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to
+prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while
+you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
+
+"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me. Though it was nothing
+more," Susie did herself the justice to observe, "than what I too had
+quite felt."
+
+But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she wondered what she had
+said. "I suppose I ought to be edified at what you can so beautifully
+give up."
+
+"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I give up nothing--I cling."
+
+Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with some stiffness to her
+great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a push to an object or two
+disposed there. "I give up then. You know how little such a person as
+Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know what I've been thinking
+perfectly possible."
+
+"Oh you've been great"--Susie was perfectly fair. "A duke, a duchess, a
+princess, a palace: you've made me believe in them too. But where we
+break down is that _she_ doesn't believe in them. Luckily for her--as
+it seems to be turning out--she doesn't want them. So what's one to do?
+I assure you I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream now."
+
+Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so fully her meaning
+that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking it in. They sat a
+moment longer confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
+
+"If it _will_ do anything for her."
+
+Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but she spoke for the
+instant of something else. "It does provoke me a bit, you know--for of
+course I'm a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things. Yet it
+doesn't prevent the fact that we must be decent."
+
+"We must take her"--Mrs. Stringham carried that out--"as she is."
+
+"And we must take Mr. Densher as _he_ is." With which Mrs. Lowder gave
+a sombre laugh. "It's a pity he isn't better!"
+
+"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined, "you'd have liked him
+for your niece; and in that case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie
+added, "interfere with _you_."
+
+"She interferes with me as it is--not that it matters now. But I saw
+Kate and her--really as soon as you came to me--set up side by side. I
+saw your girl--I don't mind telling--you helping my girl; and when I
+say that," Mrs. Lowder continued, "you'll probably put in for yourself
+that it was part of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what I
+give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line," she further set
+forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs.
+Densher! Heavens!" she growled.
+
+Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher my girl will be
+somebody."
+
+"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs. Lowder, "we're talking
+in the air."
+
+Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving everything out."
+
+"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder had another thought.
+"_He's_ not quite nobody either." It brought her back to the question
+she had already put and which her friend hadn't at the time dealt with.
+"What in fact do you make of him?"
+
+Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was
+moved a little to caution. So she remained general. "He's charming."
+
+She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own
+to which people resort when they are not quite candid--a circumstance
+that had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
+
+The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost
+determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. "I thought you
+didn't like him!"
+
+"I don't like him for Kate."
+
+"But you don't like him for Milly either."
+
+Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. "I like
+him, my dear, for myself."
+
+"Then that's the best way of all."
+
+"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for my niece, and he's not
+good enough for you. One's an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
+
+"Oh _I'm_ not--not either," Susie declared.
+
+But her companion kept on. "One lives for others. _You_ do that. If I
+were living for myself I shouldn't at all mind him."
+
+But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find him charming it's
+however I'm living."
+
+Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving
+herself away with a laugh. "Of course he's all right in himself."
+
+"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve; and the note in
+question--what Merton Densher was "in himself"--closed practically,
+with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
+
+
+II
+
+It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an
+informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to
+take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to
+himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs.
+Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a
+spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come
+back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of
+his reckoning. If what they had talked of _could_ happen--if Milly,
+that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself--it wouldn't do any
+harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn't happen--if,
+anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could
+do nothing to contribute to it--they would be in no worse a box than
+before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range
+for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the
+sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man,
+would--besides having more to show him--find him more ready to go on
+with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd--as well as being
+ground for a second report to her old friend--that Milly did her part
+for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned
+frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke
+Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for,
+his having been so easy about her behaviour.
+
+"You see I didn't know that--for the liberty I took--I shouldn't
+afterwards get a stiff note from him."
+
+So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her a trifle rash. "Oh
+you'll never get a stiff note from him in your life."
+
+She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her young friend's question.
+"Why not, as well as any one else who has played him a trick?"
+
+"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick. He could understand
+your action. It's all right, you see."
+
+"Yes--I do see. It _is_ all right. He's easier with me than with any
+one else, because that's the way to let me down. He's only making
+believe, and I'm not worth hauling up."
+
+Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare, poor Susie grasped
+at her only advantage. "Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
+of trifling with you?"
+
+She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion gave her--a
+strange half-amused perception of what she made of it. "Well, so far as
+it's trifling with me to pity me so much."
+
+"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned. "He just--the same as
+any one else--likes you."
+
+"He has no business then to like me. He's not the same as any one else."
+
+"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
+
+Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful smile. "Ah there
+you are!" Mrs. Stringham coloured, for there indeed she was again. But
+Milly let her off. "Work for me, all the same--work for me! It's of
+course what I want." Then as usual she embraced her friend. "I'm not
+going to be as nasty as this to _him_."
+
+"I'm sure I hope not!"--and Mrs. Stringham laughed for the kiss. "I've
+no doubt, however, he'd take it from you! It's _you_, my dear, who are
+not the same as any one else."
+
+Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her the last word. "No,
+so that people can take anything from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did
+indeed resignedly take after this was the absence on her part of any
+account of the visit then paid. It was the beginning in fact between
+them of an odd independence--an independence positively of action and
+custom--on the subject of Milly's future. They went their separate ways
+with the girl's intense assent; this being really nothing but what she
+had so wonderfully put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
+encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the idea that Susie had or
+was to have other encounters--private pointed personal; she favoured
+every idea, but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on as
+if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be worked for that would
+be her way; and though her companions learned from herself nothing of
+it this was in the event her way with her medical adviser. She put her
+visit to him on the simplest ground; she had come just to tell him how
+touched she had been by his good nature. That required little
+explaining, for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood he
+could but reply that it was all right.
+
+"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that clever lady. You've got
+good friends."
+
+"So each one of them thinks of all the others. But so I also think,"
+Milly went on, "of all of them together. You're excellent for each
+other. And it's in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
+
+There came to her on this occasion one of the strangest of her
+impressions, which was at the same time one of the finest of her
+alarms--the glimmer of a vision that if she should go, as it were, too
+far, she might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not of
+value. Going too far was failing to try at least to remain simple. He
+would be quite ready to hate her if she did, by heading him off at
+every point, embarrass his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt,
+rather constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't hate her,
+since Susie positively wanted to suffer for her; Susie had a noble idea
+that she might somehow so do her good. Such, however, was not the way
+in which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected to wish to
+do it. He wouldn't have time even should he wish; whereby, in a word,
+Milly felt herself intimately warned. Face to face there with her
+smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment quite such
+another lift of feeling as she had known in her crucial talk with
+Susie. It came round to the same thing; him too she would help to help
+her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't possibly be she would
+assist also to make this right.
+
+It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the basis in question,
+almost to reverse for her their characters of patient and physician.
+What _was_ he in fact but patient, what was she but physician, from the
+moment she embraced once for all the necessity, adopted once for all
+the policy, of saving him alarms about her subtlety? She would leave
+the subtlety to him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
+doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went so far as to imagine
+that the inward success of these reflexions flushed her for the minute,
+to his eyes, with a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
+and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour to the
+presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"--he noticed
+good-humouredly her harmless sally. "But, help or no help, you're
+looking, you know, remarkably well."
+
+"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was as if already she saw
+his line. Only she wondered what he would have guessed. If he had
+guessed anything at all it would be rather remarkable of him. As for
+what there _was_ to guess, he couldn't--if this was present to
+him--have arrived at it save by his own acuteness. That acuteness was
+therefore immense; and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
+leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad. Neither, for that
+matter, would hers be--which she was even actually enjoying. She
+wondered if really then there mightn't be something for her. She hadn't
+been sure in coming to him that she was "better," and he hadn't used,
+he would be awfully careful not to use, that compromising term about
+her; in spite of all of which she would have been ready to say, for the
+amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I _must_ be," for he had this unaided
+sense of something that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided,
+because who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain,
+hadn't yet seen him again, and there were things it was impossible she
+could have told him the first time. Since such was his penetration,
+therefore, why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept
+the new circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate
+her on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it
+might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of
+nursing. "You gave me the other day," she went on, "plenty to think
+over, and I've been doing that--thinking it over--quite as you'll have
+probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat," she
+smiled, "since you've already done me so much good."
+
+The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance
+so closely related to all one's possibilities that one missed the
+pleasure of really improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
+treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my wit."
+
+"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile a bit believed in his
+answer, convinced as she was that if she _had_ been difficult it would
+be the last thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said, "as I
+like."
+
+"Then it's as _I_ like. But you must really, though we're having such a
+decent month, get straight away." In pursuance of which, when she had
+replied with promptitude that her departure--for the Tyrol and then for
+Venice--was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with
+alacrity. "For Venice? That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a
+dream of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks off; three
+weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person
+who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I
+heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice."
+
+"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in
+advance or in any way, I can do for you--!"
+
+"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be
+capital to find you there."
+
+"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after a moment, "that I
+_am_ easy to treat."
+
+But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it. "You've not come to
+that _yet_."
+
+"One has to be so bad for it?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it--to 'ease' of treatment. I
+doubt if it's possible. I've not, if it is, found any one bad enough.
+The ease, you see, is for _you_."
+
+"I see--I see."
+
+They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on
+it; after which Sir Luke asked: "And that clever lady--she goes with
+you?"
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with me, I hope, to the end."
+
+He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of what?"
+
+"Well--of everything."
+
+"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end of everything is far
+off. This, you know, I'm hoping," said Sir Luke, "is only the
+beginning." And the next question he risked might have been a part of
+his hope. "Just you and she together?"
+
+"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've seen more here than of
+any one and who are just the right people for us."
+
+He thought a moment. "You'll be four women together then?"
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans. But I think," she added as
+if to say what she saw would reassure him, "that we shall not be
+unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of 'life' I
+suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
+
+"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a moment during which he
+might have been appreciating her raciness--"when I talk of life I think
+I mean more than anything else the beautiful show of it, in its
+freshness, made by young persons of your age. So go on as you are. I
+see more and more _how_ you are. You can't," he went so far as to say
+for pleasantness, "better it."
+
+She took it from him with a great show of peace. "One of our companions
+will be Miss Croy, who came with me here first. It's in _her_ that life
+is splendid; and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me. But
+she's above all magnificent in herself. So that if you'd like," she
+freely threw out, "to see _her_--"
+
+"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to you, for clearly it
+will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that if she's to be at Venice I _shall_
+see her?"
+
+"We must arrange it--I shan't fail. She moreover has a friend who may
+also be there"--Milly found herself going on to this. "He's likely to
+come, I believe, for he always follows her."
+
+Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
+
+"_He_ is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't care for him."
+
+Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter with him?"
+
+"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
+
+Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
+
+"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
+
+"And he's to be in Venice?"
+
+"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll be constantly
+about with her."
+
+"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
+
+"As we're great friends--yes."
+
+"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four women alone."
+
+"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen. But he won't," Milly
+pursued in the same wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
+
+"No--I see. But can't you help him?"
+
+"Can't _you?_" Milly after a moment quaintly asked. Then for the joke
+of it she explained. "I'm putting you, you see, in relation with my
+entourage."
+
+It might have been for the joke of it too, by this time, that her
+eminent friend fell in. "But if this gentleman _isn't_ of your
+'entourage '? I mean if he's of--what do you call her?--Miss Croy's.
+Unless indeed you also take an interest in him."
+
+"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
+
+"You think there may be then some chance for him?"
+
+"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
+
+"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke next asked, "have I
+to do with him?"
+
+"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to be there, so may he
+be. And also that we shan't in that case be simply four dreary women."
+
+He considered her as if at this point she a little tried his patience.
+"_You're_ the least 'dreary' woman I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you
+know? There's no reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
+
+"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
+
+"The conviction--strong already when I had seen you once--is
+strengthened in me by having seen your friend. There's no doubt about
+it. The world's before you."
+
+"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
+
+"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure. We talked about
+you--and freely. I don't deny that. But it shows me I don't require of
+you the impossible."
+
+She was now on her feet. "I think I know what you require of me."
+
+"Nothing, for you," he went on, "_is_ impossible. So go on." He
+repeated it again--wanting her so to feel that to-day he saw it.
+"You're all right."
+
+"Well," she smiled--"keep me so."
+
+"Oh you'll get away from me."
+
+"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with her gentle eyes on him.
+
+She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he thus for a moment did
+keep her. Something then, while he seemed to think if there were
+anything more, came back to him; though something of which there wasn't
+too much to be made. "Of course if there's anything I _can_ do for your
+friend: I mean the gentleman you speak of--?" He gave out in short that
+he was ready.
+
+"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
+
+"Mr. Densher--is that his name?"
+
+"Yes--but his case isn't so dreadful." She had within a minute got away
+from that.
+
+"No doubt--if _you_ take an interest." She had got away, but it was as
+if he made out in her eyes--though they also had rather got away--a
+reason for calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can do--?"
+
+She looked at him while she thought, while she smiled. "I'm afraid
+there's really nothing one can do."
+
+
+III
+
+Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into
+possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was
+still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool
+pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun
+on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played
+over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of
+purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old
+reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all
+flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded
+and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of
+the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller
+lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with
+the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
+eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,
+though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count as
+effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she had
+been alone--really to call alone--since she had left London, it
+ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the great
+Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
+and Americans, had entered her service during the last hours of
+all--had crossed from Paris, after multiplied _pourparlers_ with Mrs.
+Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on
+purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had
+dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures
+of his experience. She had judged him in advance--polyglot and
+universal, very dear and very deep--as probably but a swindler finished
+to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian
+hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket,
+which, as she had instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
+glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common
+consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed
+the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely,
+grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them
+and what most expressed it.
+
+She had seen quickly enough what was happening--the usual thing again,
+yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of five minutes,
+understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so
+much of the care with which she must be taken up as of the care with
+which she must be let down. All the world understood her, all the world
+had got hold; but for nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
+close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender. Gracefully,
+respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and
+the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black
+professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too
+old to make love, but with an art still to make money--did he on
+occasion convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious
+career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal.
+The others had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment
+was special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:
+there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between them
+every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on
+the surface. He had taken his place already for her among those who
+were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in the constant
+perspective, for the final function, side by side with poor Susie--whom
+she was now pitying more than ever for having to be herself so sorry
+and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact of a
+residuary legatee--which was a character that could be definitely worn;
+whereas she could see Susie, in the event of her death, in no character
+at all, Susie being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
+makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,
+with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked to
+believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he probably
+knew--he didn't after all know everything--in having, for the wind-up
+of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly
+established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At
+Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it
+can be at all managed--you know what I mean--some fine old rooms,
+wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the
+more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
+picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves,
+with a cook, don't you know?--with servants, frescoes, tapestries,
+antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement."
+
+The proof of how he better and better understood her was in all the
+place; as to his masterly acquisition of which she had from the first
+asked no questions. She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
+and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the transaction that
+mainly concerned her she would soon enough become acquainted, and his
+connexion with such values as she would then find noted could scarce
+help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming people,
+conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her,
+and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes
+alike over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what
+they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated,
+and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed.
+Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a
+painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about
+with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable
+character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us
+back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this
+October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly
+to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the
+sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;
+always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
+penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid
+voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she
+had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these
+had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent
+her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or
+threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a
+multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett
+as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a
+rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
+Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the
+Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;
+improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers
+waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends
+in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the
+addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more
+insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by
+Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at
+Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
+Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"
+to which they had opened the door.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.
+Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the
+concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of
+the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so
+different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising
+them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once
+sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
+many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly
+fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the
+acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the
+eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,
+possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own
+sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of
+her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she
+mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such
+a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence
+induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the
+light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good
+time, and yet too rich and too befriended--an intuitive cunning within
+her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in
+short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert
+wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
+compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
+things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't
+have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw
+that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York
+what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a
+series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on
+Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it
+had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a
+century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool
+controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her
+particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the
+person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,
+aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
+simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,
+like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too
+that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this
+young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,
+on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made
+up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily
+put off the mask.
+
+These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken
+by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and
+not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side
+whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They
+flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have
+flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but
+the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been
+suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we
+say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by
+either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
+relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing
+to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in
+the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly to Kate's
+advantage: Milly didn't quite see what her friend could keep back, was
+possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas
+it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a
+treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, an abject
+affection--concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase
+of such states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively bold
+and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the
+lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was
+the truth about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus was a
+wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the
+far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of
+the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight
+that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a
+Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk,
+of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
+that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung
+about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and
+that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who
+exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening
+gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick dark
+braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train,
+makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief
+and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense.
+This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
+they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their
+words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be
+tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled
+to a care of what they said.
+
+There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular, of the
+probability that if she wasn't so proud she might be pitied with more
+comfort--more to the person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
+sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate attitude, that
+this marvellous mixture of her weakness and of her strength, her peril,
+if such it were, and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly
+interesting. Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much
+Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our
+Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
+moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
+about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate
+imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good
+conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to
+be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of
+their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as
+Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be
+explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt
+contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have
+contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:
+to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived
+so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;
+though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of
+the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With
+so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
+withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a
+nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of
+chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they
+took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to
+face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of
+harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,
+in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness
+need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.
+
+She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for
+weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her
+companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed
+and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
+wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a
+word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the
+beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care
+where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:
+so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was
+conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
+as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for
+her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased
+respites. Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
+strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all
+the same--weren't they?--those experiments tried with the truth that
+consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now
+playing with the thought that Eugenio might _inclusively_ assist her:
+he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really
+quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete
+use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It
+had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she
+should just stupidly and awkwardly _want_--any more want a life, a
+career, a consciousness, than want a house, a carriage or a cook. It
+was as if she had had from him a kind of expert professional measure of
+what he was in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
+thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could closely compare with
+a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's part that--at least in Palazzo
+Leporelli when mornings were fine--showed as almost amateurish. Sir
+Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and leave the rest to
+_me_"--which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared
+indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference to a
+different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor
+reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn't sure of having at her
+command. Eugenio--this was the difference--could name, could reckon,
+and prices of _his_ kind were things she had never suffered to scare
+her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for anything,
+for everything, and here was simply a new view of the sufficient
+quantity. She amused herself--for it came to that, since Eugenio was
+there to sign the receipt--with possibilities of meeting the bill. She
+was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to
+pay too much. What else--if such were points at which your most trusted
+servant failed--was the use of being, as the dear Susies of earth
+called you, a princess in a palace?
+
+She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful
+while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer
+blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
+it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was _in_ it, as in the ark
+of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why
+shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,
+never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than
+to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the
+real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the
+positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she
+had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a
+little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started
+on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
+Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was
+following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.
+He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never
+before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with
+patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
+though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd
+thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what
+had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five
+minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to
+see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,
+as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.
+He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him
+very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude
+more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was
+neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for
+the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to
+her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so
+thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the
+great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the
+high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears
+themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her
+consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf
+of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His
+presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how
+kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,
+unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for
+such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she
+hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
+receive him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly,
+as delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil
+it--these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they might
+have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge. She gave an
+account of her companions while he on his side failed to press her
+about them, even though describing his appearance, so unheralded, as
+the result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been shivering at
+Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing
+where they all were, he had simply caught the first train. He explained
+how he had known where they were; he had heard--what more
+natural?--from their friends, Milly's and his. He mentioned this
+betimes, but it was with his mention, singularly, that the girl became
+conscious of her inner question about his reason. She noticed his
+plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently
+noticed also that it didn't affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had
+written to him, Kate apparently--and this was interesting--had written
+to him; but their design presumably hadn't been that he should come and
+sit there as if rather relieved, so far as _they_ were concerned, at
+postponements. He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!" when she sketched
+their probable morning for him, under Eugenio's care and Mrs.
+Stringham's--sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he should
+overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would leave him
+temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a little, operated
+for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
+had known where they all were from the others, but it was not for the
+others that, in his actual dispositions, he had come. That, strange to
+say, was a pity; for, stranger still to say, she could have shown him
+more confidence if he himself had had less intention. His intention so
+chilled her, from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just
+for the pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of
+their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax of
+her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to
+reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten minutes,
+with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this clearly
+pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even though he
+couldn't know it--amends for her not having been originally sure, for
+instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
+human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at
+Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present
+benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
+that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the
+charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the
+pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for
+his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she
+mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general
+prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced
+her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find
+her susceptible.
+
+
+IV
+
+She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the
+whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful
+hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her
+visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection
+of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state
+in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in
+its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke
+with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled
+afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,
+yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as
+in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
+remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but
+the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they
+moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not
+to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her
+friend.
+
+"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase
+in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and
+bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
+
+She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not
+understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that
+the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"
+she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you
+happily found me."
+
+Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go
+about?"
+
+She looked over the place, the storey above the apartments in which she
+had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting
+the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the
+arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the
+canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
+white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But
+there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to
+anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her
+adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of
+not stirring. "I go about just here."
+
+"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"
+
+They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded
+palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a
+minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
+saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on
+the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the
+window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her
+forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
+answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She
+would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible
+for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even
+on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that
+from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless
+really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him
+thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the
+relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of
+relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with
+the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been
+determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be
+mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed
+within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
+herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what
+might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't
+her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage
+of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in
+whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be
+most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on
+her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive
+attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,
+appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the
+doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,
+disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:
+she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the
+handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.
+
+She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits
+her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush
+should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had
+early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact
+as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the
+present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of
+imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's
+cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her
+imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified
+itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her
+companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
+her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was
+that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and
+humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to
+be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as
+threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,
+making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
+probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what
+remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper
+incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
+had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?
+If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to
+raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better
+service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
+strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
+sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she
+wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would
+keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for
+himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded
+them within and without did so much toward making appreciative
+stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she
+hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she
+were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of
+it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,
+"and I don't want in the least to give it up."
+
+"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's
+_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"
+
+"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die
+here."
+
+Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a
+person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of
+darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.
+But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you
+in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and
+you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself
+here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion
+for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."
+
+"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"
+
+"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
+
+"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.
+England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my
+form."
+
+"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy
+it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for
+money enough."
+
+"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I
+shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking
+sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my
+great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and
+hunt me up."
+
+"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.
+
+"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;
+rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."
+
+"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better
+for you than that."
+
+"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"
+
+He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of
+some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression
+of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the
+view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you remember
+something I said to you that day at Matcham--or at least fully meant
+to?"
+
+"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It's another life."
+
+"Certainly it will be--I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it
+to represent for you. Matcham, you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I
+think I tried to rub that into you a little."
+
+She met him with the full memory of what he had tried--not an inch, not
+an ounce of which was lost to her. "What I meant is that it seems a
+hundred years ago."
+
+"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember
+it," he pursued, "is that I was quite aware of what might have been
+said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I
+should perhaps be able to look after you--well, rather better. Rather
+better, of course, than certain other persons in particular."
+
+"Precisely--than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark promptly amended.
+
+It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could
+show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she
+had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
+made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the
+tears it had started at the time. "You could do so much for me, yes. I
+perfectly understood you."
+
+"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained, "to _fix_ your
+confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place."
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, you did--it's just exactly now, my confidence, where
+you put it then. The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now
+to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel
+you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."
+
+He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said
+them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are
+you _really_ in any trouble?"
+
+To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a
+little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything
+that's impossible. There are much better things you can do."
+
+He looked straight at it and then straight over it. "It's too monstrous
+that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know."
+
+"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a
+slight hardness. "Do you want to know if I'm badly ill?"
+
+The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested
+the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark
+winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude
+together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can
+see you suffer and not say a word?"
+
+"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public
+nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in
+itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
+anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And
+you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the
+remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for
+_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been
+unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm
+very badly ill."
+
+"And you don't do anything?"
+
+"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.
+One can't do more than live."
+
+"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why
+haven't you advice?"
+
+He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty
+things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most
+absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in
+the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in
+talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
+
+"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
+
+"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;
+now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself
+as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There
+she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she
+added, "have missed everything."
+
+"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,
+to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person
+in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call
+it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely
+require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you
+believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."
+
+Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or
+almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much
+worried."
+
+"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry
+you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.
+"You're not loved enough."
+
+"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
+
+"Why to get the full good of it."
+
+Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full
+good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in
+return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I
+might find myself forced to love _you?_"
+
+"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the
+least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion
+somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had
+absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single
+intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such
+shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,
+and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of
+existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is
+it inconceivable to you that you might try?"
+
+"To be so favourably affected by you--?"
+
+"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.
+
+Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"
+
+"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
+however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
+expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
+almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
+which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
+healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
+do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
+And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
+of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
+the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
+she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
+itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
+against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
+own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
+encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
+gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
+eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
+find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
+dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
+speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no
+decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
+practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
+only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
+alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
+wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
+about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
+disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
+in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
+like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
+brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
+having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
+her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
+to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
+innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
+some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
+meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
+it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
+couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
+fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
+had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
+her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
+quite ceased to be so.
+
+By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
+walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
+the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
+independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
+one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
+in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
+of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
+that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
+was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
+not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
+was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
+native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
+assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
+him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like
+another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the
+rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of
+his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said,
+reappeared for her--breaking out moreover, with an effect of
+strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of
+health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in
+the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a
+charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. "It's true, you know, all
+the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up."
+He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared.
+"Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference
+doesn't notice. And that's why I know that _I_ notice."
+
+"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather
+that affection was supposed to be blind."
+
+"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
+
+"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic
+complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of--are
+they beauties?"
+
+"Yes, for those who care for you--as every one does. Everything about
+you is a beauty. Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the
+seriousness of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should have _any_
+trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right
+thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know? You're the
+first young woman of your time. I mean what I say." He looked, to do
+him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear--simply so
+competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
+the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all
+in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
+if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
+simply to torment us--you were born to make us happy. Therefore you
+must listen to us."
+
+She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her
+mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you--that's just what I mustn't do.
+The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
+to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I
+give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be--"
+And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give--there you are;
+stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't
+listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
+can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
+say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
+
+He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
+because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
+"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
+in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
+if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
+
+She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
+point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
+events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
+being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
+his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
+nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
+wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
+usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
+convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
+first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
+allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
+you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
+listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
+listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
+you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
+older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
+at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
+honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
+in the world."
+
+When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
+more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
+had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
+apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
+coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
+asked.
+
+It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
+Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
+attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
+the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
+
+Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do you want me to marry
+Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar! But she
+wouldn't in any way have that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
+isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There's no cold
+world for you at all, I think," she went on; "nothing but a very warm
+and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment
+you choose to take it up."
+
+He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete and he
+had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you
+want me to marry Kate Croy?"
+
+"Mrs. Lowder wants it--I do no wrong, I think, in saying that; and she
+understands moreover that you know she does."
+
+Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it; and it wasn't obscure
+to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman.
+"It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But what's
+the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
+
+Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point out. "Because she's
+the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and
+because if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact I do as it
+is." It was a luxury of response.
+
+"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But that can't further
+the case of _all._"
+
+"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If the case of one's bad,
+the case of another's good. I don't see what you have to fear from any
+one else," she said, "save through your being foolish, this way, about
+_me_."
+
+So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making of
+what she didn't see. "Is it your idea--since we're talking of these
+things in these ways--that the young lady you describe in such
+superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
+
+"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But don't be humble." She
+was almost gay.
+
+It was this apparently, at last, that was too much for him. "But don't
+you really _know?_"
+
+As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence she could
+pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that
+a particular person's very much in love with her."
+
+"Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with
+a particular person."
+
+"Ah I beg your pardon!"--and Milly quite flushed at having so crude a
+blunder imputed to her. "You're wholly mistaken."
+
+"It's not true?"
+
+"It's not true."
+
+His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very sure?"
+
+"As sure as one can be"--and Milly's manner could match it--"when one
+has every assurance. I speak on the best authority."
+
+He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
+
+"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
+
+"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
+about her's so good."
+
+"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
+her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
+you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
+from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
+emphasis, pulled up.
+
+"You take it from Kate?"
+
+"From Kate herself."
+
+"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
+
+"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
+given me her word for it."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
+word?"
+
+It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
+instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
+little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
+_you_ call her word?"
+
+"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
+
+Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
+especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
+that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
+things."
+
+Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
+of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
+
+Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
+sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
+the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
+saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
+Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
+
+"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
+interest--"
+
+"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
+
+Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
+again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."
+
+At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
+thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
+had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
+couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
+signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further;
+he fell back on the spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
+rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should
+she be swearing to you?"
+
+She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to herself; which
+disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the
+aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
+part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you, we're such
+tremendous friends."
+
+"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have
+stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as
+if he had in a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
+Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to leave-taking, that
+she had given rather more than she intended or than she should be able,
+when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
+Strange enough in fact that he had had from her, about herself--and,
+under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight--what no
+one else had had: neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor
+Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was
+aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take
+himself off, so that she might either recover it or bear the loss
+better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time
+saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
+sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed
+for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most
+decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the
+theory that she might whimsically want him--which she never, in her
+caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes
+over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
+could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too noiseless almost for
+her nerves, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a
+ship--Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
+held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card. Lord Mark--and as
+if also for admiration of him--delayed his departure to let her receive
+it; on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her
+presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that
+even for dealing with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its
+disappearance. The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had
+asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
+come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
+the staircase.
+
+"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
+while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."
+
+"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
+great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
+judgement of his identity heard and noted once before
+
+
+
+
+BOOK EIGHTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
+more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
+discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
+polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
+mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
+touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
+but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
+it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
+made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
+at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
+been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
+pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
+notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
+and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
+lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
+tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
+should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
+shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
+end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
+independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
+occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
+with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
+humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
+befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
+in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
+his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
+figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
+his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he
+responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
+arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
+weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
+home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
+museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
+something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
+for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
+subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
+lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
+white papers.
+
+He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
+there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
+the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
+and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
+Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
+two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
+even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
+had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
+sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
+taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
+parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
+that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
+especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
+up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
+him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
+whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
+of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
+landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
+such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
+intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
+alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
+strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
+easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
+when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
+made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
+with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
+much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
+her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
+his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
+angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
+complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
+star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
+American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
+certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
+was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
+in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
+always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
+least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
+admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
+wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
+palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
+a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
+therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
+the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
+they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
+through space.
+
+Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
+suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
+his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
+see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
+image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
+the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
+his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
+Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
+been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
+difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
+which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
+of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
+make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
+even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
+across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
+past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
+general necessity of which he was conscious? That necessity of making
+the best was the instinct--as he indeed himself knew--of a man somehow
+aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he
+took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
+the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute
+and admit the light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly
+because he was nervous that he _could_ go straight; yet if that
+condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in
+short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the
+proprieties--once he could face at all remaining there--reduced
+themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him,
+and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one
+foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
+management of him. It wasn't that she had put him in danger--to be in
+real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
+him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having; an exasperation, a
+resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
+to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It
+was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless
+that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from
+the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called
+it, _bon prince_ with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity,
+the contempt, in the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
+savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There
+were things enough, goodness knew--for it was the moral of his
+plight--that he couldn't afford; but what had had a charm for him if
+not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way?
+of not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap
+edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
+actually as present as ever--how he had admired and envied what he
+called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from his
+own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only
+it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now, ever so
+characteristically, standing out in her.
+
+It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily, that he was just
+where he was and that he was above all just _how_ he was. The proof of
+a decent reaction in him against so much passivity was, with no great
+richness, that he at least knew--knew, that is, how he was, and how
+little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was,
+for the moment, wistful--that above all described it; that was so large
+a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him,
+on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question
+connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered
+soreness, his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame
+were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
+regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
+conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved,
+had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously--ridiculously
+so far as just complacently--exposed to. How little it _could_ be
+complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had
+moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it,
+was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. How
+could he know--that was the point--without putting the matter to the
+test? It had been right to be _bon prince,_ and the joy, something of
+the pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now
+compatible with the impulse to look into their account; but he held his
+breath a little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that,
+whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
+done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea of
+the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself,
+in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
+night--"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of--to the glimmer,
+more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers
+on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had
+been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and
+reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he had found his answer
+to the idea that had grown so importunate. Since a proof of his will
+was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him--it lurked there
+on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little pier had from
+time to time accosted him; but it was a part of the play of his
+nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he
+walked, very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto.
+The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
+with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
+ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
+their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
+veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
+in on the morrow.
+
+He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
+first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
+merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
+he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
+in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
+gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
+evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
+in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
+high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
+this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
+his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
+as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
+go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
+autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
+It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
+things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
+as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
+soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
+view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
+company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
+to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
+foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
+gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
+response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
+instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
+shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
+failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
+planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
+She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
+her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
+announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing
+and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
+two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
+by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
+his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
+she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
+friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
+there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
+point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
+would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
+Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
+recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
+in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
+was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
+was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
+impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
+appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
+gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
+motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
+it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
+before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
+dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
+in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
+of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
+hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
+game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
+one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
+him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
+advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
+himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
+possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
+already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
+beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
+things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
+but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
+would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple were for
+_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
+admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
+to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.
+
+That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
+came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
+plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
+hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
+act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
+in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
+supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
+the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
+the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
+familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
+after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
+insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
+idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
+that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
+how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
+reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
+hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
+written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
+his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
+find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
+ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
+as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
+Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
+had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
+had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
+remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
+attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
+were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
+little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
+off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
+solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
+simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
+with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she
+had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate
+declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his
+general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits,
+to be a mode of life like another--certainly better than some, and
+particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he
+had really come for--this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the
+style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high
+wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when
+there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
+wrong.
+
+In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing,
+the interest of seeing--and quite for the first time in his
+life--whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to
+happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never
+doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure--he who had never
+thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was
+able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his
+hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was
+finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
+_campi_, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
+at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the
+enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall
+deserted--during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to
+the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are
+the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but
+as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of
+Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as
+painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that
+departure wouldn't curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and
+that above all, as he hadn't really "begun" anything, had only
+submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
+beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
+superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications
+was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman--to which
+was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that
+complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of
+the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten
+to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
+women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
+never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
+had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
+a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
+from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
+to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
+brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
+suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
+brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
+was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
+gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
+poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
+dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
+conditions, than any ever known to him.
+
+This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
+scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
+himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
+frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
+he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
+her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
+observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
+effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
+imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
+dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
+ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
+well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
+off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
+that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
+advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
+even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
+in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
+really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
+were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
+effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
+his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
+propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
+breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
+passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
+himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
+state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
+produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
+which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
+her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
+at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
+influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
+had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
+from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
+it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
+with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
+more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
+at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
+in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
+Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
+as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
+in New York.
+
+
+II
+
+There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
+he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
+answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
+His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
+Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
+chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
+the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
+rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
+grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
+note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
+visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
+of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
+expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
+very much out of our meetings?"
+
+"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
+I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
+Maud."
+
+"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand what Aunt Maud
+gets."
+
+"Exactly so--and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so
+fascinated with the question. _She_ gives me no light; she's
+prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural--!"
+
+"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate I shall be making my
+reflexions about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on,
+"that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that
+what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The
+very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for
+yourself, is that when she adopts a view she--well, to her own sense,
+really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any
+other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've
+often thought success comes to her"--Kate continued to study the
+phenomenon--"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to
+prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of
+everything, become the right one."
+
+Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response.
+"Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn't not
+'understand.' I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently
+explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he
+pursued: "Does she think she terrorises _us?_" To which he added while,
+without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
+believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He
+knew now that he was probing the girl deep--something told him so; but
+that was a reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that you
+dislike me?"
+
+To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong. "You could yourself
+easily put it there!"
+
+He wondered. "By telling her so?"
+
+"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; "I don't ask that
+of you."
+
+"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask, you know, so little--!"
+
+There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist
+the impulse to take up. "I'm perfectly justified in what I've asked,"
+she quietly returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their eyes
+again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. "You're
+not a bit unhappy."
+
+"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
+
+"It doesn't practically show--which is enough for Aunt Maud. You're
+wonderful, you're beautiful," Kate said; "and if you really want to
+know whether I believe you're doing it you may take from me perfectly
+that I see it coming." With which, by a quick transition, as if she had
+settled the case, she asked him the hour.
+
+"Oh only twelve-ten"--he had looked at his watch. "We've taken but
+thirteen minutes; we've time yet."
+
+"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
+
+Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of
+the Square. "They're still in their shop. They're safe for half an
+hour."
+
+"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
+
+This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco,
+always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber
+of amenity, favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
+middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse
+after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and
+pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast
+empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement
+and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice
+of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the
+parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual
+feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions
+hadn't yet been, and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
+by the lace-shop, in one of the _loggie_, where, shortly before, they
+had left them for a look-in--the expression was artfully Densher's--at
+Saint Mark's. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought
+this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn't
+been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that
+could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
+in presence--in presence of every one; every one consisting at this
+juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly.
+But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become
+special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of
+their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had
+assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the least
+the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the
+fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace,
+Milly had not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom and use
+had hitherto seemed fairly established; on his coming round, day after
+day--eight days had been now so conveniently marked--their friends,
+Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her
+till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he
+had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there
+was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He
+_had_, for Mrs. Lowder--he couldn't help it while sitting there--the
+air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
+sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess
+each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that
+she hadn't been well enough to see him.
+
+That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which,
+gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all
+bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
+they--the rest of them--simply looked at each other. It was
+lurid--lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately--that they
+had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above
+all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to _that_ degree, the hush of
+gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the
+most the case--that of the guests--could permit itself. The hush, for
+that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the
+gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she
+hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had
+produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one
+quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for
+the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
+his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
+pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs.
+Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any
+of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in
+exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure,
+approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at
+home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the
+slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a
+preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond
+dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
+away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had,
+the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality in her own
+failure of real acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
+sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had by this time a
+corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at
+Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action,
+ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the
+most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest.
+They were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there were too
+many persons, at least three, and too many things, between them; but
+meanwhile something was preparing that would draw them closer. He
+scarce knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when
+it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood
+him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the
+understanding of every one else would fail and this deep little
+person's alone survive.
+
+Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that
+hung about our young friends; these had been the small accidents and
+quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some
+sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they
+stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so
+notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than
+any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from
+earshot, with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession,
+they could say what they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence
+of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It
+was most of all for them, moreover, as if this very quantity, seated on
+their lips in the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
+ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each a fear.
+There might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the
+silence resting on her last words. "What did you mean just now that I
+can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you will,
+I don't see, from the moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
+lying."
+
+Well, she could tell him. "You can say something both handsome and
+sincere to her about Milly--whom you honestly like so much. That
+wouldn't be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an effect. You
+don't, you know, say much about her."
+
+And Kate put before him the fruit of observation. "You don't, you know,
+speak of her at all."
+
+"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told you so?" Then as the girl,
+for answer, only seemed to bethink herself, "You must have
+extraordinary conversations!" he exclaimed.
+
+Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary conversations."
+
+His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed to hear more
+about them; but there was something in her own, apparently, that
+defeated the opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a different
+matter, which had been in his mind a week, yet in respect to which he
+had had no chance so good as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such
+wonderful things pass between you, what she makes of the incident, the
+other day, of Lord Mark's so very superficial visit?--his having spent
+here, as I gather, but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
+friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off by the same
+night's train, for seeing any one else. What can she make of his not
+having waited to see _you_, or to see herself--with all he owes her?"
+
+"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He came to make Milly his
+offer of marriage--he came for nothing but that. As Milly wholly
+declined it his business was for the time at an end. He couldn't quite
+on the spot turn round to make up to _us_."
+
+Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of taste on such an
+adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't see it. But Densher was lost in
+another thought. "Do you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
+leaving her, that was what had been taking place between them?"
+
+"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
+
+"What sort of a blundering weathercock then _is_ he?" the young man
+went on in his wonder.
+
+"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled. "Do you pretend that
+Milly didn't tell you?"
+
+"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
+
+Kate continued to smile. "You _are_ in love with her, you know."
+
+He gave her another long look. "Why, since she has refused him, should
+my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think
+well of him for such treatment of the other persons I've mentioned, and
+I feel I don't understand from you why Mrs. Lowder should."
+
+"She doesn't--but she doesn't care," Kate explained. "You know
+perfectly the terms on which lots of London people live together even
+when they're supposed to live very well. He's not committed to us--he
+was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied man," she asked, "always have
+his try?"
+
+"And come back afterwards, with confidence in a welcome, to the victim
+of his inconstancy?"
+
+Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of as a victim. "Oh but
+he has _had_ his try at _me_. So it's all right."
+
+"Through your also having, you mean, refused him?"
+
+She balanced an instant during which Densher might have just wondered
+if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped
+on the right side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
+discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on--now as lucid as
+ever--"considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him in respect
+to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
+As the case stands that makes no difference."
+
+Densher laughed out. "It isn't _his_ merit that he has failed."
+
+"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark. He's just what he
+was, and what he knew he was. It's not for me either to reflect on him
+after I've so treated him."
+
+"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated him beautifully."
+
+"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be jealous." But before he
+could take it up she had more to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle
+you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
+else can displease her. What does she see but that Milly herself
+recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a
+recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
+your own recognition. Out of which she therefore gets it that the more
+you have for Milly the less you have for me."
+
+There were moments again--we know that from the first they had been
+numerous--when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her
+mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at
+once to conviction and to reaction. And this effect, however it be
+named, now broke into his tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have
+for you--!"
+
+It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. "Luckily for us we may
+really consider she doesn't. So successful have we been."
+
+"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what you give me, and I
+suppose that, to be consistent--to stand on my feet where I do stand at
+all--I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to
+me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It
+seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me. It never
+seems to me somehow what I may expect of _you_. There's so much you
+_don't_ give me."
+
+She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I don't--?"
+
+"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me none."
+
+"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment ventured to ask.
+
+"Your doing something for me."
+
+She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing _this_ for you? Do you
+call this nothing?"
+
+"Nothing at all."
+
+"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
+
+They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. "I
+thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you
+risk nothing!"
+
+It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he
+had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant moreover that she
+didn't like it--either the being so or the being seen, for she soon
+spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that
+produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of
+indulgence. "What then do you wish me to risk?"
+
+The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would
+have said, worse. "What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this
+rate that I _am_?" Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely
+disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't.
+Deep, always, was his sense of life with her--deep as it had been from
+the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two
+winters ago they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for
+unguarded, ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
+intenser faith between them this was because he believed it could reach
+her and she could meet it. "I can go on perhaps," he said, "with help.
+But I can't go on without."
+
+She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. "We
+ought to be there--I mean when they come out."
+
+"They _won't_ come out--not yet. And I don't care if they do." To which
+he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that
+his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make:
+"Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?" It broke
+from him in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only _take_ me!"
+
+It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after
+all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than
+bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her
+an instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less pulled herself
+together to reply. "Do you want to kill her?"
+
+He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt
+Maud?"
+
+"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."
+
+Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"
+
+He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had
+naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank
+you very much."
+
+Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already
+risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance
+of it I'll go this very night."
+
+"Then go," said Kate Croy.
+
+He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what
+was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but
+much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They
+walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had
+become of a sudden, in all truth, a split--as if the basis of his
+departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
+recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the
+arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that
+produced for them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any your
+idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
+
+"Come to you?"
+
+"Come to me."
+
+"How? Where?"
+
+She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in
+her being so equal to him. "To my rooms, which are perfectly possible,
+and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt,
+in view. We can arrange it--with two grains of courage. People in our
+case always arrange it." She listened as for the good information, and
+there was support for him--since it was a question of his going step by
+step--in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had
+in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence
+of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
+possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to
+_see_ her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
+light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
+listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet
+done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
+beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a
+fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. _With_
+you I can do it--I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself.
+Without you--I'll be hanged! And I must be sure."
+
+She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased
+to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing her close, and though
+they had again, for the time, stopped walking, his talk--for others at
+a distance--might have been, in the matchless place, that of any
+impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. On
+possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
+afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of which his eyes moved
+while she twiddled her parasol. She now, however, made a motion that
+confronted them finally with the opposite end. Then only she
+spoke--"Please take your hand out of my arm." He understood at once:
+she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others
+from their place of purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
+was all right. The others had seen them as well and waited for them,
+complacent enough, under one of the arches. They themselves too--he
+argued that Kate would argue--looked perfectly ready, decently patient,
+properly accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse--always
+by Kate's system--than a pair of the children of a supercivilised age
+making the best of an awkwardness. They didn't nevertheless hurry--that
+would overdo it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
+felt, ever so distinctly--it was with this he faced Mrs. Lowder--that
+he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted. There was more
+to come--everything; he had by no means, with his companion, had it all
+out. Yet what he was possessed of was real--the fact that she hadn't
+thrown over his lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
+this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled was in itself
+of the nature of bliss. The danger had dropped--it was behind him there
+in the great sunny space. So far she was good for what he wanted.
+
+
+III
+
+She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening,
+and with further ground for it, the next sharpest question that had
+been on his lips in the morning--which his other preoccupation had
+then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity was again
+made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as
+usual, with the close of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them
+again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down
+later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where
+even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
+daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
+it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
+with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
+illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
+candles.
+
+"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"
+
+He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
+glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
+was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
+ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
+everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
+him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
+as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
+practically been none, that morning, on her explained
+non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
+awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
+licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
+the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
+function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
+against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
+was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
+himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
+curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
+have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
+have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
+was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
+established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
+feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
+deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
+interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
+cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
+have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
+represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
+the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
+his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
+wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
+terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
+fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
+no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
+rest was fully to come.
+
+He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
+of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
+experience."
+
+"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
+feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
+should like to say to you."
+
+"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.
+
+"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
+seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."
+
+He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
+was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
+of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
+with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."
+
+"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
+better."
+
+"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
+been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."
+
+"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
+only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
+point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
+
+Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
+You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
+little party."
+
+"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."
+
+"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
+for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
+mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
+It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
+dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
+effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
+should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
+charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
+thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
+Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
+the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
+attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
+everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
+few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
+respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
+ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
+_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
+see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
+too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
+was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
+her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
+
+He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
+into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
+
+"Well, that you'll stay on."
+
+"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
+he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
+
+"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
+songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
+arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
+in the picture."
+
+"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
+
+"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
+his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
+that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
+few days."
+
+Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
+comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
+had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
+smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
+pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
+unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
+acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
+explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
+partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
+for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
+would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
+of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
+infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
+these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
+on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
+thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
+breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
+floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very
+tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
+pinch, the pressure in London."
+
+But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the
+pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. "Oh the
+daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
+knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious
+deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've
+given up all to follow _her_. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't
+you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
+
+He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did;
+and he smiled for her kindly. "Do _you_ write about Venice?"
+
+"No; but I would--oh wouldn't I?--if I hadn't so completely given up.
+She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess--"
+
+"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
+
+"Precisely. There you are!"
+
+It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places
+at once. "I quite understand that she's yours. Only you see she's not
+mine." He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the
+moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder,
+who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he
+liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave
+him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in
+itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent
+and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could
+see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
+was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate
+wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
+way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then
+Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly
+what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the
+midst. Such perceptions made occasions--well, occasions for fairly
+wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to _be_
+the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in
+it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no
+male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a
+man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke
+Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of
+Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a
+distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
+vision of great London surgeons--if this one was a surgeon--as incisive
+all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
+ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was
+not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a
+train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
+Mark had caught him twice in the fact--the fact of his absurd posture;
+and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind
+Lord Mark.
+
+His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm
+her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess. "Of
+course she's not. You must do something first."
+
+Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be rather _she_ who must?"
+
+It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. "I
+see. No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in
+eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the
+wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
+
+It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course she has. No one could
+be more charming. She has treated me as if _I_ were somebody. Call her
+my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you
+altogether. Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see
+that it's quite court life."
+
+She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. "That's
+all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of
+the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
+vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
+
+"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you
+know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
+
+"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty
+here; it's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her
+court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
+settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
+
+He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. "I think you
+were right just now. One must do something first."
+
+"Well, you've done something."
+
+"No--I don't see that. I can do more."
+
+Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
+everything, you know."
+
+"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
+modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
+different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
+if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
+
+"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
+"He has wanted to come."
+
+"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"
+
+"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
+these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
+him easy."
+
+"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
+"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"
+
+"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
+one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."
+
+"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."
+
+"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."
+
+"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
+large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."
+
+It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
+him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
+showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
+he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
+Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."
+
+"And why should he get at me?"
+
+"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."
+
+All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
+immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
+sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
+to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
+half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
+ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
+call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
+Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
+opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
+of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
+a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
+some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
+seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
+no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
+together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
+the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
+the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
+care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
+without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
+had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
+the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
+differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
+let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
+into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
+if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
+not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
+traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
+almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
+accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
+yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
+him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
+the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
+challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
+having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
+reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
+change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
+was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
+amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
+visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
+Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
+perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
+the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
+couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
+himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
+put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
+cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
+a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
+nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
+between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
+ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
+consciousness brushed by him.
+
+She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
+some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
+inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
+that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
+appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
+display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
+her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
+at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
+he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
+company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
+her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
+world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
+in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
+most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
+was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
+word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
+introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
+toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
+affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
+what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
+done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
+done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
+interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
+from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
+him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
+getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
+could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
+or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
+herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
+that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
+pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
+her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
+such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that
+her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave
+him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted
+him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
+minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived
+long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to
+be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was
+a liking greater than Milly's--or it would be: he felt it in him to
+answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that
+Kate was somehow--for Kate--wanting in lustre. As a striking young
+presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly
+diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
+dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
+indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
+perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
+wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes--he had never forgotten
+it--the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She
+was, in her accepted effacement--it was actually her acceptance that
+made the beauty and repaired the damage--under her aunt's eyes now; but
+whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the
+less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an
+exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
+
+"Don't you think her good enough _now?_" Almost heedless of the danger
+of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
+renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little
+orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference
+enlivened by native humours--things quite in the line of old Venetian
+comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy--a real solvent of
+shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
+general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good
+manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but
+of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at
+all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
+
+"But she's _too_ nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything
+suits her so--especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll
+trouble you really to look at them." Densher, though aware he had seen
+them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
+done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
+kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
+face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
+wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
+wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
+of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
+presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
+somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
+the ground."
+
+"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
+her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
+companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
+figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
+that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
+under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
+power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
+one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
+well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
+such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
+he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
+that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
+Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
+nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
+a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
+presently going on.
+
+"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
+
+"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
+
+"Oh yes, I see myself!"
+
+As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
+and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
+ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
+character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
+was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
+well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
+Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
+difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
+represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was
+nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
+married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
+little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
+afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
+only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
+come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
+good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
+better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
+me about it. She evidently believes her better."
+
+"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"
+
+"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"
+
+"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
+Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
+be taught.
+
+"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
+
+It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
+nothing to do with it."
+
+"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
+
+But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
+doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
+watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
+kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
+inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
+been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
+
+"It's beautiful indeed."
+
+He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
+no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
+Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
+can't deceive him."
+
+Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
+you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
+sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"
+
+Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
+doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
+direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
+precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
+and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
+to you."
+
+"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
+
+"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
+to the previous question, "to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's
+necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can
+see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to
+do with me."
+
+"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
+
+"For not caring for _you?_ Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven
+by it into your relation with Milly--as all _that_ I leave you to him."
+
+"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for
+leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
+
+She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her
+place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of
+introducing him. "All the more reason why I should commit you then to
+Lady Wells."
+
+"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from
+afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at
+the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of
+whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when
+they were married. It was furthermore that the consciousness of
+something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically
+much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments--to
+say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of
+opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud,
+over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might
+pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to
+confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
+now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
+immediately to show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any
+finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're
+right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs.
+Lowder's being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued,
+"can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't
+deceive other people--not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He
+won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest
+friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud,
+who's her own."
+
+Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth
+his having kept her for. "Why will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing
+your way so little."
+
+Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick,
+its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to
+a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
+his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
+turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
+see it!"
+
+"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
+nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
+you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
+
+"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
+
+"To please you."
+
+"And how in the world can it please me?"
+
+Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
+density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
+Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
+there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
+
+He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
+corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
+queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
+But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
+on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
+so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
+
+"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
+
+Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
+difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
+yours does serve me."
+
+"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
+gains you time."
+
+"Time for what?"
+
+"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
+as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
+
+Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
+cryptic, love!"
+
+It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
+those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
+a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
+he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
+dreamed I should take for any human creature."
+
+Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
+reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
+can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
+again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
+make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. There need be nothing
+but our sense of each other."
+
+It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took
+up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. "You can tell
+her anything you like, anything whatever."
+
+"Mrs. Stringham? I _have_ nothing to tell her."
+
+"You can tell her about _us_. I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that
+you do still like me."
+
+It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still
+like me."
+
+She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat
+it."
+
+"I see. To Aunt Maud."
+
+"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate
+then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he
+was; and she showed it again as she went on. "_There_, accordingly, is
+your time."
+
+She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke,
+though not quite all at once. "You must let me say I _do_ see. Time for
+something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time
+too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
+
+"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of
+concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully
+made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll
+do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them."
+
+He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was
+only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly
+fitted. "Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
+
+It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no
+wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to
+their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
+bravely moved. "To marry her."
+
+"So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course
+have money?"
+
+It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had
+only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all
+along--to his stupidity, his timidity--it had been, it had been only,
+what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn't
+forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't
+pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as
+if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. "You'll in
+the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free."
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to Lady Wells."
+
+He never budged--there was too much else. "I'm to propose it
+then--marriage--on the spot?"
+
+There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he
+spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof.
+"Oh I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash
+your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act as you
+like and as you can."
+
+He thought again. "I'm far--as I sufficiently showed you this
+morning--from washing my hands of you."
+
+"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
+
+"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll come?"
+
+But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant.
+"You'll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance--well, quite ideal."
+
+"Your descriptions"--her "ideal" was such a touch!--"are prodigious.
+And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
+
+"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I
+don't like."
+
+It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into
+this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled
+his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the
+greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too,
+moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what _he_ did. But
+something else on his lips was uppermost. "What I don't make out then
+is how you can even bear it."
+
+"Well, when you know me better you'll find out how much I can bear."
+And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many
+implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually,
+"better" after his long sacrifice to knowledge--this for instance was a
+truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had
+mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own
+generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she
+might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying
+him on. "All you'll have to do will be to stay."
+
+"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
+
+"Oh dear no--we shall go."
+
+"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
+
+"In a day or two--straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now."
+
+It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then what becomes of
+Miss Theale?"
+
+"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her."
+
+He stared. "All alone?"
+
+She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. "You're old
+enough--with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
+
+Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it,
+as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these
+successive cues, that he was essentially "seeing what she would
+say"--an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a
+need to know her better to which she had a moment before done
+injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams that she would
+somewhere break down, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she
+wasn't breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. "Is
+your going Mrs. Lowder's idea?"
+
+"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I
+don't," she added, "refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of
+the general propriety of it."
+
+"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment. "It makes
+everything fit."
+
+"Everything."
+
+The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the
+while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he
+had in fact been looking at something else. "You leave her here then to
+die?"
+
+"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay. I mean," Kate
+explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
+
+"And that's all that's necessary?"
+
+Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we long ago agree that what
+she believes is the principal thing for us?"
+
+He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. "Oh yes.
+I can't deny it." Then he added: "So that if I stay--"
+
+"It won't"--she was prompt--"be our fault."
+
+"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
+
+"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
+
+Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing
+more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn't
+presently found: "But what if she doesn't accept me?"
+
+It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her
+tone the next moment touch him. "You can but try."
+
+"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard
+to propose to a dying girl."
+
+"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined in Kate the
+flash of _justesse_ he could perhaps most, on consideration, have
+admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the
+fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her
+eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
+literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to
+where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so
+that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side,
+happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them
+in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the
+value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together
+again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their
+plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
+only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out
+afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last
+spoke it was under cover.
+
+"I might stay, you know, without trying."
+
+"Oh to stay _is_ to try."
+
+"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?"
+
+"I don't see how you can have the appearance more."
+
+Densher waited. "You think it then possible she may _offer_ marriage?"
+
+"I can't think--if you really want to know--what she may _not_ offer!"
+
+"In the manner of princesses, who do such things?"
+
+"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
+
+Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be for me then to
+accept. But that's the way it must come."
+
+Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: "You'll,
+on your honour, stay then?"
+
+His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. "Without
+you, you mean?"
+
+"Without us."
+
+"And you yourselves go at latest--?"
+
+"Not later than Thursday."
+
+It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay, on my honour, if
+you'll come to me. On your honour."
+
+Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigour out of
+which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigour was more to
+him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the
+woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a "dodge."
+She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain.
+Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady Wells is
+tired of waiting: she's coming--see--to _us_."
+
+Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to
+cross, and he still had time. "If you decline to understand me I wholly
+decline to understand you. I'll do nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
+
+"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
+
+He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase
+was--and for vulgar triumphs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
+Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
+understand?"
+
+"I'll do everything."
+
+She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
+playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
+relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
+sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
+conflict. "Well, I understand."
+
+"On your honour?"
+
+"On my honour."
+
+"You'll come?"
+
+"I'll come."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK NINTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
+most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
+the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
+within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
+that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
+it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
+hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
+risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
+engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
+name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
+come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
+importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
+memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
+itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
+watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
+with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
+futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
+not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
+bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
+yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
+survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
+have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
+there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
+a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
+had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
+ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
+this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
+directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
+historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
+convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
+present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
+and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
+in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
+and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
+value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
+possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
+round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?
+
+It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
+treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
+finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
+key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
+and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
+other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
+hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
+whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
+as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
+be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
+play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
+remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
+orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
+slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
+importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
+occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
+acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
+sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
+approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
+third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
+profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
+broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
+anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
+up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
+engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
+the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
+way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been
+magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
+items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
+outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
+fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
+spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
+chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
+was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
+warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
+it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
+it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
+still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
+him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
+which the other name was careful action.
+
+Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
+immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
+faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
+straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
+time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
+was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
+as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
+always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
+had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
+after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
+free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
+_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
+it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
+left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
+made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
+inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
+what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
+virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
+there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
+Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
+that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
+case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
+well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He
+then fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at its
+highest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
+Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
+neither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged it
+was. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he was
+concerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
+and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more than
+anything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed
+a little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask
+himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for
+them--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
+and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,
+however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not to
+profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go
+directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered
+in Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go
+directly against Milly.
+
+To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,
+from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was
+possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on
+the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactly
+why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of
+the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach
+out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It
+was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be
+almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and
+call it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,
+of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
+couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered
+about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe
+it; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, he
+could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he
+was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet
+Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never
+took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none
+the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving
+them alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
+with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
+supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
+pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
+three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
+degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
+incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
+Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
+some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
+last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
+induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
+lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
+respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
+only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
+palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
+in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
+
+Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
+ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
+creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
+relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
+very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
+to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
+young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
+truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
+way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
+didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
+following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
+which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
+him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
+have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
+sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
+token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
+had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
+sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
+London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
+appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,
+out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
+uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
+meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
+everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
+by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
+their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
+would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
+so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
+for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
+half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
+hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
+mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
+thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
+letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
+inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
+yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
+
+These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
+whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
+on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
+Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
+felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
+sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
+the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
+to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
+inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
+scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
+letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
+of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
+Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
+difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
+explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.
+
+The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"
+
+"I hope to begin it."
+
+"It's something you haven't begun?"
+
+"Well, only just."
+
+"And since you came?"
+
+She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
+easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
+ground."
+
+Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper.
+"I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."
+
+"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to
+repair that ravage."
+
+"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
+
+"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mind
+anything."
+
+"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your
+days."
+
+He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh
+I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."
+And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he
+visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for
+comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
+also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
+effort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was so
+interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he
+found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
+answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
+particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea
+with him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
+on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--the
+extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.
+Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,
+he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though
+it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
+top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,
+deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not been
+modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
+likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.
+It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; that
+glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
+sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it would
+serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten
+Milly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less
+wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
+casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put
+his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it be
+safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"
+
+"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
+he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
+soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
+she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
+her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
+not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
+saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
+the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
+life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
+couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
+Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
+bad?"
+
+He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
+mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
+believe whatever you tell me."
+
+"Well then, I'm splendid."
+
+"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
+
+"I mean I'm capable of life."
+
+"I've never doubted it."
+
+"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"
+
+"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
+
+"Well, that I know I _can_."
+
+"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
+
+"Whatever I do. If I want to."
+
+"If you want to do it?"
+
+"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
+
+He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
+pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
+
+"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
+turned for him to mere light and sound.
+
+He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"
+
+It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
+why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
+
+"Will it help you to live?"
+
+"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
+general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"
+
+"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
+
+"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
+
+It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
+him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
+inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
+when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
+
+What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
+of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
+face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for
+something else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about it
+and that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's no
+matter."
+
+"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
+
+"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
+
+It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at
+any rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."
+
+"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
+
+"You mean you won't come to me?"
+
+"No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart from
+that," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm
+not forced to."
+
+"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at
+all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the least
+coercible of creatures."
+
+"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
+
+"The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."
+
+"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
+
+On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you
+don't complain."
+
+As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His
+telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas
+his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
+gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well
+have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the
+way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she
+took him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one sees
+one's way."
+
+"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
+
+"I mean to keeping what one has."
+
+"Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,
+"it's enough to try for."
+
+"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she added
+with a change: "And now about your book."
+
+"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
+
+"The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie
+or me to run the risk of spoiling."
+
+He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not doing a book."
+
+"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"
+
+He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm
+doing."
+
+It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was
+afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he
+feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
+didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of
+the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly
+wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps
+able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,
+she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see
+her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
+
+"Then if it's not for your book--?"
+
+"What _am_ I staying for?"
+
+"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it rather
+empty for you?"
+
+"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose
+marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally
+begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a
+loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the
+vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
+
+"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could
+protest. "You stay because you've got to."
+
+He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have
+said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It
+gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
+Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
+He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission
+from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either
+niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the
+girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he
+was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he
+thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's
+other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
+
+"Oh you must judge."
+
+He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too
+restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that
+was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
+kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was
+staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against
+her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
+didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or
+worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_
+judging!"
+
+
+II
+
+He didn't go home, on leaving her--he didn't want to; he walked
+instead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, to
+a small and comparatively sequestered cafe where he had already more
+than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with
+solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
+It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
+leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror
+and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might
+have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
+because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen
+his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took
+sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
+When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly
+on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on
+the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
+seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
+mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pass
+everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
+a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her
+deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have
+close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his
+hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on
+the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the
+cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made
+him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for
+three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more
+cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him
+had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action
+itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference
+even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep
+from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil
+lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might
+have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
+
+What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the
+perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to
+destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his
+really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing
+so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another a
+catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
+be better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion might
+either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these
+considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously
+amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all
+with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without
+the girl's leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,
+whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to this
+his wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. That
+was the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum of
+vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall
+of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step
+would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
+when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn't at this
+juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was
+wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the
+idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap,
+and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported
+him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to
+dinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he should
+probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should
+be able to be still enough through everything.
+
+He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not
+having failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't
+trying--quite the contrary--to be either distant or dull. That would
+not have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.
+That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; so
+that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as
+it were, to let himself go--go in the direction, that is to say, of
+staying. It depended on where he went; which was what he meant by
+taking care. When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreat
+without betraying the manoeuvre. Perfect tact--the necessity for which
+he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised--was to keep all
+intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus
+for instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
+well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the
+relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,
+at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
+of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't
+diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as
+possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping
+her, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for want
+of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many words
+speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to
+intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was
+an impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he was
+careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all
+was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
+elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not
+stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within
+bounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much
+disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the
+queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,
+even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
+in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of
+facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have
+to be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, without
+prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as
+doing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judge
+where it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other at
+the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,
+and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and
+yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the
+line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for
+us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what
+figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above
+and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
+been felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not the
+national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,
+in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he could
+unlimitedly take for granted.
+
+He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the
+undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his
+nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to
+mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. All
+women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but
+the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,
+practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character
+that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual
+non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days
+had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the
+information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." The
+announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the
+gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the
+knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,
+could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli
+among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among
+the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he
+recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of
+the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not
+prepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared to
+say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher
+mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in
+whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but a
+place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always
+ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour
+the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, any
+cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health
+was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
+taken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
+carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio,
+whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
+protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led
+from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in
+meditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would
+have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which
+required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for
+each--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything
+but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from
+occult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely
+formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't
+himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;
+it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
+court.
+
+The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first
+sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought him
+down the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of the
+court, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the one
+chance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,
+_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by the
+obvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him for
+the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young
+lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
+attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a
+connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious
+to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of
+the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,
+had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic
+sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of
+politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's
+servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third
+was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him after
+all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that
+might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to
+fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that
+came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"
+because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him
+see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever
+so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as
+insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the
+pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in the
+augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established
+between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to Miss
+Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he could
+also bethink himself that, so long as the word never came--and it was,
+on the basis he had arranged, impossible--he enjoyed the imagination of
+mounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as
+during these minutes in the damp _loggia_ where the storm-gusts were
+strong; and there came in fact for our young man, as a result of his
+presence, a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to the
+dismal. Something had happened--he didn't know what; and it wasn't
+Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought
+the ladies--as if their liability had been equal--were a "leetle"
+fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it.
+It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a
+profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's
+Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
+slightly smiled at him in the process--but ever so slightly this time,
+his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,
+whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.
+
+This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other over all
+they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Densher's
+protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for
+them alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they really
+could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black
+sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and
+interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled,
+stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges.
+Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such
+a depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly
+prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equally
+weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash of
+mutual suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility, they were
+more united than disjoined. But it was to have been a moment for
+Densher that nothing could ease off--not even the formal propriety with
+which his interlocutor finally attended him to the _portone_ and bowed
+upon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the air
+had made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew of
+course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to return
+was not what he missed; yet he knew at the same time that what had
+happened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond
+the _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out
+where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled
+his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
+enough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,
+just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acute
+person in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
+scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no
+disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to a
+queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
+mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had
+been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that the
+vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
+
+Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the more
+impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite
+of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the
+Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the
+high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the
+limit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the
+Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for
+him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if the
+difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of
+a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh
+note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,
+and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at
+a stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
+margin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had held
+out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and he
+wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as
+himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There
+were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
+now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the
+grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than
+ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
+and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with
+brown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendent
+jackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs
+that overflowed from the cafes were gathered, still with a pretence of
+service, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, with
+his coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These were
+impressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit thrice
+before he stopped short, in front of Florian's, with the force of his
+sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the cafe--he had spotted an
+acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused long
+enough to look at twice was seated, well within range, at a small table
+on which a tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still
+remained; and though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of a
+French newspaper--the heading of the _Figaro_ was visible--he stared
+straight before him at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
+for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity
+produced, however quickly, all the effect of establishing
+connexions--connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were
+the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of the
+head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being
+noticed. This wider view showed him _all_ Lord Mark--Lord Mark as
+encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
+to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out,
+on that occasion, as he came in--he had felt it, in the hall, at the
+time; and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
+seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface, the same
+potential quantity.
+
+It was a matter, the whole passage--it could only be--but of a few
+seconds; for as he might neither stand there to stare nor on the other
+hand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, this
+time to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause,
+as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had
+simply faced him--as he had faced _him_, not placed by him, not at
+first--as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging
+fire, had then clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struck
+from these certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for
+neither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what
+now mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
+place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher, as inevitably
+a haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that case have seen him
+before. He paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for him
+even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come back
+for something--as a sequel to his earlier visit; and whatever he had
+come back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived but
+last night or that morning; he had already made the difference. It was
+a great thing for Densher to get this answer. He held it close, he
+hugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept him
+going and going--it made him no less restless. But it explained--and
+that was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in
+the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weather
+had changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible,
+_because_ of Lord Mark. It was because of him, _a fortiori_, that the
+palace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he found the visitor
+each time as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
+before him; the next time he was looking over his _Figaro_, which he
+had opened out. Densher didn't again stop, but left him apparently
+unconscious of his passage--on another repetition of which Lord Mark
+had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would be off that night;
+he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were as
+plain to Densher as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
+cleared for him--if cleared it was; there was something he didn't see,
+the great thing; but he saw so round it and so close to it that this
+was almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what he
+had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man
+had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit
+would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was
+the reason why he himself had found her door shut.
+
+He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that
+he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could
+now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
+as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he asked himself why it
+should prevent this that he could feel, in connexion with the crisis,
+so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all the
+benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn't
+feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had
+touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability
+so to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a
+kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
+by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark's
+return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there
+were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even to
+his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing
+it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about it
+than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop
+on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a
+visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely
+one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to
+spare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
+reflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
+straight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating a
+person in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.
+With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of the
+contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,
+and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and he
+drew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.
+Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it
+straight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled into
+just the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the very
+person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative
+innocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wished
+to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To
+keep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, to
+keep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
+consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.
+
+The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,
+extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed
+but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the
+better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the
+particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either of
+the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
+impossible--the being again denied; for it made him practically
+answerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglect
+either in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didn't get in, the
+one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health.
+Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him
+he had only to wait--which he was actually helped to do by his feeling
+with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in
+themselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted,
+the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about
+was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and
+listened to the wind--listened also to tinkles of bells and watched for
+some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never
+came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he
+wasn't at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hour
+of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd of
+refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafes on the chance the
+brute, as he now regularly imaged him, _might_ be still there. He could
+only be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and that--one had but to
+think of it--would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however--it was
+proved; though Densher's care for the question either way only added to
+what was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came
+round to what he was doing for Milly--spending days that neither relief
+nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject
+for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but
+sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
+and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find
+himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible
+meeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of
+everything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the
+third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he
+wouldn't have budged for the world.
+
+He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all
+events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely
+wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
+else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her
+wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,
+stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the
+pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified
+though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be
+accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a
+proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it
+were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have
+been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium
+as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.
+These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what
+she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a
+qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such
+things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she
+had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
+he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
+intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
+talk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
+deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?
+Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently
+caught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strange
+inconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in the
+breach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, done
+justice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
+in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have written
+had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and
+her idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only
+it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,
+in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on
+the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
+with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,
+for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the grinning padrona threw
+open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a
+difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It
+appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she
+allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without
+consciousness or care, and that her face, under her veil, richly rosy
+with the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if the
+rain were her tears.
+
+
+III
+
+They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
+fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+"You mean she's worse?"
+
+The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
+instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
+of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
+relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
+veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
+to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
+know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."
+
+"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
+feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
+
+She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
+"Have you been wretched?"
+
+Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
+him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
+visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
+draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
+had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
+above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
+seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
+been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
+
+This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
+his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
+been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
+
+"Yet it has done no good?"
+
+"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
+headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"
+
+"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
+
+"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
+
+"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
+
+She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
+taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
+themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
+him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
+had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
+in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
+conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
+Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
+you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"
+
+"Only nothing now matters?"
+
+She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
+expressed. "Then you know?"
+
+"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
+
+Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
+was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
+
+"Not for three days?"
+
+"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
+the faintest allusion."
+
+"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
+_me?_"
+
+"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
+
+"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."
+
+"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
+waterproof.
+
+It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
+it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
+but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
+mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
+impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
+withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
+
+It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
+pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"
+
+"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
+do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
+
+"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
+
+"Everything?"
+
+Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
+That's why I've come."
+
+"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
+affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
+him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
+was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
+possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
+it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
+so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
+an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
+it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
+far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
+abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
+of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened
+when she met his groan with an attenuation.
+
+"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."
+
+It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
+feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
+he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
+his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
+something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
+had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
+her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
+measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
+in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
+which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
+me?"
+
+And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
+effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
+believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
+helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
+
+It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
+She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
+accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
+ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
+she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
+consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
+rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
+meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
+larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
+
+He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
+they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
+don't mean not of me."
+
+"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
+as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
+age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
+Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
+to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
+inconsequence.
+
+He wondered. "You thank God--?"
+
+"That she's so quiet."
+
+He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"
+
+"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So
+you see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It would
+kill me if she _were_ to tell me."
+
+"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
+
+"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."
+
+"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a
+long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they
+could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought
+out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to
+him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been
+waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and
+talk of her here with you."
+
+It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"
+
+"I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."
+
+"She'll never tell?"
+
+"She'll never tell."
+
+Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
+
+"She _is_ magnificent."
+
+His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he
+could, all over. "Would she see me again?"
+
+It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"
+
+"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him
+some time. "No."
+
+"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
+
+"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
+
+She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don't
+see what you can do."
+
+"I don't either. But _she_ might."
+
+Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."
+
+"Too late for her to see--?"
+
+"Too late."
+
+The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled in
+him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"
+
+"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved
+and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that
+I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly
+enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
+events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has
+told him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that he
+may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
+only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to
+entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and
+meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an
+agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of
+her."
+
+"By her request?"
+
+"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of
+provisions."
+
+"By her request too?"
+
+"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first
+time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we
+liked."
+
+Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"
+
+"None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing's
+any comfort."
+
+"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, _I'm_ not."
+
+"No. But I didn't come for that."
+
+"You came for _me_."
+
+"Well then call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyes
+filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper
+still. "I came at bottom of course--"
+
+"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as
+you say, too late for me to do anything?"
+
+She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow
+in her, from the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"--and
+she turned her vision again strangely about her--"with you here, and
+with everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her."
+
+"God forbid we should abandon her."
+
+"Then you _won't?_" His tone had made her flush again.
+
+"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons _me?_ What can I do if she
+won't see me?"
+
+"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
+
+"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I
+shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I
+could help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "she
+would have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to make
+out, "is the devil of it. She _won't_ want it herself. She _can't!_"
+
+He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he
+helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and
+even for that there are difficulties. But there _is_ that." He stood
+before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from
+her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave
+to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on
+the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but,
+as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really
+know yourself what it is."
+
+He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said--rather!--there
+were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment;
+he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider,
+like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood
+at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in
+fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first
+again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer
+to her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came back
+to her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if he
+had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
+where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
+Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the one
+least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without
+him?"
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the
+first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only
+he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
+
+"Well then that's something."
+
+She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."
+
+"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
+October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
+and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
+both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
+him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
+said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
+
+"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
+
+"Ah I know nothing about that."
+
+"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
+saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
+will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
+he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
+
+"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
+_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
+her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."
+
+He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
+saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
+distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
+confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
+
+There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
+dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
+was here, we all liked him."
+
+"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
+with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,
+"yourself."
+
+Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
+of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
+nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
+
+Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
+plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
+professional propriety."
+
+"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
+something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
+couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"
+
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"I can't talk to any one about her."
+
+"Except to _me_," his friend continued.
+
+"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
+waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
+honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
+sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
+visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
+him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
+precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
+She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
+statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
+nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
+was impossible for us, and--"
+
+"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
+more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
+straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
+there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
+
+"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
+
+"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
+together."
+
+Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
+back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
+of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
+which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
+perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
+could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
+believe that he thinks she's gone."
+
+She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."
+
+"Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More and
+more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something
+with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to
+postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he
+was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
+wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of
+Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of
+Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
+swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast on
+it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent
+to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
+absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
+first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility
+so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,
+and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.
+"Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for me
+to see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have
+conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she
+had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness
+would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for
+insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,
+she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.
+Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? I
+mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh she
+was earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"
+
+"The opportunity to put what?"
+
+"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
+
+Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarter
+of an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,
+however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
+his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of
+his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If I
+deny what to her?"
+
+Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along been
+letting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."
+
+"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenly
+perverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was she
+who now blushed deep.
+
+It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things.
+"Then _you_ know--"
+
+"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's what has done it."
+
+"Yes--I understand that. But you also know--"
+
+He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. "I'm
+speaking," she said soothingly, "of what he told her. It's _that_ that
+I've taken you as knowing."
+
+"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
+
+It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality of
+relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else.
+Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
+it for _true!_"
+
+Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayed
+himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still
+better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there
+was no postponing. They were left with her idea--the one she was
+wishing to make him recognise. He had expressed ten minutes before his
+need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
+he was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even than
+as yet appeared.
+
+He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; he
+mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of course
+she could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly,
+without delay, see it; on which her sense of having "caught" him became
+as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What I mean
+is that he told her you've been all the while engaged to Miss Croy."
+
+He gave a jerk round; it was almost--to hear it--the touch of a lash;
+and he said--idiotically, as he afterwards knew--the first thing that
+came into his head. "All _what_ while?"
+
+"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness. "I only repeat to
+you what he told her."
+
+Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caught
+himself up. "Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you're talking
+about. I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained, "in the
+Piazza; only just saw him--through the glass at Florian's--without any
+words. In fact I scarcely know him--there wouldn't have been occasion.
+It was but once, moreover--he must have gone that night. But I knew he
+wouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over--what he would
+have come for."
+
+Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
+
+Densher approved. "He came to let her know that he knows better than
+she for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool's
+paradise, refused him."
+
+"How you _do_ know!"--and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.
+
+"I know that--but I don't know the good it does him."
+
+"The good, he thinks, if he has patience--not too much--may be to come.
+He doesn't know what he has done to her. Only _we_, you see, do that."
+
+He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him--what she felt?"
+
+"She was able--I'm sure of it--not to show anything. He dealt her his
+blow, and she took it without a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain,
+spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of what
+she related. "She's magnificent."
+
+Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
+
+"And _he_," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
+
+"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom in
+it, they looked at each other. "Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
+
+"So awfully--it's Maud Lowder's own view. And he was nice, in London,"
+said Mrs. Stringham, "to _me_. One could almost pity him--he has had
+such a good conscience."
+
+"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
+
+"Yes, but it wasn't--I could see from the only few things she first
+told me--that he meant _her_ the least harm. He intended none whatever."
+
+"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned. "He only of
+course meant harm to me."
+
+"And good to himself--he thought that would come. He had been unable to
+swallow," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "what had happened on his other
+visit. He had been then too sharply humiliated."
+
+"Oh I saw that."
+
+"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while he
+was turned away."
+
+"Perfectly," Densher said--"I've filled it out. And also that he has
+known meanwhile for _what_ I was then received. For a stay of all these
+weeks. He had had it to think of."
+
+"Precisely--it was more than he could bear. But he has it," said Mrs.
+Stringham, "to think of still."
+
+"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point,
+was having more to think of even than he had yet had--"only, after all,
+how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
+
+"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
+
+"He can only have acted--it would have been his sole safety--from full
+knowledge."
+
+He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as they
+were, something had none the less passed between them. It was this
+that, after an instant, made her again interrogative. "What do you mean
+by full knowledge?"
+
+Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?"
+
+"I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason to
+believe, straight from there."
+
+"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
+
+"Well, to try again--with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make
+himself possibly right with her--a different attempt from the other. He
+had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
+opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half
+an hour would be just what was most effective. It _has_ been!" said
+Susan Shepherd.
+
+Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as she
+lighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quite
+dared--putting the absent dots on several i's--he saw new questions
+swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; and
+they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was
+at any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder."
+
+"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly."
+
+He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally, upon news of _me?_"
+
+His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
+
+"I've given her none that hasn't been decently good. This will have
+been the first."
+
+"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
+
+"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as she is."
+
+He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs. Lowder written about him?
+Has she written that he has been with them?"
+
+"She has mentioned him but once--it was in her letter before the last.
+Then she said something."
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well it was in reference to
+Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I
+should say rather that he was thinking of _her_--only it seemed this
+time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him."
+
+Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised
+them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of
+a queerness in his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged to
+_propose_ to her niece?"
+
+"I don't know what she means."
+
+"Of course not"--he recovered himself; "and I oughtn't to seem to
+trouble you to piece together what I can't piece myself. Only I
+'guess,'" he added, "I _can_ piece it."
+
+She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I dare say I can piece
+it too."
+
+It was one of the things in her--and his conscious face took it from
+her as such--that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark
+for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
+They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep
+down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it
+wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful--at
+least this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so,
+most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been
+feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all _such_
+petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that,
+in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his
+putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark.
+"Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?"
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "_her_ friend also. But not a single word
+that I know of."
+
+He had taken it for certain she hadn't--the thing being after all but a
+shade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for six
+weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter but
+a shade more strange than Milly's not having mentioned her. In spite of
+which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
+He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he
+could get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been
+judging. "How did he manage to get _at_ her? She had only--with what
+had passed between them before--to say she couldn't see him."
+
+"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier," the good lady
+explained with a slight embarrassment, "than at the other time."
+
+"Easier?"
+
+"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
+
+"Yes. But exactly not _the_ difference."
+
+"Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. She
+could afford to be the opposite." With which, as he said nothing, she
+just impatiently completed her sense. "She had had _you_ here for six
+weeks."
+
+"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
+
+"Besides, I think he must have written her first--written I mean in a
+tone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then on
+the spot--"
+
+"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked? The horrid little beast!"
+
+It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for
+hope, the intensity of her look at him. "Oh he went off without an
+alarm."
+
+"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
+
+"Ah that, certainly."
+
+"Then it _was_ mere base revenge. Hasn't he known her, into the
+bargain," the young man asked--"didn't he, weeks before, see her, judge
+her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than a
+few months to live?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; and
+it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. "He has doubtless
+been aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware."
+
+"He has wanted her, you mean, just _because_--?"
+
+"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
+
+"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with a
+hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in
+his visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more
+taken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion.
+"Shall we have lights--a lamp or the candles?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"Not for me."
+
+He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a
+thought. "He _will_ have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has
+happened."
+
+Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."
+
+"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poor
+lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Densher
+continued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
+
+"And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"
+
+"Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact
+to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has
+believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at
+Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in
+Venice."
+
+Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to
+what?"
+
+"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some
+duplicity."
+
+"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous
+supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long for
+each--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,
+which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
+This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it
+even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
+left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their
+further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an
+advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the
+absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she
+addressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had already
+used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for
+_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so
+dreadfully to believe?"
+
+Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely
+certain then that she does believe it?"
+
+"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"
+
+He took his time again to judge. "Do _you_ believe it?"
+
+He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a
+little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered
+none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
+will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly
+settle it--if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if,
+to save her life, you consent to a denial."
+
+"But a denial, when it comes to that--confound the whole thing, don't
+you see!--of exactly what?"
+
+It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged.
+"Of everything."
+
+Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. "Oh!"
+he simply moaned into the gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought
+also blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the
+stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,
+but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an
+almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
+bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and
+called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
+scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of
+vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this
+on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
+He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at
+present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where
+the event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed him
+before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more
+than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of
+them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
+almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,
+as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
+other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
+had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
+nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
+would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
+to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
+of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
+going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
+Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
+of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
+had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
+he possibly _could_.
+
+It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
+station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
+turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
+and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
+as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
+proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
+life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
+afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
+prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
+current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
+aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
+prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
+great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
+brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
+brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
+Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
+made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
+was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
+it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
+went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
+platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
+presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
+that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
+anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
+hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce
+have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
+might have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in
+presence of the fact.
+
+Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkable
+young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up
+again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt
+himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof
+of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now
+connected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.
+The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as
+he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
+him. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, the
+remarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of his
+face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred
+its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
+suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
+now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a
+symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,
+of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,
+in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble to
+sink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densher
+began wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
+make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been
+on the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the
+palace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching
+mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
+together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity
+refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the
+palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this
+susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All
+he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,
+the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
+headshake, "go there now."
+
+"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that the
+thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite
+inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it
+that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
+moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
+craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
+the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
+a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
+hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
+Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
+swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
+of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
+Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
+time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
+him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
+he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
+about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
+instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
+and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
+personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
+of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
+only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
+within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
+smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
+all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
+now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
+interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
+really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
+_cliche_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
+of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
+in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
+reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
+had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
+of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
+outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
+been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
+been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
+befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
+had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quite
+on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,
+absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on
+this occasion moved away.
+
+The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance
+grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was to
+be the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
+making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left to
+be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should
+one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
+It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or two
+that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That he
+couldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this was
+as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact
+of the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
+taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
+gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
+meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time
+nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless the
+great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densher
+further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's
+having decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend as
+well--for there would be practically some difference to her--on her
+actually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke
+would make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his own
+view of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of response
+it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
+personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be
+prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked
+himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the
+worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man
+should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him
+for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and
+consequently there was nothing to hope.
+
+It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to all
+probability; but it pressed on him that there were few possible
+diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was
+so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
+Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
+taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
+The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
+tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
+the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
+difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
+Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
+as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
+quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
+value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
+the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
+phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
+did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
+Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
+his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
+tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
+made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
+mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
+he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
+original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
+his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
+time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
+this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
+knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
+no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
+described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
+on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
+to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
+
+That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
+saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
+stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
+gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
+himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
+days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
+sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highest
+medical lights in the world; so that really when the personage in
+question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the
+doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
+like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the
+magnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.
+The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her
+immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some
+hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with
+his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
+at once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_
+still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and
+quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now to
+be prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not
+only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't
+dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that
+during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in
+sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The
+demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous
+acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him
+come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but
+there were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. It
+was for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity of
+Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he
+had looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon as
+the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined
+itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing
+could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher was
+well aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period in
+the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
+nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor's
+entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the
+fact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to say
+he had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she
+might _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
+was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all
+their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
+as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
+wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
+have said, quiet.
+
+The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
+a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
+superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
+he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
+stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
+they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
+Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
+wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
+all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
+Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
+them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
+his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
+He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
+all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
+to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
+in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
+it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
+response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
+held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
+spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
+it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
+because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
+him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
+aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
+system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
+man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
+Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
+man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
+man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
+He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
+and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
+the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
+concerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
+he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
+have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
+way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
+odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
+exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
+complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
+have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
+abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
+station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
+would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
+doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
+dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.
+
+That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
+three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
+wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
+term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
+Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
+friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
+naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
+was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
+personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
+that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
+errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
+call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
+had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
+with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
+proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
+Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
+companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
+as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
+authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
+affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
+awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
+the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
+short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
+was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,
+though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
+prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
+involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
+only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
+right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
+and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
+questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
+now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
+knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
+Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
+habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
+it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
+farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
+his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
+looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
+one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
+shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
+ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
+last spoken made him start.
+
+"I shall come back."
+
+"Then she's better?"
+
+"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
+the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
+still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
+hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
+see her."
+
+Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
+betrayed. "She asks me?"
+
+Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
+closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
+but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
+as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
+
+Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
+the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
+Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"
+
+"She can receive you."
+
+"And you're coming back--?"
+
+"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
+
+"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
+friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had
+announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
+come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
+colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
+world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
+but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
+remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
+"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
+his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
+slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
+the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
+"Then she's better?"
+
+Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
+the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
+to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
+successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
+to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
+reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
+him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
+observation of Eugenio.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TENTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your
+making a sign?"
+
+Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate
+and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it
+straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her
+instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility
+between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general
+trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh
+sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,
+something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still
+more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had
+been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on
+either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
+had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her
+as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed
+of taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere first
+look--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the
+firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the London
+fog, as the flower of her difference; just as her difference
+itself--part of which was her striking him as older in a degree for
+which no mere couple of months could account--was the fruit of their
+intimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosen
+together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their
+wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened--of what in
+fact, for the spirit of each, was still happening--been showing it to
+him for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, so
+still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to
+tackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast of
+it in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his present
+visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it would
+doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write
+to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him--he had come up slowly; but
+it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That was
+exactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to
+her feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. He
+had come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them;
+and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits,
+his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, so
+the inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of
+intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell
+her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he felt on the spot, he
+couldn't have brought it all with him before this afternoon. He _had_
+brought it, to the last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't
+be hard--as he in fact found--to produce, for Kate's understanding, his
+first reason.
+
+"A fortnight, yes--it was a fortnight Friday; but I've only been
+keeping in, you see, with our wonderful system." He was so easily
+justified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her saying
+she didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid for
+her; and such a gage of its equal vividness for himself was precisely
+what she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
+remark that on the very face of it, she would remember, their wonderful
+system attached no premium to rapidities of transition. "I couldn't
+quite--don't you know?--take my rebound with a rush; and I suppose I've
+been instinctively hanging off to minimise, for you as well as for
+myself, the appearances of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I
+knew you'd understand." It was presently as if she really understood so
+well that she almost appealed from his insistence--yet looking at him
+too, he was not unconscious, as if this mastery of fitnesses was a
+strong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struck
+her as expert for contingencies in the very degree of her having in
+Venice struck _him_ as expert. He smiled over his plea for a renewal
+with stages and steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and
+graduated; though--finely as she must respond--she met the smile but as
+she had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at that
+moment--which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
+charged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow--had not
+qualified her welcome; what had done this being much more the presence
+in the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman who had introduced
+him and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea-table.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to appoint the tea-hour,
+five o'clock on Sunday, for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired
+him, without a signature, "Come on Sunday _before_ tea--about a quarter
+of an hour, which will help us"; and he had arrived therefore
+scrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room and
+hadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily gathered,
+was to be, for the interval--not long but precious--engaged with an old
+servant, retired and pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
+was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to have
+the scrap of time, after the withdrawal of the footman, to themselves,
+and there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
+spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety of shades, it
+proclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice--that was
+what kept it noble--to Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful
+self-command. If he had his discretion she had her perfect manner,
+which was _her_ decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he had, to finish with the
+question of his delay, furthermore observed, Mrs. Stringham would have
+written to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so that it
+wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longer
+there.
+
+"Yes, we've known it."
+
+"And you continue to hear?"
+
+"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I mean Aunt Maud does."
+
+"Then you've recent news?"
+
+Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day or two I believe. But
+haven't _you?_"
+
+"No--I've heard nothing." And it was now that he felt how much he had
+to tell her. "I don't get letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder
+does." With which he added: "Then of course you know." He waited as if
+she would show what she knew; but she only showed in silence the dawn
+of a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for him
+to ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
+
+Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you _know?_"
+
+"How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himself
+stared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she
+slowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
+
+It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her
+lips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"
+
+"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had to
+think a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--so
+far as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"
+he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,
+what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," he
+explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
+
+She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so
+far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the
+wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
+unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect
+for misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felt
+her closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitude
+would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling
+uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew
+in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the
+quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too
+far, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
+the sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out
+himself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of
+everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would
+confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
+or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that she
+wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
+that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
+to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
+at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
+Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
+She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
+That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
+handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
+dreadful for you much of it must have been."
+
+He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
+first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
+I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
+little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"
+
+"She's dying."
+
+It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
+could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
+Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
+present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
+Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
+
+"I believe he's there now."
+
+"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
+
+She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
+otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
+him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
+
+"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
+
+"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
+
+"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
+
+"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
+three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
+gone. He had started I believe some days before."
+
+"And won't then by this time be back?"
+
+Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."
+
+"He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while she
+lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."
+
+"I think _she_ is," said Kate.
+
+It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from
+him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"
+
+"Well, she's after all my friend."
+
+It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least
+expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,
+his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.
+You _were_ sure of it."
+
+"Of course I was sure of it."
+
+And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however,
+presently broke. "If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what
+do you think of Lord Mark's?"
+
+She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
+
+"You haven't seen him?"
+
+"Not since he saw her."
+
+"You've known then of his seeing her?"
+
+"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"
+
+Kate wondered. "What rest?"
+
+"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't stand--it was what
+then took place that simply killed her."
+
+"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw
+that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't
+put on. "Mrs. Stringham hasn't said _that_."
+
+He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then taken
+place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. "The way
+it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
+all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
+
+"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him
+pursue.
+
+"One can see now that she was living by will--which was very much what
+you originally told me of her."
+
+"I remember. That was it."
+
+"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse
+was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke. He told her, the
+scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."
+
+Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know it!"
+
+"That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"
+Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last see
+him?"
+
+But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what made
+her worse?"
+
+He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he
+spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
+
+"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
+
+Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he
+continued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since of
+course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
+And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there not
+being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she
+need regard as a warning."
+
+She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_
+did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It was
+by the conviction she got from me."
+
+"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
+
+"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
+
+Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
+which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
+absolutely of what they would have called between them her
+straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
+ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
+suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
+responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
+for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
+impressions as it was our idea to give."
+
+"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.
+
+He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
+character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
+
+It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
+born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
+been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
+Mark's."
+
+Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
+
+"Why for you."
+
+"To tell her he lied?"
+
+"To tell her he's mistaken."
+
+Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at by
+Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to
+put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference
+in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,
+my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."
+
+"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"
+
+He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to
+be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense
+of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many
+things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to
+admiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear about
+it--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question
+of it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; but
+to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+
+"You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She had
+spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;
+but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she
+meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
+
+"I hadn't even a chance."
+
+Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it
+all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn't
+see you?"
+
+"Not after your friend had been with her."
+
+She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
+
+It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her face
+to the wall."
+
+This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now
+for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the
+minimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
+
+"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitively
+ill."
+
+"Well, that was what she had been before."
+
+"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don't
+pretend that she's not magnificent."
+
+"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
+
+He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"
+he wound up; "and there we are."
+
+His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more
+deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had
+fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,
+as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the
+same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to
+hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
+of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if
+her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had
+fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on
+Milly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.
+But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such
+things were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure
+on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general
+that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then
+that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"
+
+It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--so
+far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."
+
+"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
+
+"Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.
+She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."
+
+His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"
+
+"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I had
+wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."
+
+"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not just _because_ she was
+dying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know that
+seeing her you could judge."
+
+"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied
+you moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to
+it."
+
+She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that to
+convince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"
+
+"I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"
+
+Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"
+
+"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
+back afterwards."
+
+With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
+flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
+You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
+conscience?"
+
+"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
+how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
+it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
+remember what I say."
+
+Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
+pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."
+
+"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
+it matter?"
+
+It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
+relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
+from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
+gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
+Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
+different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
+
+"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
+moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
+say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
+to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
+she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
+truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
+for it."
+
+"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted
+_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been
+glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her
+from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it
+was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and
+clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear
+man--that she loves you with passion."
+
+"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
+
+"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
+then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
+once more to look at you?"
+
+"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
+longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
+first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
+taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
+another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
+Densher, "affected her."
+
+"Of course it affected her."
+
+Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
+for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
+know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
+wished herself to tell me so."
+
+"And she did tell you so?"
+
+"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
+
+"And as _you_ of course did."
+
+"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
+did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
+
+"You only went to oblige her?"
+
+"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
+
+"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
+
+"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
+
+"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
+stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
+
+"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
+
+"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
+such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
+added--"to see her die."
+
+"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
+
+"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
+
+He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
+visit--just like another."
+
+"Like another person?"
+
+"Like another visit."
+
+"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
+his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
+indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
+had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
+room?"
+
+"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
+glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
+inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
+the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what you
+originally said to me of her?"
+
+"Ah I've said so many things."
+
+"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.
+Well, she didn't."
+
+"So that it was really almost happy?"
+
+It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling
+how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone
+that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "I
+don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.
+For it would be worth it for us."
+
+"Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke
+again abruptly. "She'll recover."
+
+"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
+
+She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of her
+feeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having been
+misled."
+
+She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would
+have rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and her
+strength."
+
+"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"
+
+He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given
+it up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."
+
+"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was ever
+alienated."
+
+"I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."
+
+"But she was ill."
+
+"That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--during
+the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no
+difference with her."
+
+"She would still have received you?"
+
+"She would still have received me."
+
+"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"
+
+"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."
+
+"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"Because you've told her?"
+
+"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a
+person who does see."
+
+Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious.
+You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you
+needn't be afraid."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
+
+Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked
+five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge
+silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not
+soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. "Well, it's all most
+wonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign her
+friend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
+this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming
+water. "You'll have some?"
+
+He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"
+
+"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their old
+law, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
+done it!"
+
+"Humbugged her?"
+
+"Squared her. You've pleased her."
+
+Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something
+else, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a brute then I must
+be!"
+
+"A brute--?"
+
+"To have pleased so many people."
+
+"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please
+_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What I
+don't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "is
+what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you
+up for days and days, what brought her back to you?"
+
+She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him
+ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going
+into it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
+back. His visit, his presence there did it."
+
+"He brought her back then to life."
+
+"Well, to what I saw."
+
+"And by interceding for you?"
+
+"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."
+
+Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
+
+"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak of
+her."
+
+Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
+
+"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"
+
+"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
+
+"He understood," said Densher.
+
+"But understood what?"
+
+He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."
+
+"Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing.
+"But how did he convince her?"
+
+Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."
+
+He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "The
+great thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," she
+continued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."
+
+"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
+
+"Well, at peace with you."
+
+"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.
+
+"The peace of having loved."
+
+He raised his eyes to her. "Is _that_ peace?"
+
+"Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound
+up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_
+she wanted."
+
+Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority
+that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look
+at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he
+intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so
+take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think it
+hideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point of
+the word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."
+
+"Oh!" he only again murmured.
+
+She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came
+to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and
+enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing
+that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that
+knowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
+"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but she
+insisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."
+
+
+II
+
+He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this
+inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but
+interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
+Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of
+the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his
+intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder
+alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate
+gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them
+was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him
+to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had
+fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard
+fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to
+his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare
+alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been
+uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,
+and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she
+resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my
+dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to
+leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this
+extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the
+protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their
+tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their
+hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his
+scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed
+for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been
+entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had been
+at one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come back
+to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the
+fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic
+turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.
+Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an
+awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he
+marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the
+fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was
+but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for
+consideration, melted into it and out of sight.
+
+He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of the
+remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice
+had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of
+their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not
+sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that
+were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without
+her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish
+them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking
+place had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him from
+poor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they would
+have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the
+scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by which
+she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the
+memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him for
+unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the
+guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth
+in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She
+treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
+and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness
+with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches
+to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;
+it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile
+to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,
+he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freely
+for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.
+Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a
+week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.
+Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him
+on--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had
+private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
+others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of
+candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely
+sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
+himself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not false
+that he _had_ been through a mill.
+
+It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to
+him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I
+want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"
+his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was
+with him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even if
+it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just
+brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her
+in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in
+the world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest
+reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two
+or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--two
+and a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now
+that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn
+of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that
+when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come
+up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
+queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He
+liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to
+himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met
+_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than
+her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy
+her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course
+the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which
+he was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have
+come about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be free
+with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being
+alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had
+been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in
+fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy
+moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed
+herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to the
+end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all
+to his help.
+
+"You simply couldn't stand it?"
+
+"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.
+
+"Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;
+luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--men
+haven't, in many relations, the courage of women."
+
+"They haven't the courage of women."
+
+"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come away
+for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."
+
+Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behaviour
+since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--he
+couldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy
+would have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was
+Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothing
+but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth
+she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that
+compromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as a
+change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even
+without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal
+it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for
+all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.
+Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,
+shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
+leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.
+She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but this
+was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had
+taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as
+already dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable way
+to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited
+her, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;
+which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
+interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have
+nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious
+of her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
+for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in
+London while the pain went on--what would that do but make his days
+impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by some
+art about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed.
+"What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
+it? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment may
+be--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'm
+good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." He
+consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly
+about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be
+guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The
+days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the
+suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was
+the taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottom
+of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that
+if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just
+for that reason.
+
+She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle
+enough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insist
+on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was
+thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one
+better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together
+that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in
+the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_
+stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't for
+Densher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.
+It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came
+to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in
+particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
+as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed
+the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he
+couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
+might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the
+family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl
+must have wanted to live.
+
+"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with
+everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if
+it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"
+
+Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly
+giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have
+been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had
+her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,
+and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about
+them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to
+herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,
+the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep
+it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so
+naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its
+vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
+shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she
+was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully
+silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,
+in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object
+clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the
+case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make
+him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had
+been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud
+by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had
+let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received
+on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so
+perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of
+princely state.
+
+Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,
+all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth
+of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and the
+situation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite London
+gossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at Lancaster
+Gate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
+the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He
+himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the
+page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation
+inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half
+understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding
+himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these
+moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
+and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He
+had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious
+of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
+lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gathered
+all--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of their
+associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far
+as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the
+essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too
+beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
+sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherently
+express. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder's
+faith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
+scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence
+within--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their association
+deepened by it, they turned together away.
+
+That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of a
+week the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morning
+with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to
+gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a
+haunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but the
+degree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his new
+aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he
+hadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; it
+was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.
+There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plain
+honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper
+corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year
+was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the
+still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked
+empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep
+browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks
+lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it
+fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and
+then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a
+telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,
+for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
+to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion
+of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made
+his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
+for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a
+good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich
+impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
+later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of
+their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be
+reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he
+had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at
+hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller
+now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he
+was graver as he lingered and looked out.
+
+Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if
+she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that
+was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,
+even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return
+to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
+begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might
+be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with
+ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,
+other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special
+danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he
+had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all
+that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.
+The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
+place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the
+days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This
+and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over
+the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--for
+they really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness of
+their prime. It was to all intents however this very reference that
+showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward
+him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
+nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him
+afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he
+certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,
+at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these for
+instance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's
+eyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
+from America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundays
+ago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from
+Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got it
+the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune
+of the moment.
+
+Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred to
+him, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect produced
+for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much
+intensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of
+the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of
+response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't
+possibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she had
+beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of
+studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.
+Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were living
+under; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,
+distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by her
+own air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herself
+though it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,
+could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of her
+superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alone
+that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming
+courage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he had
+presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined
+him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her
+hand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that he
+wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he
+should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
+whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in high
+happiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing at
+the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only
+make-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that they
+couldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering at
+no point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished the
+present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great
+wintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.
+
+"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,
+we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not to
+wait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't you
+see?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my
+impatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."
+
+"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,
+though she had listened to him without confusion.
+
+"To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce it
+as done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. We
+shall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
+wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a
+bad dream."
+
+She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought at
+his call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dear
+man, what has happened to you?"
+
+"Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.
+Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I am
+that you must have me."
+
+He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also
+not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, with
+her clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, you
+know, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've been
+going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"
+
+It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,
+upon my soul--!"
+
+"I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where I
+was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for
+_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only
+right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't
+think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talked
+her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
+to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He
+had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--which
+was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood
+everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,
+the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of all
+her strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really
+_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he
+could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he
+only looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "You
+do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to
+me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in
+hearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"
+
+"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.
+
+"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that case
+wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I
+don't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with your
+moral certainty."
+
+By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. The
+point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he
+recognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
+
+"You've not an idea?"
+
+"I've not an idea."
+
+"I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd go
+home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an
+idea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.
+There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meeting
+you."
+
+If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he
+could but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in high
+passion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made it
+all out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,
+and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, and
+his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her
+lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but
+that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to
+something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
+she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,
+between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,
+when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she
+leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
+irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an
+advantage with his passion now.
+
+
+III
+
+He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
+"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
+her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
+return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
+had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
+preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
+Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
+night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
+first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
+with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
+quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
+him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
+next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
+wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
+distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
+hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
+sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
+difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
+and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
+other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
+and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
+monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
+the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
+him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
+his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
+for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
+event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of
+convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
+stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
+Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
+determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
+doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
+commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
+life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
+another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
+his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
+felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
+state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
+Christmas day.
+
+Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
+certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
+final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
+Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
+urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
+once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
+sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
+earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
+reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
+dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
+walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
+to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
+before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
+mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
+assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
+drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
+for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
+enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
+his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
+Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
+back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
+and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
+himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
+that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
+that what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness
+who had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in his
+presence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of his
+consciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on the
+spot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He became
+aware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the brougham
+had a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to his
+knowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
+nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the face
+that, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely have
+noticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
+Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,
+presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearly
+getting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--only
+Mrs. Lowder was with him.
+
+It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher again
+delayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred to
+him. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a case
+of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,
+might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this event
+she might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had had
+the effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range of
+the window. It wasn't there he had wished to see her; yet if she _was_
+there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
+made out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,
+with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a
+conscious face from behind the clear plate of a cafe in Venice. The
+great glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with the
+window down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,
+none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could
+occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedly
+remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as
+his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched
+the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by
+Kate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for
+the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
+young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the
+disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more
+than he had looked from his bench at his cafe. Densher was thinking
+that _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was
+thinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--more
+ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of
+the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,
+associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside
+Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient
+identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and
+Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_
+wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with
+presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the
+brougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
+word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her
+passage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; you
+needn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the
+steps.
+
+"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not come
+to learn."
+
+"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "to
+Lancaster Gate."
+
+"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was
+attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and
+he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
+functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and
+that yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"
+
+He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_
+had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallest
+hesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."
+
+"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."
+
+"Yes--folded them."
+
+It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and
+she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it's
+more true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."
+
+He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words
+fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread them
+the wider."
+
+"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"
+
+"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,
+that did a little warn her off.
+
+"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled to
+direct news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise I
+shouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"
+
+He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of
+the brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching him
+moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest.
+"Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just
+now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they
+stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage
+might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,
+understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
+you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the
+image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.
+It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
+exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since the
+night before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper
+reserve.
+
+But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I should
+otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"
+Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
+with which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dear
+friend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be
+still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Or
+wouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with
+me _tete-a-tete?_"
+
+It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making the
+difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather
+mystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall
+you mind if I don't tell you at once?"
+
+"Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you
+needn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of all
+days, I shall otherwise sit there alone."
+
+Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
+
+"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs. Lowder, "is spending her
+Christmas in the bosom of her more immediate family."
+
+He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his face might show. "You
+mean she has left you?"
+
+Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the enquiry with a
+consciousness in which he saw a reflexion of events. He was made sure
+by it, even at the moment and as he had never been before, that since
+he had known these two women no confessed nor commented tension, no
+crisis of the cruder sort would really have taken form between them:
+which was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered her boat. The
+situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's present expression lighted up by
+contrast that superficial smoothness; which afterwards, with his time
+to think of it, was to put before him again the art, the particular
+gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed, so intimately familiar
+for him, as her talent for life. The peace, within a day or two--since
+his seeing her last--had clearly been broken; differences, deep down,
+kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as deep, had been shaken to
+the surface by some exceptional jar; with which, in addition, he felt
+Lord Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season vaguely
+associated. The talent for life indeed, it at the same time struck him,
+would probably have shown equally in the breach, or whatever had
+occurred; Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a strain rather than a
+stroke. Of these quick thoughts, at all events, that lady was already
+abreast. "She went yesterday morning--and not with my approval, I don't
+mind telling you--to her sister: Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean,
+who lives somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs--that I
+should have to say such things to-day!--are a constant worry; so that
+Kate, in consequence--well, of events!--has simply been called in. My
+own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with _such_ events she need have,
+in her situation, next to nothing to do."
+
+"But she differed with you?"
+
+"She differed with me. And when Kate differs with you--!"
+
+"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point in the scale of hypocrisy
+at which he could ask himself why a little more or less should signify.
+Besides, with the intention he had had he _must_ know. Kate's move, if
+he didn't know, might simply disconcert him; and of being disconcerted
+his horror was by this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
+allude to events at all calamitous."
+
+"No--only horrid and vulgar."
+
+"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered in
+free speech to him a momentary balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I
+suppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."
+
+"Oh!" said Densher again.
+
+"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marian
+has shrieked for help."
+
+Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromised
+for an instant with his discretion. "Come upon her--for money?"
+
+"Oh for that of course always. But, at _this_ blessed season, for
+refuge, for safety: for God knows what. He's _there_, the brute. And
+Kate's with them. And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the
+steps, "is her Christmas."
+
+She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer.
+"Yours then is after all rather better."
+
+"It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But why
+do I talk of _our_ troubles? Come if you can."
+
+He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
+
+"And now--I dare say--you'll go to church?"
+
+She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by way
+of sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little more
+to the purpose than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
+finishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself to
+all appearance receiving her hint as happy. "Why yes--I think I will":
+after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had opened
+from within, he was free to turn his back. He heard the door, behind
+him, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another direction
+than his own.
+
+He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he
+was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the
+south. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
+there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally
+talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing was
+open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the
+influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that
+possessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everything
+else, an awful sound--what were they, a thousand times over, but his
+own? His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hour
+longer taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would have
+held his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just lied
+to Mrs. Lowder--a term it perversely eased him to keep using--even more
+than was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, in
+such a state of his nerves, _could_ he go?--he pulled up short again,
+as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And
+yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. He
+was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he
+bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He
+had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before
+it. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really--as it
+struck him--consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid
+service--the flocking crowd told of it--which glittered and resounded,
+from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of
+organ and choir. It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of a
+discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory in
+short, to make him right, would do.
+
+
+IV
+
+The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from an
+early hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
+gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in
+Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt
+independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
+achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club
+library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,
+closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the
+night. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thing
+he did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,
+he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
+He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to
+trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return
+with a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face with
+Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that
+his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent
+prepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,
+counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of
+his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp
+and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen
+her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's
+pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied
+ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as
+the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a
+still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with
+her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.
+Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
+flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
+Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
+stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
+best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
+was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
+stranger in it than she.
+
+A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
+from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
+the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
+for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
+case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
+curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
+circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
+florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
+mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
+Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
+Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
+blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
+of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
+asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
+having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
+reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
+him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
+He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
+him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
+sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
+the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
+might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
+wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
+anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
+make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
+is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
+what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
+took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
+she was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made
+for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
+same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
+companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
+assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
+her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
+her and how above all must she not feel them?
+
+Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
+tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
+the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
+left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
+and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
+So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
+conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
+nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
+be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
+her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
+reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
+explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
+gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
+It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
+did tell me, so suddenly come here."
+
+"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
+firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
+He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
+door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
+what _you_ mean."
+
+"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
+after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
+that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
+But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
+taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
+and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
+Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
+bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
+stay."
+
+Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
+he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"
+
+"No--I've had no telegram."
+
+She wondered. "But not a letter--?"
+
+"Not from Mrs. Stringham--no." He failed again however to develop
+this--for which her forbearance from another question gave him
+occasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confronted
+with her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that she
+respected this impulse she made her enquiry different. "Should you like
+to go out to her--to Mrs. Stringham?"
+
+About that at least he was clear. "Not at all. She's alone, but she's
+very capable and very courageous. Besides--!" He had been going on, but
+he dropped.
+
+"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembers
+Eugenio."
+
+She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender;
+and he showed equally every reason to assent. "One remembers him
+indeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value to
+her--he's capable of anything. What I was going to say," he went on,
+"is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive."
+
+On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. "Mr.
+Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly's
+affairs--her first trustee, I suppose--had just got there at Mrs.
+Stringham's last writing."
+
+"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me--I mean the last
+time before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said,
+"they'll do."
+
+"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as if it wasn't what each
+was most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that.
+"But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning had
+taken you to Sir Luke?"
+
+"Oh something else--which I'll presently tell you. It's what made me
+instantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. But
+in a minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at seeing you in
+this place." He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectly
+still. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with
+his back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confined
+himself to his point. "Is it anything very bad that has brought you?"
+
+He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; so
+that, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. "Do you
+mean, if I may ask, that _she_, dying--?" Her face, wondering, pressed
+it more than her words.
+
+"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said. "What has come to me
+is what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting
+you know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me last
+night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And
+he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her
+as mechanical.
+
+She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went
+with her. "You didn't want to come?"
+
+"It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if it
+had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,
+I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and
+portentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for my
+happiness."
+
+This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it.
+"You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."
+
+"Oh--well enough!"
+
+But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."
+
+"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
+so simple even as that."
+
+She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
+with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
+still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
+at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
+then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
+explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
+_haven't_ decided what to do."
+
+She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
+say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
+Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
+you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
+part of the room to another.
+
+"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
+
+It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
+you've had to come?"
+
+"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
+Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
+whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
+And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
+little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."
+
+"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
+suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
+a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
+as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
+oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
+
+She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
+very awful?"
+
+"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
+you find my idea--"
+
+He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
+impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
+anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
+
+It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
+making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
+turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
+recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
+storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
+Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
+might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
+the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
+stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
+possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
+The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
+anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
+she'd understand.
+
+It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
+instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
+the world like her?"
+
+"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
+never any one in the world like her."
+
+Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
+unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
+she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
+communication is?"
+
+"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.
+
+"Do you mean a letter?"
+
+"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."
+
+Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
+
+"Oh perfectly."
+
+It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
+next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"
+
+"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
+very short ones."
+
+"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
+enough if you're sure you remember."
+
+"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
+in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
+Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then she
+once copied me something."
+
+"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of
+your reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as if
+precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:
+"And the writing has its usual look?"
+
+Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's
+beautiful."
+
+"Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further
+remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's
+possible."
+
+"Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's
+what I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle
+vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
+
+She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his
+pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the
+room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. He
+looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid
+London street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--as
+he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of
+the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness
+that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of
+his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so
+driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him
+to say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the
+inanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
+minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly
+presented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to
+things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try
+to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she
+again took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"
+
+It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by an
+hour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But my
+eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I
+recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
+
+"One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however was
+so singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this while
+you _hadn't_ touched it."
+
+"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching
+nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took
+hold of it."
+
+"Then where is it?"
+
+"Oh I have it here."
+
+"And you've brought it to show me?"
+
+"I've brought it to show you."
+
+So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,
+almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.
+She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his
+own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought.
+"But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
+
+"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."
+
+She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable
+child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You
+haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you
+require don't come from your document itself." Then as he answered
+nothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"
+
+"I haven't read it."
+
+She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"
+
+Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and
+again he was before her. "By telling me _this_. It's something, you
+know, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."
+
+She was vague. "The other day?"
+
+"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he
+doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What
+does his having been with her there mean?"
+
+"Of whom are you talking?"
+
+"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
+
+"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
+
+"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;
+and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the
+question."
+
+Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any
+hour."
+
+"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his
+second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a
+matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact
+remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
+
+Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly
+than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked
+just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something
+back."
+
+"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.
+All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a
+connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was
+practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what
+has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
+for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
+
+
+V
+
+Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
+down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
+that I must have told him?"
+
+She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
+he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
+anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
+What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
+
+"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
+
+She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
+allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
+really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
+often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
+him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
+knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
+stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
+her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
+to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
+none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
+Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"
+
+"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--since
+when?"
+
+"Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And then
+she explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--like
+Aunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn't
+after all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,
+she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for
+the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."
+
+"You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"
+
+"Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfully
+added--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."
+
+He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,
+"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"
+
+"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has
+some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
+let--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of
+money, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at."
+
+Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything? In spite of
+what?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to
+do that sort of thing."
+
+"To try to get money?"
+
+"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has
+had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days'
+notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud,
+who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come then
+to Lancaster Gate--to sleep at least--till, like all the world, you go
+to the country.' He was to have gone to the country--I think to
+Matcham--yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was."
+
+Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement,
+beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. "Told you, you mean, so that
+you needn't leave the house?"
+
+"Yes--so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was
+part of my reason."
+
+"And _was_ it part of your reason?"
+
+"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here--as I knew there would
+be--without it. So that," she said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad
+I am here: even if for all the good I do--!" She implied however that
+that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as you tell me, get off then to
+Matcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going this
+afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable--and it's really, I'm
+bound to say, quite amiable of him--is that he has declined to leave
+Aunt Maud, as I've been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone.
+If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it's a _procede_ that won't
+please her less. It's small wonder therefore that she insists, on a
+dull day, in driving him about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
+"what may happen between them; but that's all I see in it."
+
+"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher returned,
+"something that, while I'm with you at least, I always take from you as
+the truth itself."
+
+She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the
+sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that
+seemed to show how fine she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
+everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and,
+yielding to the impulse to which he hadn't yielded just before, he laid
+his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
+little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled
+things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he
+applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an
+instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all
+passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn't
+prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was
+enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid
+connexion and as she made it sat down again. "I've been trying to place
+exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were
+in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me--spoke out."
+
+"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled round.
+
+"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it, by having refused
+to meet him as he wanted--as he pressed--I plead guilty to being so.
+Would you have liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
+would have kept him from going?"
+
+It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you know he was going?"
+
+"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that--even if it doesn't fit your
+strange suppositions--I should have given him just the same answer if I
+had known. If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust upon
+you, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which I
+find a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," she
+continued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
+
+"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the next
+moment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."
+
+"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he was unfortunately the
+one person we hadn't deceived, I can't contradict you."
+
+"No--of course not. But _why_," Densher still risked, "was he
+unfortunately the one person--? He's not really a bit intelligent."
+
+"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in
+anything so unnatural as--all things considered and when it came to the
+point--my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his
+conviction he acted."
+
+Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's conviction as if it
+were a blot on the face of nature. "Do you mean because you had
+appeared to him to have encouraged him?"
+
+"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where _were_ we?"
+
+"'Where'--?"
+
+"You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn't mattered. What
+mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
+that he has had all along his impression of _you_. You can't help it,"
+she said, "but you're after all--well, yourself."
+
+"As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and
+kept myself there--what," Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
+
+"Your being in Venice and liking to be--which is never on any one's
+part a monstrosity--was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite
+capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
+
+"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
+
+"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before
+what you call his second descent, hadn't convinced him--all the more
+that my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back convinced." And
+then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: "I mean after he
+had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
+
+"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
+
+"That you were sincere. That it was _her_ you loved." It came to him
+from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found
+himself yet again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return here," she
+meanwhile continued, "had it from him. And that's why you're now so
+well with Aunt Maud."
+
+He only for a minute looked out in silence--after which he came away.
+"And why _you_ are." It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect
+between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps
+rather if it hadn't been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp
+because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
+so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while
+they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of
+everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word
+might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he
+drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his
+waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her
+eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place
+and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and
+unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he
+thus finally spoke of was a different matter. "Did I understand from
+Mrs. Lowder that your father's in the house?"
+
+If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was
+not to take her so now. "In the house, yes. But we needn't fear his
+interruption"--she spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in bed."
+
+"Do you mean with illness?"
+
+She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill. He's a marvel. He's
+only--endless."
+
+Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you with him?"
+
+"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. "By our
+making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him--and for
+Marian too."
+
+"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't--could I?--not have
+come."
+
+"No, you couldn't not have come."
+
+"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?"
+
+Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day, put ugly words into my
+mouth. I've enough of my trouble without it."
+
+"I know--I know!" He spoke in instant pleading. "It's all only that I'm
+as troubled _for_ you. When did he come?"
+
+"Three days ago--after he hadn't been near her for more than a year,
+after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her
+existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in."
+
+Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such want--?"
+
+"No, not of food, of necessary things--not even, so far as his
+appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he
+was--well, in terror."
+
+"In terror of what?"
+
+"I don't know. Of somebody--of something. He wants, he says, to be
+quiet. But his quietness is awful."
+
+She suffered, but he couldn't not question. "What does he do?"
+
+It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
+
+Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. "What _has_ he done?"
+
+It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face.
+Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. "If you love
+me--now--don't ask me about father."
+
+He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because I love you that I'm
+here. It's because I love you that I've brought you this." And he drew
+from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
+
+But her eyes only--though he held it out--met the offer. "Why you've
+not broken the seal!"
+
+"If I had broken the seal--exactly--I should know what's within. It's
+for _you_ to break the seal that I bring it."
+
+She looked--still not touching the thing--inordinately grave. "To break
+the seal of something to you from _her?_"
+
+"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by whatever you think
+of it."
+
+"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you yourself think?" And then
+as he didn't answer: "It seems to me _I_ think you know. You have your
+instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
+
+Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an
+accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to
+face. "I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it
+out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour." He held up
+his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. "This thing
+had been timed."
+
+"For Christmas Eve?"
+
+"For Christmas Eve."
+
+Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season of gifts!" After which,
+as he said nothing, she went on: "And had been written, you mean, while
+she could write, and kept to _be_ so timed?"
+
+Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn't reply. "What do
+_you_ mean by the proof?"
+
+"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved. But I won't," she
+said, "break your seal."
+
+"You positively decline?"
+
+"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly: "I know without."
+
+He had another pause. "And what is it you know?"
+
+"That she announces to you she has made you rich."
+
+His pause this time was longer. "Left me her fortune?"
+
+"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But money to a large
+amount. I don't care," Kate went on, "to know how much." And her
+strange smile recurred. "I trust her."
+
+"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
+
+"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought. "That wouldn't, on my
+part, have been playing fair with her. And I did," she added, "play
+fair."
+
+Densher, who had believed her--he couldn't help it--continued, holding
+his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had
+somehow passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and that's why--since
+we talk of proofs--I want to give _you_ one. I've wanted to let you
+see--and in preference even to myself--something I feel as sacred."
+
+She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
+
+"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can
+peculiarly recognise--"
+
+"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he dropped.
+
+"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice
+of an act of splendid generosity."
+
+"And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?"
+
+He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol of my attitude."
+
+She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraid
+of yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to do
+yourself violence."
+
+"So it is then you meet me?"
+
+She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand
+still stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"
+
+"I absolutely desire you to take it."
+
+"To do what I like with it?"
+
+"Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon my
+making the point--between you and me."
+
+She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."
+Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes
+again rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
+before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."
+
+"Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.
+
+"Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearer
+to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing
+into the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: his
+arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,
+with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'll
+have it all," Kate said, "from New York."
+
+It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that
+she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as she
+had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need
+recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the
+prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a
+note from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed him
+by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he
+had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,
+and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale's
+copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the
+gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the
+girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act on
+receipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to the
+bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted in
+strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what
+Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair
+since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little
+vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had
+at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention
+of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when
+they met again the subject was made present to them--at all events till
+some flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutely
+expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
+often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of
+February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's
+stay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt
+which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at
+Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of
+them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she
+really despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with my
+own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
+_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proud
+as the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--having
+nothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. She
+calls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holiday
+to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the
+scullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
+not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quite
+decent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has been
+good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I
+don't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one
+hoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,
+after all, you clever creature, what that was."
+
+It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that
+Densher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, after
+Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on
+his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent
+was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then
+acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been
+painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of
+which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite
+high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.
+Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on
+her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was
+prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger
+passed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he
+would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away
+westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in
+this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
+which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
+answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
+again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
+post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
+question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
+companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
+a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
+might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
+current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
+it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
+that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
+as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
+same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
+even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
+wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
+image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
+bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
+several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
+was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
+say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
+him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
+within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
+these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
+none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
+publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
+good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
+to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
+view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
+delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
+Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
+in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
+and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
+world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
+that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
+impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness
+of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't
+undo.
+
+Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of
+arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which
+they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made
+everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.
+Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered
+alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on
+her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for
+them at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time an
+appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--though
+he didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, for
+a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster
+Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
+It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
+which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of
+cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way
+of a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to
+helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion
+that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful
+warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under
+their feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.
+He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
+Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying
+his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she
+admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in
+the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--she
+was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about
+misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and all
+unconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that they
+didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point
+for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the
+river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was
+mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together
+to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never
+been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--he
+scarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk of
+what they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as
+if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They
+concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;
+they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come
+of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
+off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their
+change--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being so
+damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
+point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What
+danger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had long
+since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he
+asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
+
+Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being the
+interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such
+different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a
+difference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;
+she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been
+more agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: he
+felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which he
+even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at
+all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people
+she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have
+something fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top of
+a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a
+person she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for the
+so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,
+what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at
+once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
+She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck
+him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,
+but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the
+impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
+She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out
+of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look
+with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
+prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
+That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
+sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
+to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
+really _do_ anything it would be another matter."
+
+He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
+a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
+her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
+might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
+objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
+consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
+day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
+contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
+are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
+actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
+to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
+something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
+thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
+precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
+thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
+he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
+left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
+the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
+of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
+handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
+handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
+else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
+words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
+letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
+only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
+part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
+given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
+about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
+It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
+of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save
+it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice
+of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual
+ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he
+cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and
+guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the
+inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,
+should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which
+they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one
+with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't
+complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.
+
+The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion
+we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.
+This would have marked immediately the difference--had there been
+nothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their other
+terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been
+_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they
+had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,
+almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
+around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air
+in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in
+the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the
+way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil
+symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,
+she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these
+things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her
+after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of
+reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
+who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very
+prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your
+seal."
+
+She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long
+envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in
+another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--his
+belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had
+happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and
+it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any
+approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my
+intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
+as not mine."
+
+"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
+
+"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
+New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
+and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
+back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
+his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
+
+Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
+signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
+touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
+sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
+possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
+for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"
+
+"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
+_know_--!"
+
+"But you don't know," she said very gently.
+
+"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
+handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
+one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
+the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."
+
+She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
+mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
+
+Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
+"Well yes--something of that sort."
+
+"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
+spoils the beauty?"
+
+"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
+confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
+received it."
+
+"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
+
+"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
+if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."
+
+"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
+
+He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
+air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
+wanted--in so good a case--to test you."
+
+She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
+good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
+"has ever been known."
+
+"The better the case then the better the test!"
+
+"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
+
+"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
+sooner."
+
+"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
+you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
+
+"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
+correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
+
+She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
+Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"
+
+He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"
+
+"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not
+accepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such
+cases? Not taking up the bequest."
+
+"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My
+asking you to join with me in doing so."
+
+Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her
+less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
+
+"How? By a single word."
+
+"And what word?"
+
+"Your consent to my giving up."
+
+"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."
+
+"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.
+
+She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I
+_don't_ consent?"
+
+"Yes. I do nothing."
+
+"That, as I understand, is accepting."
+
+Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
+
+"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
+
+"I won't touch the money."
+
+It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
+"Who then in such an event _will?_"
+
+"Any one who wants or who can."
+
+Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
+time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
+you?"
+
+"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
+you."
+
+"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
+
+"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
+he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
+must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
+you 'have' me."
+
+"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
+thoroughly up to it!"
+
+"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
+as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.
+Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
+
+It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
+and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
+dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
+in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
+each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
+before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
+said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
+further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
+them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
+air.
+
+There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
+intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."
+
+She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
+she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
+absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
+interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
+done for you?"
+
+"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"
+
+"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"
+
+"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
+Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."
+
+She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
+facts be published?"
+
+"'Published'?"--he winced.
+
+"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
+
+"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
+
+It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
+insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
+help you to renounce?"
+
+"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
+that the amount of money's not small."
+
+"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
+inevitably not be meagre."
+
+Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
+was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."
+
+He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
+of them. "Stupendous?"
+
+"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
+face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
+uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but that
+made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really
+is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're
+afraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
+indeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in
+love with her."
+
+"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
+
+She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for
+the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.
+But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she
+died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you
+_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_
+us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "I
+used to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove.
+Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached.
+They cover us."
+
+"They cover us," Densher said.
+
+"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done
+for you."
+
+His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,
+his tears. "Do I understand then--?"
+
+"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll
+marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
+consent _you_ don't."
+
+"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of
+her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every
+penny."
+
+Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare.
+"Precisely--so that I must choose."
+
+"You must choose."
+
+Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,
+while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath
+come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save
+you from my choice."
+
+"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
+
+"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your
+surrender of that."
+
+"What is it then?"
+
+"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
+
+"Oh--her memory!"
+
+"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't
+be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her
+memory's your love. You _want_ no other."
+
+He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then
+he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
+
+"As we were?"
+
+"As we were."
+
+But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We
+shall never be again as we were!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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