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  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'spunctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got outof it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let himsee that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had torecognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the mosthelpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure wasflagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining thestreet, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerouscorner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched outto have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquentat this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struckhim as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after hisabsence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved themto face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.That it would require some handling, that they should still have todeal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was thegreat matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshedconsciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had hadtwenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, andthe time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. Hehad arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool themoment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at thestation, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he hadpraised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered franklyenough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't careto-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. Itwas none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointedtheir next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particularobligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promiseto Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and hadsuggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an ideathat had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, butnobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in therefreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur thenotice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "havesomething" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it alreadycome up for them again that they had no place of convenience.

  He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but hehadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regardto that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on thatthere were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actuallyrather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he hadnowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and onKate'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, asthey were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhapsdid 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 thatonce at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stopthere, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn'tbe able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying adeficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the furtherfact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to asingle sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there onthe Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in thegarden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to thecoach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to makelove greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again forhappiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. IfKate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house therewould probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon thered spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question ofcoming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would haveyet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word atsuch a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dreadof the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual casethat the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour shedid in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed sowell how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to askhim, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, nowand henceforth, to treat them in her own way.

  She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their earlyconvenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy artthat his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till afterhe left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such aneffect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only thenight before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight ofthe 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 sayto her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to havebelieved that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not againstAunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in thecourt of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel fromsuch a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had alreadysuffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies andsubtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, thenames of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared withlove itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he mighthave come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him ofcourse a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleasedwhom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; andhe should be paid according to agreement and would now take up hismoney. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't inthe least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive forbringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend toproduce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present achange of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, andwithout it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of thelapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, shemight always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to dosomething for him; and that consideration it was that had just nowtided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had donepersonally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour thatalmost scared him even in their small corner of the room atEuston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him thatwaiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature hehad originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It wasall there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hiddenmaster in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. Hisfinal sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of onethe impossible.

  She had been like that afres
h on the morrow; and so for the hour theyhad been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact astheir situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshiftfor closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs ofunrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decentinterest 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; notagain, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily andtacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their oldfrustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the picturedhalls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter ofan hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled himfor their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. Shemight be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing totouch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditionsas those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn'tpretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a likeservice. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed himit wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to havebrought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and onthe spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort ofthing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to replythat to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, sostill, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearninginterval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrelabout; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport ofher subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite ofwhich indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't oncemore 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 forbetter talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate andsuperficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn'texhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kateappeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--tolook about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, toremember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign ofthe eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, inthe midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, withinconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of whathe had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patchedit up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about somepicture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quiteindependently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadfulcloseness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again tobreathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passedinto another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engagedtogether, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It wasprobably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequentlyreconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. Hethought of her for some reason as little, though she was of aboutKate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in hismistress, he had never applied the diminutive.

  What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the processby which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her wasgreater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as anew and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met overthere, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she hadanswered 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 manythings to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale'sindividual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They evenwent so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of socialphenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For thisgroup in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent youngpersons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come backto him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the Americanpair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly preparedhim. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perceptionthat preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, bothyesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance infact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to requiresome brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on theirseparating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by theaid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the officelater, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as apretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him toput her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on herpart, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner andlooked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a momentfor the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of thefirst emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. Hisfull parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of asort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentarystreet-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehowmanaged to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was moreor less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; andthere would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhatsightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.

  He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in thedirection his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had takena day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; andthough he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be itadded--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--varioustroubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what hereally wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enoughof that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as towhat most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during thesefirst hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. Thisat any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things ratherthan fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would bepart of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were notmeanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanationsweren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always withthe effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in theirstroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up withthis special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump inwith her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a questionhe 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 thesense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss thanas a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, underprovidence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him wasconcerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put thequestion to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of herappeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. Herecalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the momentitself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felthimself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority ofher very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebratedsolemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by thattime made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--asurprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. Itmeant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at leastout of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally madehim ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his
return.

  "Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." Andshe had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now bequite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've marginsurely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'llleave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack ofbetrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quitethe contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; itwill be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll askto-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--mycleverness, 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 itnow than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himselfthat 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 otherquestions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challengeabout the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dearMilly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why hefelt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her inadvance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if roomhad been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he wouldknow why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was aforeground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps atthe present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, ifnot the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if sheweren'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 hadmeant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made outthat--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. Thesemight take place, in other words, on her premises, which would removethem still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which didhang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact thattheir next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yetthis fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of morepreliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursdayat 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 allthe way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end ofa quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at herappearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. Theparts, 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 andfitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, withthe general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if theAmerican ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. Onecouldn'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 tohelp us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speakto 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 Kateembraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though heperhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piecethan 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 heimaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even beforehis absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that whenwe're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had repliedthat she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, andthe domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already toprevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of atruth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner hisimmediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate promptedquestions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted herpatience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as forinstance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could donothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to thinkpossible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charmsof the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, someoccasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to methese two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are soaccountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. Andit's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." Hewas but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope yousee we can't work it anyhow."

  If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it wasbecause of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shownhimself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that youhadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifullygood-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You'requite 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 charmingfriends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but theywon't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friendalways helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by thistime out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, sheparticularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had justmade sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, theycould work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly ofthe sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from thefirst not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect ofthem in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think intruth 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 justwhat we do. What could be more lovely than this?"

  It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had tocome to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little ather calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of comingback into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but heknew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of LancasterGate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in oneof the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, butvisibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest ofblues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, andKate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particulartime 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 himnow more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors andthe permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. Theyconnected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid inhim by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What itamounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if hecould!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have herinconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fineas it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her wheretheir communications would be straight and easy and their intercourseindependent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Willyou take me just as I am?"

  She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualifiedto his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure hefound in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instantinto a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used withhim. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don'tspoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "onlybelieve in me, and it will be beautiful."

  He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if hedidn't; but he had come back--and it all was u
pon him now--to seize herwith a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her tosay, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and sheclosed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that shecould gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her responseher surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profitedby these things that it could for the time be ever so intimatelyappreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in whichthey held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it thecertitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was strongerthan an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought wasthat she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sinceritymaking a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her toswear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in factonly now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken upmore 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 enactedwas a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehowsuddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown moreconsistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "Icertainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile ofindulgence--"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 thefirst thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, afterall, 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 mostpeople 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 nomore money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or thanhe should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always wouldbe; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of somemonths before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw howtheir meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantitythan their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other handhe couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent herindifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he waswould call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him thatshe seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite otherterms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sevres, of complicatedbrass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in factby saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressedher, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, hewould 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, afterall, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, asthere is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as weplay 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 caresfor 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. Ibelieve she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herselfwhile 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'ther blessing and a cheque?"

  Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There issomething in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn'tpropose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for athing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has reallybut one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken aboutus, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't indetail 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 haduttered 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 tomake compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," sheexplained, "meet here."

  Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. IfLancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't comeback at all?"

  "Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who'sin love with you."

  But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't makeout, 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 theimplications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a generalprudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"

  Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very welltell her all."

  It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in amanner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' heranything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see thatyou'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 Isee, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged ifI 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 Igive _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 impatientlydeclared, "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 merecomplaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to himunder the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, andtook hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was herform of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he metit, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified _all_ things so topossess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on theseterms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then lefteverything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments toone 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 goodshe'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you--so that she'll helpus to go on."

  Densher stared--she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basisdoes 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 Ilove 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 shedoesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows ofAunt Maud's stand. _That_"--Kate was lucid--"gives her the chance to benice to you."

  "And what does it give _me_," the young man none the less rationallyasked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"

  Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at hisviolence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And thereare 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, onall grounds, is no more than decent of you."

  He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what hadpassed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but ithad made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything inthe nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindlingconsequence. "Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes," saidDensher, "her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quiteindependently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received."

  It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you see. I shall meet youthere."

  "I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why she should wish toreceive you for it."

  "She receives me for myself--that is for _her_ self. She thinks no endof 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 asalready--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, asif it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw outat 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, andKate hailed the effect with surprise. "Have you been supposing that shedoes know--?"

  "About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you showme--and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her." She uttered atthis 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 dearman, 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 andparcel of you?"

  "How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, tohave 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 isout of my being in danger from you--by not having so much as suspectedor heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring itand sinking it--if she only does so hard enough. Therefore _she_, inher manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwisethan as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowedeither 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 outfor themselves?"

  "No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's sofunnily 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, thatyou regard me with a complacent eye--for you show it, I think, alwaystoo much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it toomuch; I don't perhaps--to please you completely where others areconcerned--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 wenton, "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 goodindeed."

  The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining."

  "Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essentialplea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," sheadded, "I _will_ explain."

  "And what will I do?"

  "Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here intruth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment,took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she hadreturned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that,Aunt Maud's liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn'tspoil their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they shouldprobably find it would help them. But she came back to Milly too. "Mindyou go to see her."

  Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. "Then I may comeagain?"

  "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, howwill that give us privacy?"

  "Try it--you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage aswe 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 hebrought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to _me?_"

  It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarcegenerous in expecting her definitely to answer, and by looking to himto wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made himfeel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that hethus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and ofhis flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yetagain on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. Itmight have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in hermind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it willmake."

  Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent; it was he who wasstupid--the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But hemade a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle butstrong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that thedifference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"

  Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of hermore marked shows of impatience; with which in fact she sharply closedtheir discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and sheaccompanied him to the top of the stairs with an air of having so puttheir possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubtsperverse. "I verily believe I _shall_ hate you if you spoil for me thebeauty 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 thetelegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine withthem that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate eventhough in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting Americanfriends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of Americanfriends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit tothe 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 afterhis due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham camein alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of thehour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punct
ual as hewas, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in thefield. He had thus had with her several bewilderingmoments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation tohim to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, whathe wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easyachievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offerherself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want ofyou, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity ofthe article required was what might especially have caused him tostagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowderdealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposedit for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had afterall soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by lettinghis wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of asmall strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that hefeared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always acomfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make himashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she alsoavoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secretdiscomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suithim. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was ofbeing ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but littlethat he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his positionthat 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 inconvenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thickirony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he hadalready seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes asugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--couldafford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart agloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of thisimpotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him bykeeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yetbeen so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in theworld as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. Shewelcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which herfew questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had theamusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of aplan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware ofAmerica, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; theidea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurredto her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as herfavourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; thishelped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless andblameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a completeabsence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method bythe beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received supportall round, for no young man could have been less formidable than theperson to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. Theostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, asprodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was hisown reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--arelation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving norlingering, 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 headto foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher againthe least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habituallyand 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, tothe "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, thisestimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; sothat he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, theplastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, inrespect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such aperson was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every wayto express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for thecharacter she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. Itwas made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--thingsall perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meetcriticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had thelast touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. AuntMaud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and theperformer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier onparade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall atthe play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the pooractress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poorperformer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, herjewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entranceaccordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressionsas we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in verymuch less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make thepoint that there was, still further, time among them for him to feelalmost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself ashaving lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any casehe only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge andat the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thuscame to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated tomere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the mostexpensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant tofear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite ofthe fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a specialintelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked bydouble-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey asign to the person in the house she loved best.

  The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile wenton--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, straygentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visiblypresented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for alike impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. Atopposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other thecontractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company oftwo innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what nowoffered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathlessand 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 wildregrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was thefirst thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she calledit--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if theyoung man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not beenwholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had madedear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiarto the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Anyknowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert tosupply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the mostprivileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a mannerinvented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caughther in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for herby his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in afriendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharpflashlight or two?

  He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening withinterest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist ashe was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put hispen--oh his "pen!"--at th
e service of private distinction. The ear ofsociety?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publiclyparagraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, heappeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settledhimself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch thefull revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that ifhe could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could hegracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. Whattouched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the airof a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if briefcareer. There was of course more said about the heroine than if shehadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the rangeof Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the twowearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemedto know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't shebeen, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the functionof inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appearedbenevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as ifshe wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, butwould let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express itin their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respectto this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wonderingindeed, 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 caughtthem in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when itcame to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--takena lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this ladystriking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he washimself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoicedand soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitatedthan pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that couldscarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dryNew England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the Americancomplexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for findingrelief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed heperceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enoughof it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was askedif it were true that their friend had really not made in her owncountry the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowderherself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he werethe more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose orwith her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory thatthey saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in theStates: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taughtthe Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some nativeproduct. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she wasweird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be thatNew 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 wereawfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thankgoodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left theBriton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to becalculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. Sheannounced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of heryoung friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was nomanner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed themoral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and thegood lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at acertain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearestapproach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had leftthem deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenlyaddressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least littlebit--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 solemnmeanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, hecouldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't knowenormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendouslyappreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had animmediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't thenpresent."

  "Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what itexpressed 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 mayhave gone."

  It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She hadmore things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhapsit were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during thisfoolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of thefoolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, whichaffected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a senseproduced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was evenalready a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringhamperceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it'sprecisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vastopportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,long."

  It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately rightfor him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with itthat nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again bewrong. "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 nowto keep well with him.

  He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before Iknew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I hadendlessly more to see."

  "But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacingarchness.

  "No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charmingimpressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to othersabout her."

  "She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushedfirmness.

  "Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "veryoften quite prove the depth of the impression?"

  He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at allthey seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was asdeep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursuedfor Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as anauthority about her."

  Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friendhad had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not beingeasy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than onesees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing herand 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 thefact of her success; and it was at that comparatively grosscircumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxiouscompanion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in anold-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, inthe arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing andfumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose asfor the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mutecommunion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and moredetermined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;though it w
as not indeed till much later on that he found himself, inthought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from thethings she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Herown idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as afeature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the restof them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that hashappened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. Youdon't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it andfollowed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, atthis, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the casewas a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorterthan one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, butin which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. Thelittle American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, butit 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 herdhad drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probablythe absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would comeand the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all eventscharacteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to hisscribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, afeature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumblenature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that wouldbe the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the authorof the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who wasonly that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from beinginconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, theAmerican whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, thecreature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficientlymarked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.

  So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he hadthus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone ofsociety went so far as to make him take up again his sense ofindependence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this wascivilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle waswithin. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, butthere came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, acrossthe table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the greatworld?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a resultof something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when shestruck 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, waspractically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to hisaid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, torelieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leaveLondon for three months at that time of the year and come back to findyour friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jiggingaway 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 ofhaving discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who haddeveloped 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 thesepleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of makinglight of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--whichproperty, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he wasalso to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have aglimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for thefeet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must revealonly when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in herpassion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her littlelife save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that sheentertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in theobservation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in thedrift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was asif she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement byfeeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed toadmiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found itsomehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her ofthis view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had itfrom her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do withher. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got atthat Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with suchstuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite ofMaud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, therewas none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yetDensher might even then have felt them in the air. They werepractically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of herfriend's chemical change, wound up with the comparativelyunobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a littleperhaps 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 asmight be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she couldmeasure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had reallycovered ground.

  IV

  The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in hiselement at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songsupstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily inthis 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 thisgeneral respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risksto which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house thatintervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songssufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a smallsofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know eachother--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; andshe arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to putAunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in theworld they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, theprofit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;there were in particular at present more things in his mind than hecould bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the otherhand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see onthe spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was notin the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. Imean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For youshe 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'sthe matter with her?"

  But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here hasbeen 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'strue that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
/>
  "Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visiblypreoccupied 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'sanything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, andshe 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 wasalready, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on twodifferent heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the othermakes 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 Ifelt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent toher?"

  "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 sheisn'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 presentdisregard for appearances."

  "Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll makethem all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engagedthat she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion hadindeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instanceanother when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing torespond just in order to make that impression."

  "Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! Ihope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I meanjudging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it asthrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do youmean she's as ill as she looks?"

  Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speechdeserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of herown--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was whatMilly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she couldscarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing hertoo--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been onthe point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulledup. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the nightbefore Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for afarewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off aday 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 girlbrought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as aman might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; butKate, 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 wantsyou; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously havehung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--shedoesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has openedout before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."

  Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling meshe 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 muchto 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 beensomebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girloddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It hasall come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for itcertainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfectsuccess--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--andshe has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel witha thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kindof thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all thefacts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' andSusie 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. Iassure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quiteplain."

  Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what goodthen 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'tcare for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then asit made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her ifthere were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noblecompassion. "She has nothing."

  "Not all the young dukes?"

  "Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any ratedoes 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 oflife. Oh she has you arranged!"

  "_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached andrueful. "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, forthe purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, andyou're therefore what I use most."

  He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." Afterwhich, 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, Ithink. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"

  "People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean shehas something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It'sreally as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, inspite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it'sconceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, asa creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in thesedays, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. Shehas _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."

  "Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do lether have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."

  "Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher inshort was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is thatshe 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 yourwatch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives youconvenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, shewon't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won'ttaste, 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. "Ibelieve that if she's ill at all she's very ill. I believe that ifshe's bad she's not a _little_ bad. I can't tell you why, but that'show I see her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll have itall 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 havingthoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid."You 'think' an
d you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the whilewithout an inkling of her complaint?"

  "No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't wantknowledge. 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, akind of--I don't know what to call it--intensity of pride. And then andthen--" 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 toothat you're as strong as the sea."

  She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of theiryoung immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it atleast without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, thepersonal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if thatvery consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for thepoor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial goodthey, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this. "Howwe're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously sighed. But there werethe facts. "From illness I keep away."

  "But you don't--since here you are, in spite of all you say, in themidst 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 ofwhat I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon."

  She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, thehand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warningbrought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a casefor surgery?"

  "I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may cometo 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 itnow--she sees Sir Luke Strett."

  It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after aninstant: "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 itbefore 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. Youunderstand 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 hasbeen your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making upto her goes, plenty of others will."

  Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeingtheir 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 hadsharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up ather. "You're prodigious!"

  "Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave afurther sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobbyhad, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediatelyfinding her within his view, advanced to greet her before theannouncement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none theless felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to thevisitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowlyrose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And thenfor the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back fromAmerica."

  "Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as hemainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. Herecognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might haveappeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, heknew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficialresemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it wasthe very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training andexperience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as athing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest ofcuriosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness towhich he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to askLord 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, frombelow, 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 onDensher. "She isn't really bad, I trust?"

  Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested inMilly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man withwhom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered withoutvisible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he wasdoing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he wasaided by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I think not. I'vejust been reassuring Mr. Densher," she added--"who's as concerned asthe rest of us. I've been calming his fears."

  "Oh!" said Lord Mark again--and again it was just as good. That was forDensher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for theothers: "_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, gavethem frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy.What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presentlywith him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this timequite 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 withhim."

  "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 themeasure, do you mean, of my danger?"

  He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare say, of MissTheale'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. "Ifthat interest--Mrs. Lowder's--takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't herather 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 hecheats?"

  "Yes," said Kate--"that's the way people are. What they think of theirenemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck withwhat 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'tyet 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 tomake 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 whichhe added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?"

  "Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her againimpatient.

  Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, Isuppose, 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 naturalsense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differencesor 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 knowwhat I lose."

  Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "AndAunt Maud--why shouldn't _she_ know? I mean that your friend thereisn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"

  "Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That'sundeniably 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--morecould be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with thesordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in hisfamily 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 hadyet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed sothat one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out intime with a very sufficient "Yes!"

  "Political?"

  "Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call itwhen a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow aneffect 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--andmen 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 thuspromptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have beenfound, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Somethingsuddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him andoverflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of thefuture she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you arestupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--andthen you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--exceptthat 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 beyondit. 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, heached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've asubscription!"

  She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had inanswer, and they remained once more confronted and united in theiressential 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 itselfpressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "Seehere, 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 thinkyou'll kill _me_ in time to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her thenext instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this shehad got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had comeback to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closelyconnected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had adistance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him beforethey joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understandshe meant his way with Milly.

  He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she hadbrought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by thislight something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitelytell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"

  She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, thoughquite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growingintimate, 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 takethem?"

  "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 gostraight!"

  He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you meanby going straight?"

  "Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, andyou'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 thequeerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondroussilken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"

  He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, hadcaught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, herattention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through andwho was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed byLord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened beforeany dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate foundtime to say to him with furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Anotherwas that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drewnear to him with an almost reproachful "Come and talk to _me!_"--achallenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness oftheir installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not thesame he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs.Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him aslooking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which heafterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a fewwords with her after dinner he would have found her ready. Thisimpression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense ofsomething by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhapsa slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her "Good-night,sir!" as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothingmore to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by thistime had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personagehad forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently--witha view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs onMilly--proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurredwas that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word forhimself. It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she bothdetained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but hehadn'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, Imyself discovered, I--as was said at dinner--invented her."

  "Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't taken out thepatent. Don't, I only mean, in the press of other things, too muchneglect her."

  Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate's, heasked himself quickly if it mightn't help him with her. He at any ratecould but try. "You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,you know, what Mi
ss Croy has been saying to me. _She_ keeps me up--shehas had so much to say about them."

  He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of hispassage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring toherself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it asif her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw hisintention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance;she only said imperturbably: "Yes, she'll herself do anything for herfriend; so that she but preaches what she practises."

  Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate's devotionwent. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in faceof which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herselfof the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate's mastery ofthe subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.What might really _become_ in all this of the American girl wastherefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose noneof its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, sofar as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all thesame, 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--leavingtown and, as I take it, going abroad."

  Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealingwith this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "tillshe has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving himuncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall gotoo."

  He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And whatgood 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 indeedputting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use herather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could makeof it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "toconsider."

  "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'mtreating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I cansmooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And herfortune's a real fortune."

  Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as hefelt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funnyif 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 youfor the handsome offer--"

  "Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say itdoes--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 youowe me something--if you want to know why."

  Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, herconsistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receivean odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was thatshe believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in thislight did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Ofcourse I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Yourinviting me for instance to-night--!"

  "Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," sheadded, "how far I've gone for you."

  He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but helaughed 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 foryou what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity onlymade him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has theweight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness withsurprise. "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 seewhat she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now tomake me right!"

  The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he hadleft the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of thesquare that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had hisbrief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to MillyTheale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She hadaffirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. Hemade it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by itsstarting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so thatMilly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--thevery properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. SoMilly was successfully deceived.

  V

  To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was tosee her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his threevisits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face toface 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 hadbeen present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that theirexcellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmlessAmerican relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce expressin names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They hadboth since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was hismental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as ifthe greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasonsother than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, ather hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is witha highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played forhim at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's sooddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make herinteresting. She had been interesting enough without them--thatappeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful aswas the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nippedin the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but stillperfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of hisbreaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his owngood sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him whichministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances andwhich he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoicein the possession of. Many men--he practically made thereflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lostpatience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any furtheracquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate ofthis young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been oneway, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, hadnot been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since thenight before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed ofbeing the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind ofman wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minorevil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every oneconcerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He likedKate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. Heliked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him theevening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had neverknown himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muffnot to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should hefind he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea ofworking it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promisemuch interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; butpositively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.

  Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the b
est intentions and with amargin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found hisburden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardnessinvolved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced forhim turned round on the spot to present him another face. This wassimply the face of his old impression, which he now fullyrecovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, theyhad the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in theworld. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class wasfrom the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probablethan on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her inKate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, toDensher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from theNational Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was thereforescarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much forher. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best andsimplest; the least he could decently do, given their happyacquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she hadbeen prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then therewas the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at anyrate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had sharedwith Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was findingher, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad tosee him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early butthat she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was wellenough 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 histhought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account becauseexpecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain personmight turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom ofmind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautifulhypocrisy 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 asif she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree ofsurprise; 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 anywant of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take careof it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, onhis entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she hadapparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibilityof his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she hadwithin the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did heunderstand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner inwhich he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that hecouldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after toacknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like thatcould 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 hadlet him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend'sexplanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; butshe had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as withthe smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance forinsistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she hadreasons 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 sopersonal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could takea hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quicklydisposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one hewas glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of theappeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest hadbeen invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion wasexactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden somuch as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorryfor her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to makeout. 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 theground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightlylonger time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement andthen with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pityhadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yieldquite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turnedround: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeatit--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. Hissituation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject forthat degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt itas something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in commonhonesty, 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 itselfquite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, camestraight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wastedcharity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case ofconscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of whichhe was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he wasunhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate hadspent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it wasbecause she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was whatcame up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definitean account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. Hisimmediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for himalmost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other partyto their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. Thevalue of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw itso expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, sohis right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; andif he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a wayquite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence._There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mindwhat he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy considerationon a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kepton, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not tomiss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing onwhatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he hadhimself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description ofhim, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibilitywould begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp pointwas, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: thisdifference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw itwith a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting thatwas 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!"--thatwould have been the particular word; which there were at the same timebut too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it bevirtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--andthis quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom itwould constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something soextraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from thecomplications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman oneloved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certainlength--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of theabjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed inpresence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do onenothing but good.

  Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at theimmensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence havewanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: MillyTheale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. Shewould absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shallever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be lessdelicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be freeto do that if Kate, in some prudenc
e, some contrition, for some betterreason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross thandoing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of thefact 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 herwith the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in theimpression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over andabove it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed asshe did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Denshertherefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of apure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this purepleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were thingsshe seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were notall the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant inthe light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off thequestion of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she didthat, 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 shallnever be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worryabout me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, inshort, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even nowwhile you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was foldedfinely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions andher 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," heaccused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at leastapparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at allevents then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out aboutLondon, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat heras a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her achesand pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him atLancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had metthis with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature ofthe season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--theyfraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since theirinterrupted encounter in New York.

  At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up forthem, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just sosharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view oftheir past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they hadoriginally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen toremembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at thetime 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 mighthave been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to oneof those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place theirbeginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about thesteps 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 tocommunicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingledthemselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hardto say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was keptface to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident intheir situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness ofthe forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond theircontrol. The current thus determined had positively become for him, bythe time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but forthe absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he wouldfreely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticisedacquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young womancould do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experimentwent and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go asthe marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a wordabout Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a questionfor them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurredcomparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night beforeappealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but hefairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him ofcourse how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shownhim by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealtwith, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps againconveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her beforegoing further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite somuch. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it cameup afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and neverrenew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument againstthat issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful littleeloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.

  Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact thatshe was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Overthe latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the meritof giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; thechance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to herfreedom. 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 thusappeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was justwhat would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiarbrutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance ofheroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. Shewould be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incurwhatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue tobe exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. Itwouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn'tbefore 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'tcare for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as ifMilly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in mysociety, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to makemy society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a differentimpression 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 tobe whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do youbegin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"

  She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face shewould, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed viewof the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. Theyweren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weekssomewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we'veonly been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's doneand the wind's in our sails."

  "May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you comeback?"

  She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the windturns. And what do you do with your summer?"

  "Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My workin your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of thepleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."

  "I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different timefrom 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 greatwith me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, ineither. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--youall," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to realphysical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. Mylabour'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 Ilearn, the whole
place in your pocket."

  "Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed sowhat you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'mwatching 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--notto make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off againto 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 herstatement--"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 ifbargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"

  He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but hechecked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring tosocial life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of amob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should youcome here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappearfor 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 goingsomewhere for that."

  "For better air?"--she remembered. "Oh yes, one certainly wants to getout of London in August."

  "Rather, of course!"--he fully understood. "Though I'm glad you've hungon 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 haveseemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he wasproposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issuewas easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll find ready tosurround you with sympathy."

  It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge himafresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"

  "Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we _shall_ feel for you will bemuch 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 itfor Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me."

  "So she has to _me_," said Densher. "I feel," he added as she at firstanswered nothing, "that, quite contrary to anything I originallyexpected, I've made a good friend of her."

  "I didn't expect it either--its turning out as it has. But I did," saidMilly, "with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I'd do anything"--shekept it up--"for Kate."

  Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she mightfor the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of theideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves togetherand operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had atthat moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do forKate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which hefelt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousnessstronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in hissilence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing forKate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he wastrying 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," hepermitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person socharming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean herworking 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 showhe 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. Heremembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's wayswas just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no furtherthan to remark with a good intention that had the further merit ofrepresenting a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to callknow."

  "Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The wordsgave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility forhis own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had timeto 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 wouldperfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, andbefore Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how justhere it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made upnot to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly putthere by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no toturn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even havegiven him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filledfor them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the Augustafternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavycarriage-wheels and of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a greatshake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeededby a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by adue 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?--everyday. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of ourhearts, very amusing." She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herselfof what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together onthe balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeeda brave show. "Is it very awful?"

  It was to Densher's eyes--save for its absurd heaviness--onlypleasantly pompous. "It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do Iknow? You're mistress of these things, in contact with the highestwisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which yourcarriage--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 hadhappened the next minute was first that she had denied she was goingout, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had saidshe would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive--that in factthere were always things to do, that there had been a question for herto-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why thecarriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said thesethings, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, theyfound Milly's servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompanyher. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling thematter--on the basis, that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher'shappy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we havedescribed in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. Thesystem of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought himheadlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just nowit was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or theother. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed tohim longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watchinghimself wait. He couldn't keep that up for ever; and since one thing orthe other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presentlybecame conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settleditself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against afirm 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 atonce to her servant, "In ten minutes"; and then to her visitor, as theman went out, "We'll go somewhere--I shall like that. But I must ask ofyou time--as little as possible--to get ready." She looked over theroom to provide for him, keep him there. "There are books andthings--plenty; and I dress very quickly." He caught her eyes only asshe went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.

  Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce havesaid; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing tooblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so thatshe had made him simply wish
, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige_her;_ which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quiteround it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and hestood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more--remainedwith several very living little matters to think about. One of thesewas the phenomenon--typical, highly American, he would have said--ofMilly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had soughtrefuge--refuge from another question--in the almost exclusivecontemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not evento a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous forhis young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone--since shehadn't mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no moreadvanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn't an Americangirl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate _would_ havedone it, though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,spontaneous. And then in addition Kate _had_ done it--or things verylike it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate--even if his ostensibly notbeing put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at anyrate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate,was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as toanything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to giveherself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved aboutthe room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed athis disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;whereas Kate was backward--backward still, comparatively, as an Englishgirl--and yet advanced in a high degree. However--though this didn'tstraighten it out--Kate was of course two or three years older; whichat 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 hiscorner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the optionof taking advantage of Milly's absence to retrace his steps. If hemight have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, hecouldn't turn tail now; he must simply wait there with hisconsciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issuewas closed from without; in the course of three minutes more MissTheale'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, stoppedshort at sight of Densher--only, after an instant, as the young man sawwith free amusement, not from surprise and still less fromdiscomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation--Miss Theale hadgone to prepare to drive--on receipt of which the servant effacedhimself.

  "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 thoroughlyconsistent and handsome about it.

  "What I mean is of course," he went on--for he was sensibly affected byher gaiety--"at your so lively instigation."

  She had looked about the room--she might have been vaguely looking forsigns of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aidin taking a decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you like."She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she madea fresh joke of this direct impression of it. "So much so as that? Doyou 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 beall right. If she _is_--"

  But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?" He was moved to saymore. "It's not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to meit's you." She struck him as making light of a matter that had beencosting 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 atall 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 hiswords; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he reallyneedn't get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She askedit, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she better--if she's able tosee you?"

  "She assures me she's in perfect health."

  Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On which she added: "It won'thave 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 thenext moment. "I've told you that."

  He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then itwas 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 rememberedwhere they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, evenstretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite rightfeeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and yet they were sayingthings--! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. "Ask _her_, ifyou like; you're free--she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don'ttrouble about what you think I may or mayn't have told. I'm all rightwith her," said Kate. "So there you are."

  "If you mean _here_ I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable. If youalso mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you're sofar 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 meout for you."

  "In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity, "you can do it alittle for _her_. I'm not afraid," she smiled.

  He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on itand affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things inthis face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to hisrelief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, aquestion of words. "I do nothing for any one in the world but you. Butfor 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'mletting you do--well, God knows what with me."

  She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense ofwhich she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in methen, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gonefurther?"

  "Break off with you?"

  "Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay andexplain 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 mebut 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 ofitself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone cameback 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 henow weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding mehere--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 toomany conditions."

  She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want ofpliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what itsuddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man ofany taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure ofbeing able to show--imagination, tact,
positively even humour. Thecircumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that thespeculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I shouldbegin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, hadtranslated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"

  She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for morethan he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.

  "Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settledsomething for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding outhis hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both tocheck him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute thatshe did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyesdeeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself andrenew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense ofwhere they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usualvictories, which immediately took further form. By the time he haddropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. Itwas 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 thathe had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on whichshe then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.

  "If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding youwith her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'llunderstand."

  She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he hadbefore she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understandenough, 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, threeminutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garmentsthroughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took foran infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its foldedfabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feetlike the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of theirfriend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," hesaid--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded hiscorner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.

  She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossedover whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justifiedKate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, itshould now be wholly left.