Title: The Wings of the Dove (1909)
Author: Henry James
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Title: The Wings of the Dove (1909)
Author: Henry James





PREFACE


"The Wings of the Dove," published in 1902, represents to my memory a
very old--if I shouldn't perhaps rather say a very young--motive; I can
scarce remember the time when the situation on which this long-drawn
fiction mainly rests was not vividly present to me. The idea, reduced to
its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great
capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die
under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover
of the condemnation and passionately desiring to "put in" before
extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve,
however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived. Long had I
turned it over, standing off from it, yet coming back to it; convinced
of what might be done with it, yet seeing the theme as formidable. The
image so figured would be, at best, but half the matter; the rest would
be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought
about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience
somehow compassed. These things, I had from the first felt, would
require much working-out; that indeed was the case with most things
worth working at all; yet there are subjects and subjects, and this one
seemed particularly to bristle. It was formed, I judged, to make the
wary adventurer walk round and round it--it had in fact a charm that
invited and mystified alike that attention; not being somehow what one
thought of as a "frank" subject, after the fashion of some, with its
elements well in view and its whole character in its face. It stood
there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and
traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for
equal services in return, and would collect this debt to the last
shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light
a person infirm and ill--a case sure to prove difficult and to require
much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters, one of
those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of the very
best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked and
cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they
make a sign.

Yes then, the case prescribed for its central figure a sick young woman,
at the whole course of whose disintegration and the whole ordeal of
whose consciousness one would have quite honestly to assist. The
expression of her state and that of one's intimate relation to it might
therefore well need to be discreet and ingenious; a reflexion that
fortunately grew and grew, however, in proportion as I focussed my
image--roundabout which, as it persisted, I repeat, the interesting
possibilities and the attaching wonderments, not to say the insoluble
mysteries, thickened apace. Why had one to look so straight in the face
and so closely to cross-question that idea of making one's protagonist
"sick"?--as if to be menaced with death or danger hadn't been from time
immemorial, for heroine or hero, the very shortest of all cuts to the
interesting state. Why should a figure be disqualified for a central
position by the particular circumstance that might most quicken, that
might crown with a fine intensity, its liability to many accidents, its
consciousness of all relations? This circumstance, true enough, might
disqualify it for many activities--even though we should have imputed to
it the unsurpassable activity of passionate, of inspired resistance.
This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the
moment one recognised that the poet essentially CAN'T be concerned with
the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still
by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the
conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle. The process of
life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground
as in no other connexion. One had had moreover, as a various chronicler,
one's secondary physical weaklings and failures, one's accessory
invalids--introduced with a complacency that made light of criticism. To
Ralph Touchett in "The Portrait of a Lady," for instance, his
deplorable state of health was not only no drawback; I had clearly been
right in counting it, for any happy effect he should produce, a positive
good mark, a direct aid to pleasantness and vividness. The reason of
this moreover could never in the world have been his fact of sex; since
men, among the mortally afflicted, suffer on the whole more overtly and
more grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior strategy.
I had thus to take THAT anomaly for what it was worth, and I give it
here but as one of the ambiguities amid which my subject ended by making
itself at home and seating itself quite in confidence.

With the clearness I have just noted, accordingly, the last thing in the
world it proposed to itself was to be the record predominantly of a
collapse. I don't mean to say that my offered victim was not present to
my imagination, constantly, as dragged by a greater force than any she
herself could exert; she had been given me from far back as contesting
every inch of the road, as catching at every object the grasp of which
might make for delay, as clutching these things to the last moment of
her strength. Such an attitude and such movements, the passion they
expressed and the success they in fact represented, what were they in
truth but the soul of drama?--which is the portrayal, as we know, of a
catastrophe determined in spite of oppositions. My young woman would
HERSELF be the opposition--to the catastrophe announced by the
associated Fates, powers conspiring to a sinister end and, with their
command of means, finally achieving it, yet in such straits really to
STIFLE the sacred spark that, obviously, a creature so animated, an
adversary so subtle, couldn't but be felt worthy, under whatever
weaknesses, of the foreground and the limelight. She would meanwhile
wish, moreover, all along, to live for particular things, she would
found her struggle on particular human interests, which would inevitably
determine, in respect to her, the attitude of other persons, persons
affected in such a manner as to make them part of the action. If her
impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of
life as possible, if this longing can take effect only by the aid
of others, their participation (appealed to, entangled and coerced as
they find themselves) becomes their drama too--that of their promoting
her illusion, under her importunity, for reasons, for interests and
advantages, from motives and points of view, of their own. Some of these
promptings, evidently, would be of the highest order--others doubtless
mightn't; but they would make up together, for her, contributively, her
sum of experience, represent to her somehow, in good faith or in bad,
what she should have KNOWN. Somehow, too, at such a rate, one would see
the persons subject to them drawn in as by some pool of a Lorelei--see
them terrified and tempted and charmed; bribed away, it may even be,
from more prescribed and natural orbits, inheriting from their connexion
with her strange difficulties and still stranger opportunities,
confronted with rare questions and called upon for new discriminations.
Thus the scheme of her situation would, in a comprehensive way, see
itself constituted; the rest of the interest would be in the number and
nature of the particulars. Strong among these, naturally, the need that
life should, apart from her infirmity, present itself to our young woman
as quite dazzlingly liveable, and that if the great pang for her is in
what she must give up we shall appreciate it the more from the sight of
all she has.

One would see her then as possessed of all things, all but the single
most precious assurance; freedom and money and a mobile mind and
personal charm, the power to interest and attach; attributes, each one,
enhancing the value of a future. From the moment his imagination began
to deal with her at close quarters, in fact, nothing could more engage
her designer than to work out the detail of her perfect rightness for
her part; nothing above all more solicit him than to recognise fifty
reasons for her national and social status. She should be the last fine
flower--blooming alone, for the fullest attestation of her freedom--of
an "old" New York stem; the happy congruities thus preserved for her
being matters, however, that I may not now go into, and this even though
the fine association that shall yet elsewhere await me is of a
sort, at the best, rather to defy than to encourage exact expression.
There goes with it, for the heroine of "The Wings of the Dove," a strong
and special implication of liberty, liberty of action, of choice, of
appreciation, of contact--proceeding from sources that provide better
for large independence, I think, than any other conditions in the
world--and this would be in particular what we should feel ourselves
deeply concerned with. I had from far back mentally projected a certain
sort of young American as more the "heir of all the ages" than any other
young person whatever (and precisely on those grounds I have just
glanced at but to pass them by for the moment); so that here was a
chance to confer on some such figure a supremely touching value. To be
the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that consciousness
should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would be to play the part, it
struck me, or at least to arrive at the type, in the light on the whole
the most becoming. Otherwise, truly, what a perilous part to play
OUT--what a suspicion of "swagger" in positively attempting it! So at
least I could reason--so I even think I HAD to--to keep my subject to a
decent compactness. For already, from an early stage, it had begun
richly to people itself: the difficulty was to see whom the situation I
had primarily projected might, by this, that or the other turn, NOT draw
in. My business was to watch its turns as the fond parent watches a
child perched, for its first riding-lesson, in the saddle; yet its
interest, I had all the while to recall, was just in its making, on such
a scale, for developments.

What one had discerned, at all events, from an early stage, was that a
young person so devoted and exposed, a creature with her security
hanging so by a hair, couldn't but fall somehow into some abysmal
trap--this being, dramatically speaking, what such a situation most
naturally implied and imposed. Didn't the truth and a great part of the
interest also reside in the appearance that she would constitute for
others (given her passionate yearning to live while she might)
a complication as great as any they might constitute for
herself?--which is what I mean when I speak of such matters as
"natural." They would be as natural, these tragic, pathetic, ironic,
these indeed for the most part sinister, liabilities, to her living
associates, as they could be to herself as prime subject. If her story
was to consist, as it could so little help doing, of her being let in,
as we say, for this, that and the other irreducible anxiety, how could
she not have put a premium on the acquisition, by any close sharer of
her life, of a consciousness similarly embarrassed? I have named the
Rhine-maiden, but our young friend's existence would create rather, all
round her, very much that whirlpool movement of the waters produced by
the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great business; when we
figure to ourselves the strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of
suction, the general engulfment that, for any neighbouring object, makes
immersion inevitable. I need scarce say, however, that in spite of these
communities of doom I saw the main dramatic complication much more
prepared FOR my vessel of sensibility than by her--the work of other
hands (though with her own imbrued too, after all, in the measure of
their never not being, in some direction, generous and extravagant, and
thereby provoking).

The great point was, at all events, that if in a predicament she was to
be, accordingly, it would be of the essence to create the predicament
promptly and build it up solidly, so that it should have for us as much
as possible its ominous air of awaiting her. That reflexion I found,
betimes, not less inspiring than urgent; one begins so, in such a
business, by looking about for one's compositional key, unable as one
can only be to move till one has found it. To start without it is to
pretend to enter the train and, still more, to remain in one's seat,
without a ticket. Well--in the steady light and for the continued charm
of these verifications--I had secured my ticket over the tolerably long
line laid down for "The Wings of the Dove" from the moment I had noted
that there could be no full presentation of Milly Theale as ENGAGED with
elements amid which she was to draw her breath in such pain, should not
the elements have been, with all solicitude, duly prefigured. If
one had seen that her stricken state was but half her case, the
correlative half being the state of others as affected by her (they too
should have a "case," bless them, quite as much as she!) then I was free
to choose, as it were, the half with which I should begin. If, as I had
fondly noted, the little world determined for her was to "bristle"--I
delighted in the term!--with meanings, so, by the same token, could I
but make my medal hang free, its obverse and its reverse, its face and
its back, would beautifully become optional for the spectator. I somehow
wanted them correspondingly embossed, wanted them inscribed and figured
with an equal salience; yet it was none the less visibly my "key," as I
have said, that though my regenerate young New Yorker, and what might
depend on her, should form my centre, my circumference was every whit as
treatable. Therefore I must trust myself to know when to proceed from
the one and when from the other. Preparatively and, as it were,
yearningly--given the whole ground--one began, in the event, with the
outer ring, approaching the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations.
There, full-blown, accordingly, from one hour to the other, rose one's
process--for which there remained all the while so many amusing
formulae.

The medal DID hang free--I felt this perfectly, I remember, from the
moment I had comfortably laid the ground provided in my first Book,
ground from which Milly is superficially so absent. I scarce remember
perhaps a case--I like even with this public grossness to insist on
it--in which the curiosity of "beginning far back," as far back as
possible, and even of going, to the same tune, far "behind," that is
behind the face of the subject, was to assert itself with less scruple.
The free hand, in this connexion, was above all agreeable--the hand the
freedom of which I owed to the fact that the work had ignominiously
failed, in advance, of all power to see itself "serialised." This
failure had repeatedly waited, for me, upon shorter fictions; but the
considerable production we here discuss was (as "The Golden Bowl" was to
be, two or three years later) born, not otherwise than a little
bewilderedly, into a world of periodicals and editors, of roaring
"successes" in fine, amid which it was well-nigh unnotedly to lose
itself. There is fortunately something bracing, ever, in the alpine
chill, that of some high icy arete, shed by the cold editorial shoulder;
sour grapes may at moments fairly intoxicate and the story-teller worth
his salt rejoice to feel again how many accommodations he can practise.
Those addressed to "conditions of publication" have in a degree their
interesting, or at least their provoking, side; but their charm is
qualified by the fact that the prescriptions here spring from a soil
often wholly alien to the ground of the work itself. They are almost
always the fruit of another air altogether and conceived in a light
liable to represent WITHIN the circle of the work itself little else
than darkness. Still, when not too blighting, they often operate as a
tax on ingenuity--that ingenuity of the expert craftsman which likes to
be taxed very much to the same tune to which a well-bred horse likes to
be saddled. The best and finest ingenuities, nevertheless, with all
respect to that truth, are apt to be, not one's compromises, but one's
fullest conformities, and I well remember, in the case before us, the
pleasure of feeling my divisions, my proportions and general rhythm,
rest all on permanent rather than in any degree on momentary
proprieties. It was enough for my alternations, thus, that they were
good in themselves; it was in fact so much for them that I really think
any further account of the constitution of the book reduces itself to a
just notation of the law they followed.

There was the "fun," to begin with, of establishing one's successive
centres--of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject
commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated
from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid BLOCKS of
wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass
and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to
effect and to provide for beauty. Such a block, obviously, is the whole
preliminary presentation of Kate Croy, which, from the first, I recall,
absolutely declined to enact itself save in terms of amplitude.
Terms of amplitude, terms of atmosphere, those terms, and those terms
only, in which images assert their fulness and roundness, their power to
revolve, so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as true
as parts in the sun--these were plainly to be my conditions, right and
left, and I was so far from overrating the amount of expression the
whole thing, as I saw and felt it, would require, that to retrace the
way at present is, alas, more than anything else, but to mark the gaps
and the lapses, to miss, one by one, the intentions that, with the best
will in the world, were not to fructify. I have just said that the
process of the general attempt is described from the moment the "blocks"
are numbered, and that would be a true enough picture of my plan. Yet
one's plan, alas, is one thing and one's result another; so that I am
perhaps nearer the point in saying that this last strikes me at present
as most characterised by the happy features that WERE, under my first
and most blest illusion, to have contributed to it. I meet them all, as
I renew acquaintance, I mourn for them all as I remount the stream, the
absent values, the palpable voids, the missing links, the mocking
shadows, that reflect, taken together, the early bloom of one's good
faith. Such cases are of course far from abnormal--so far from it that
some acute mind ought surely to have worked out by this time the "law"
of the degree in which the artist's energy fairly depends on his
fallibility. How much and how often, and in what connexions and with
what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe, that of his prime
object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute
for it--or in other words at all appreciably to exist? He places, after
an earnest survey, the piers of his bridge--he has at least sounded deep
enough, heaven knows, for their brave position; yet the bridge spans the
stream, after the fact, in apparently complete independence of these
properties, the principal grace of the original design. THEY were an
illusion, for their necessary hour; but the span itself, whether of a
single arch or of many, seems by the oddest chance in the world to be a
reality; since, actually, the rueful builder, passing under it,
sees figures and hears sounds above: he makes out, with his heart in his
throat, that it bears and is positively being "used."

The building-up of Kate Croy's consciousness to the capacity for the
load little by little to be laid on it was, by way of example, to have
been a matter of as many hundred close-packed bricks as there are
actually poor dozens. The image of her so compromised and compromising
father was all effectively to have pervaded her life, was in a certain
particular way to have tampered with her spring; by which I mean that
the shame and the irritation and the depression, the general poisonous
influence of him, were to have been SHOWN, with a truth beyond the
compass even of one's most emphasised "word of honour" for it, to do
these things. But where do we find him, at this time of day, save in a
beggarly scene or two which scarce arrives at the dignity of functional
reference? He but "looks in," poor beautiful dazzling, damning
apparition that he was to have been; he sees his place so taken, his
company so little missed, that, cocking again that fine form of hat
which has yielded him for so long his one effective cover, he turns away
with a whistle of indifference that nobly misrepresents the deepest
disappointment of his life. One's poor word of honour has HAD to pass
muster for the show. Every one, in short, was to have enjoyed so much
better a chance that, like stars of the theatre condescending to oblige,
they have had to take small parts, to content themselves with minor
identities, in order to come on at all. I haven't the heart now, I
confess, to adduce the detail of so many lapsed importances; the
explanation of most of which, after all, I take to have been in the
crudity of a truth beating full upon me through these reconsiderations,
the odd inveteracy with which picture, at almost any turn, is jealous of
drama, and drama (though on the whole with a greater patience, I think)
suspicious of picture. Between them, no doubt, they do much for the
theme; yet each baffles insidiously the other's ideal and eats round the
edges of its position; each is too ready to say "I can take the thing
for 'done' only when done in MY way." The residuum of comfort for the
witness of these broils is of course meanwhile in the convenient
reflexion, invented for him in the twilight of time and the infancy of
art by the Angel, not to say by the Demon, of Compromise, that nothing
is so easy to "do" as not to be thankful for almost any stray help in
its getting done. It wasn't, after this fashion, by making good one's
dream of Lionel Croy that my structure was to stand on its feet--any
more than it was by letting him go that I was to be left irretrievably
lamenting. The who and the what, the how and the why, the whence and the
whither of Merton Densher, these, no less, were quantities and
attributes that should have danced about him with the antique grace of
nymphs and fauns circling round a bland Hermes and crowning him with
flowers. One's main anxiety, for each one's agents, is that the air of
each shall be GIVEN; but what does the whole thing become, after all, as
one goes, but a series of sad places at which the hand of generosity has
been cautioned and stayed? The young man's situation, personal,
professional, social, was to have been so decanted for us that we should
get all the taste; we were to have been penetrated with Mrs. Lowder, by
the same token, saturated with her presence, her "personality," and felt
all her weight in the scale. We were to have revelled in Mrs. Stringham,
my heroine's attendant friend, her fairly choral Bostonian, a subject
for innumerable touches, and in an extended and above all an ANIMATED
reflexion of Milly Theale's experience of English society; just as the
strength and sense of the situation in Venice, for our gathered friends,
was to have come to us in a deeper draught out of a larger cup, and just
as the pattern of Densher's final position and fullest consciousness
there was to have been marked in fine stitches, all silk and gold, all
pink and silver, that have had to remain, alas, but entwined upon the
reel.

It isn't, no doubt, however--to recover, after all, our critical
balance--that the pattern didn't, for each compartment, get itself
somehow wrought, and that we mightn't thus, piece by piece, opportunity
offering, trace it over and study it. The thing has doubtless, as
a whole, the advantage that each piece is true to its pattern, and that
while it pretends to make no simple statement it yet never lets go its
scheme of clearness. Applications of this scheme are continuous and
exemplary enough, though I scarce leave myself room to glance at them.
The clearness is obtained in Book First--or otherwise, as I have said,
in the first "piece," each Book having its subordinate and contributive
pattern--through the associated consciousness of my two prime young
persons, for whom I early recognised that I should have to consent,
under stress, to a practical FUSION of consciousness. It is into the
young woman's "ken" that Merton Densher is represented as swimming; but
her mind is not here, rigorously, the one reflector. There are occasions
when it plays this part, just as there are others when his plays it, and
an intelligible plan consists naturally not a little in fixing such
occasions and making them, on one side and the other, sufficient to
themselves. Do I sometimes in fact forfeit the advantage of that
distinctness? Do I ever abandon one centre for another after the former
has been postulated? From the moment we proceed by "centres"--and I have
never, I confess, embraced the logic of any superior process--they must
BE, each, as a basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the
high interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is
no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and
though I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a represented
community of vision between several parties to the action when it makes
for concentration, I understand no breaking-up of the register, no
sacrifice of the recording consistency, that doesn't rather scatter and
weaken. In this truth resides the secret of the discriminated
occasion--that aspect of the subject which we have our noted choice of
treating either as picture or scenically, but which is apt, I think, to
show its fullest worth in the Scene. Beautiful exceedingly, for that
matter, those occasions or parts of an occasion when the boundary line
between picture and scene bears a little the weight of the double
pressure.

Such would be the case, I can't but surmise, for the long passage
that forms here before us the opening of Book Fourth, where all the
offered life centres, to intensity, in the disclosure of Milly's single
throbbing consciousness, but where, for a due rendering, everything has
to be brought to a head. This passage, the view of her introduction to
Mrs. Lowder's circle, has its mate, for illustration, later on in the
book and at a crisis for which the occasion submits to another rule. My
registers or "reflectors," as I so conveniently name them (burnished
indeed as they generally are by the intelligence, the curiosity, the
passion, the force of the moment, whatever it be, directing them), work,
as we have seen, in arranged alternation; so that in the second
connexion I here glance at it is Kate Croy who is, "for all she is
worth," turned on. She is turned on largely at Venice, where the
appearances, rich and obscure and portentous (another word I rejoice in)
as they have by that time become and altogether exquisite as they
remain, are treated almost wholly through her vision of them and
Densher's (as to the lucid interplay of which conspiring and conflicting
agents there would be a great deal to say). It is in Kate's
consciousness that at the stage in question the drama is brought to a
head, and the occasion on which, in the splendid saloon of poor Milly's
hired palace, she takes the measure of her friend's festal evening,
squares itself to the same synthetic firmness as the compact
constructional block inserted by the scene at Lancaster Gate. Milly's
situation ceases at a given moment to be "renderable" in terms closer
than those supplied by Kate's intelligence, or, in a richer degree, by
Densher's, or, for one fond hour, by poor Mrs. Stringham's (since to
that sole brief futility is this last participant, crowned by my
original plan with the quaintest functions, in fact reduced); just as
Kate's relation with Densher and Densher's with Kate have ceased
previously, and are then to cease again, to be projected for us, so far
as Milly is concerned with them, on any more responsible plate than that
of the latter's admirable anxiety. It is as if, for these aspects, the
impersonal plate--in other words the poor author's comparatively
cold affirmation or thin guarantee--had felt itself a figure of
attestation at once too gross and too bloodless, likely to affect us as
an abuse of privilege when not as an abuse of knowledge.

Heaven forbid, we say to ourselves during almost the whole Venetian
climax, heaven forbid we should "know" anything more of our ravaged
sister than what Densher darkly pieces together, or than what Kate Croy
pays, heroically, it must be owned, at the hour of her visit alone to
Densher's lodging, for her superior handling and her dire profanation
of. For we have time, while this passage lasts, to turn round
critically; we have time to recognise intentions and proprieties; we
have time to catch glimpses of an economy of composition, as I put it,
interesting in itself: all in spite of the author's scarce more than
half-dissimulated despair at the inveterate displacement of his general
centre. "The Wings of the Dove" happens to offer perhaps the most
striking example I may cite (though with public penance for it already
performed) of my regular failure to keep the appointed halves of my
whole equal. Here the makeshift middle--for which the best I can say is
that it's always rueful and never impudent--reigns with even more than
its customary contrition, though passing itself off perhaps too with
more than its usual craft. Nowhere, I seem to recall, had the need of
dissimulation been felt so as anguish; nowhere had I condemned a
luckless theme to complete its revolution, burdened with the
accumulation of its difficulties, the difficulties that grow with a
theme's development, in quarters so cramped. Of course, as every
novelist knows, it is difficulty that inspires; only, for that
perfection of charm, it must have been difficulty inherent and
congenital, and not difficulty "caught" by the wrong frequentations. The
latter half, that is the false and deformed half, of "The Wings" would
verily, I think, form a signal object lesson for a literary critic bent
on improving his occasion to the profit of the budding artist. This
whole corner of the picture bristles with "dodges"--such as he should
feel himself all committed to recognise and denounce--for
disguising the reduced scale of the exhibition, for foreshortening at
any cost, for imparting to patches the value of presences, for dressing
objects in an AIR as of the dimensions they can't possibly have. Thus he
would have his free hand for pointing out what a tangled web we weave
when--well, when, through our mislaying or otherwise trifling with our
blest pair of compasses, we have to produce the illusion of mass without
the illusion of extent. THERE is a job quite to the measure of most of
our monitors--and with the interest for them well enhanced by the
preliminary cunning quest for the spot where deformity has begun.

I recognise meanwhile, throughout the long earlier reach of the book,
not only no deformities but, I think, a positively close and felicitous
application of method, the preserved consistencies of which, often
illusive, but never really lapsing, it would be of a certain diversion,
and might be of some profit, to follow. The author's accepted task at
the outset has been to suggest with force the nature of the tie formed
between the two young persons first introduced--to give the full
impression of its peculiar worried and baffled, yet clinging and
confident, ardour. The picture constituted, so far as may be, is that of
a pair of natures well-nigh consumed by a sense of their intimate
affinity and congruity, the reciprocity of their desire, and thus
passionately impatient of barriers and delays, yet with qualities of
intelligence and character that they are meanwhile extraordinarily able
to draw upon for the enrichment of their relation, the extension of
their prospect and the support of their "game." They are far from a
common couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as befits the remarkable
fashion in which fortune was to waylay and opportunity was to
distinguish them--the whole strange truth of their response to which
opening involves also, in its order, no vulgar art of exhibition; but
what they have most to tell us is that, all unconsciously and with the
best faith in the world, all by mere force of the terms of their
superior passion combined with their superior diplomacy, they are laying
a trap for the great innocence to come. If I like, as I have
confessed, the "portentous" look, I was perhaps never to set so high a
value on it as for all this prompt provision of forces unwittingly
waiting to close round my eager heroine (to the eventual deep chill of
her eagerness) as the result of her mere lifting of a latch. Infinitely
interesting to have built up the relation of the others to the point at
which its aching restlessness, its need to affirm itself otherwise than
by an exasperated patience, meets as with instinctive relief and
recognition the possibilities shining out of Milly Theale. Infinitely
interesting to have prepared and organised, correspondingly, that young
woman's precipitations and liabilities, to have constructed, for Drama
essentially to take possession, the whole bright house of her exposure.

These references, however, reflect too little of the detail of the
treatment imposed; such a detail as I for instance get hold of in the
fact of Densher's interview with Mrs. Lowder before he goes to America.
It forms, in this preliminary picture, the one patch not strictly seen
over Kate Croy's shoulder; though it's notable that immediately after,
at the first possible moment, we surrender again to our major
convenience, as it happens to be at the time, that of our drawing breath
through the young woman's lungs. Once more, in other words, before we
know it, Densher's direct vision of the scene at Lancaster Gate is
replaced by her apprehension, her contributive assimilation, of his
experience: it melts back into that accumulation, which we have been, as
it were, saving up. Does my apparent deviation here count accordingly as
a muddle?--one of the muddles ever blooming so thick in any soil that
fails to grow reasons and determinants. No, distinctly not; for I had
definitely opened the door, as attention of perusal of the first two
Books will show, to the subjective community of my young pair.
(Attention of perusal, I thus confess by the way, is what I at every
point, as well as here, absolutely invoke and take for granted; a truth
I avail myself of this occasion to note once for all--in the interest of
that variety of ideal reigning, I gather, in the connexion. The
enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible
illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of "luxury,"
the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks
for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully,
divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the
skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on
it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call
it a luxury.) That I had scarce availed myself of the privilege of
seeing with Densher's eyes is another matter; the point is that I had
intelligently marked my possible, my occasional need of it. So, at all
events, the constructional "block" of the first two Books compactly
forms itself. A new block, all of the squarest and not a little of the
smoothest, begins with the Third--by which I mean of course a new mass
of interest governed from a new centre. Here again I make prudent
PROVISION--to be sure to keep my centre strong. It dwells mainly, we at
once see, in the depths of Milly Theale's "case," where, close beside
it, however, we meet a supplementary reflector, that of the lucid even
though so quivering spirit of her dedicated friend.

The more or less associated consciousness of the two women deals thus,
unequally, with the next presented face of the subject--deals with it to
the exclusion of the dealing of others; and if, for a highly particular
moment, I allot to Mrs. Stringham the responsibility of the direct
appeal to us, it is again, charming to relate, on behalf of that play of
the portentous which I cherish so as a "value" and am accordingly for
ever setting in motion. There is an hour of evening, on the alpine
height, at which it becomes of the last importance that our young woman
should testify eminently in this direction. But as I was to find it long
since of a blest wisdom that no expense should be incurred or met, in
any corner of picture of mine, without some concrete image of the
account kept of it, that is of its being organically re-economised, so
under that dispensation Mrs. Stringham has to register the transaction.
Book Fifth is a new block mainly in its provision of a new set of
occasions, which readopt, for their order, the previous centre,
Milly's now almost full-blown consciousness. At my game, with renewed
zest, of driving portents home, I have by this time all the choice of
those that are to brush that surface with a dark wing. They are used, to
our profit, on an elastic but a definite system; by which I mean that
having to sound here and there a little deep, as a test, for my basis of
method, I find it everywhere obstinately present. It draws the
"occasion" into tune and keeps it so, to repeat my tiresome term; my
nearest approach to muddlement is to have sometimes--but not too
often--to break my occasions small. Some of them succeed in remaining
ample and in really aspiring then to the higher, the sustained lucidity.
The whole actual centre of the work, resting on a misplaced pivot and
lodged in Book Fifth, pretends to a long reach, or at any rate to the
larger foreshortening--though bringing home to me, on re-perusal, what I
find striking, charming and curious, the author's instinct everywhere
for the INDIRECT presentation of his main image. I note how, again and
again, I go but a little way with the direct--that is with the straight
exhibition of Milly; it resorts for relief, this process, whenever it
can, to some kinder, some merciful indirection: all as if to approach
her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess
is ever dealt with; the pressure all round her kept easy for her, the
sounds, the movements regulated, the forms and ambiguities made
charming. All of which proceeds, obviously, from her painter's
tenderness of imagination about her, which reduces him to watching her,
as it were, through the successive windows of other people's interest in
her. So, if we talk of princesses, do the balconies opposite the palace
gates, do the coigns of vantage and respect enjoyed for a fee, rake from
afar the mystic figure in the gilded coach as it comes forth into the
great PLACE. But my use of windows and balconies is doubtless at best an
extravagance by itself, and as to what there may be to note, of this and
other supersubtleties, other arch-refinements, of tact and taste, of
design and instinct, in "The Wings of the Dove," I become conscious of
overstepping my space without having brought the full quantity
to light. The failure leaves me with a burden of residuary comment of
which I yet boldly hope elsewhere to discharge myself.




VOLUME 1



Book First, Chapter 1


She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in
the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation
that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It
was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place,
moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed
cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery and
of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at
the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in
coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to
enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had
above all from time to time taken a brief stand on the small balcony to
which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in
this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main
office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts,
adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs,
constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them
in the room exactly as one felt the room--the hundred like it or
worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her
impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while
she tasted the faint flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune
and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really in a manner that
she mightn't add the shame of fear, of individual, of personal collapse,
to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel
the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small
salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision
was the worst thing yet--as including in particular the interview to
which she had braced herself; and for what had she come but for the
worst? She tried to be sad so as not to be angry, but it made her angry
that she couldn't be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten
for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if
not in these merciless signs of mere mean stale feelings?

Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
florid voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
words and notes without sense and then, hanging unfinished, into no
words nor any notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves bristled
there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
from them. Wasn't it in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black
closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
dusky hair; kept her eyes aslant no less on her beautiful averted than
on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in black,
which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made her
hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes showed as
blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She was
handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids; a
circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the
impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as
regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the
total. She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence
without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow
always in the line of the eye--she counted singularly for its pleasure.
More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or less
dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably couldn't have
given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of which her
friends were conscious--those friends whose general explanation was to
say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken by the world as the
cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw more things than her
fine face in the dull glass of her father's lodgings she might have seen
that after all she was not herself a fact in the collapse. She didn't
hold herself cheap, she didn't make for misery. Personally, no, she
wasn't chalk-marked for auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken
sentence, if she was the last word, WOULD end with a sort of meaning.
There was a minute during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite
visibly lost herself in the thought of the way she might still pull
things round had she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she
would take in hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of
the harm her wretched father had done it, wasn't yet past praying for.
She loved it in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what
could a penniless girl do with it but let it go?

When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
her he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see her
without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of a
design he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
deception. He had clearly wanted, for the perversities he called his
reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him could
be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt; and
this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it to
be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could leave
unmade, nor a conviction of his impossibility in you that he could
approach you without strengthening. He might have awaited her on the
sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed in bed and received her
in that situation. She was glad to be spared the sight of such
penetralia, but it would have reminded her a little less that there was
no truth in him. This was the weariness of every fresh meeting; he dealt
out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the game of
diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him. The inconvenience--as
always happens in such cases--was not that you minded what was false,
but that you missed what was true. He might be ill and it might suit you
to know it, but no contact with him, for this, could ever be straight
enough. Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly wondered on what
evidence of his own she would some day have to believe it.

He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be
above the one they were in: he had already been out of the house, though
he would either, should she challenge him, deny it or present it as a
proof of his extremity. She had, however, by this time, quite ceased to
challenge him; not only, face to face with him, vain irritation dropped,
but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness in such a way that after a
moment nothing of it was left. The difficulty was not less that he
breathed in the same way upon the comic: she almost believed that with
this latter she might still have found a foothold for clinging to him.
He had ceased to be amusing--he was really too inhuman. His perfect
look, which had floated him so long, was practically perfect still; but
one had long since for every occasion taken it for granted. Nothing
could have better shown than the actual how right one had been. He
looked exactly as much as usual--all pink and silver as to skin and
hair, all straightness and starch as to figure and dress; the man in the
world least connected with anything unpleasant. He was so particularly
the English gentleman and the fortunate settled normal person. Seen at a
foreign table d'hote he suggested but one thing: "In what perfection
England produces them!" He had kind safe eyes, and a voice which, for
all its clean fulness, told the quiet tale of its having never had once
to raise itself. Life had met him so, halfway, and had turned round so
to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to
choose the pace. Those who knew him a little said "How he does
dress!"--those who knew him better said "How DOES he?" The one stray
gleam of comedy just now in his daughter's eyes was the absurd feeling
he momentarily made her have of being herself "looked up" by him in
sordid lodgings. For a minute after he came in it was as if the place
were her own and he the visitor with susceptibilities. He gave you
absurd feelings, he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
tables: this had been always how he came to see her mother so long as
her mother would see him. He came from places they had often not known
about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's only actual expression
of impatience, however, was "I'm glad you're so much better!"

"I'm not so much better, my dear--I'm exceedingly unwell; the proof of
which is precisely that I've been out to the chemist's--that beastly
fellow at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could qualify the humble
hand that assuaged him. "I'm taking something he has made up for me.
It's just why I've sent for you--that you may see me as I really am."

"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you
really are! I think we've all arrived by this time at the right word for
that: 'You're beautiful--n'en parlons plus.' You're as beautiful as
ever--you look lovely." He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as she
knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he
continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she
virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least
indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass he
had reached, could give him pleasure, and had come back on these
occasions to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome, that she
was in her way a tangible value. It was at least as marked,
nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
they WERE similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome,
but he certainly didn't care. The hitch here of course was that, with
whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four
bouncing children, had no such measure. She asked him the next thing how
long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how little it
mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably have in
common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer, truthful
or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her own side to
say to him. This was really what had made her wait--what superseded the
small remainder of her resentment at his constant practical
impertinence; the result of all of which was that within a minute she
had brought it out. "Yes--even now I'm willing to go with you. I don't
know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if you hadn't
written you would within a day or two have heard from me. Things have
happened, and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I should be quite
sure. I AM quite sure. I'll go with you."

It produced an effect. "Go with me where?"

"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here." She had taken off her gloves
and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.

Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way--hovered there as if
looking, in consequence of her words, for a pretext to back out easily:
on which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called,
what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him,
still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with
some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to
have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no
state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been
to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means been
to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a straw for
his embarrassment--feeling how little, on her own part, she was moved
by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many attitudes that
she could now deprive him quite without compunction of the luxury of a
new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone as he said: "Oh
my child, I can never consent to that!"

"What then are you going to do?"

"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You may imagine if I'm not
thinking."

"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked, "of what I speak of? I
mean of my being ready."

Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little
apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising
on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No--I
haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable a show that she
felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair at
home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him. His
plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses; inevitably
so much more present to the world than whatever it was that was
horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He had
positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously on
the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
directly present to Kate her self that it might, on some sides, prove no
light thing for her to leave uncompanion'd a parent with such a face and
such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it
passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with
himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognised his younger
daughter's happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still
more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not
that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great
wonder was that they hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to its
eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into
patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment. She saw
the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you really ask me
to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"

She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you as
yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."

"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"

"Oh dear, no; not at all. That's no part of the question. If I haven't
understood you by this time I never shall, and it doesn't matter. It has
seemed to me you may be lived with, but not that you may be understood.
Of course I've not the least idea how you get on."

"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.

His daughter took the place in again, and it might well have seemed odd
that with so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show.
What showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was
somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent,
after all, a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly gave point to her
answer. "Oh I beg your pardon. You flourish."

"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly put to her, "that I've
not made away with myself?"

She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real
things. "You know how all our anxieties, under mamma's will, have come
out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don't know how we
lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for
me, but I give up a hundred to Marian."

"Oh you weak thing!" her father sighed as from depths of enlightened
experience.

"For you and me together," she went on, "the other hundred would do
something."

"And what would do the rest?"

"Can you yourself do nothing?"

He gave her a look; then, slipping his hands into his pockets and
turning away, stood for a little at the window she had left open. She
said nothing more--she had placed him there with that question, and the
silence lasted a minute, broken by the call of an appealing
costermonger, which came in with the mild March air, with the shabby
sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room, and with the small homely
hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved nearer, but as if her question
had quite dropped. "I don't see what has so suddenly wound you up."

"I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell
you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a
condition. She wants to keep me."

"And what in the world else COULD she possibly want?"

"Oh I don't know--many things. I'm not so precious a capture," the girl
a little dryly explained. "No one has ever wanted to keep me before."

Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more
surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if
that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an
admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high
spirit and general form.

"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind to me, but it's time, she
says, that we should understand each other."

Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is--high time; and I can quite
imagine what she means by it."

"Are you very sure?"

"Oh perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for you handsomely if you'll
break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her
condition's of course that."

"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am."

He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after which,
within a few seconds, he had quite congruously turned the situation
about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify your throwing
yourself upon me?"

She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. "Yes."

"Well then, you're of feebler intelligence than I should have ventured
to suppose you."

"Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom."

"Ah how you've all always hated me!" he murmured with a pensive gaze
again at the window.

"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory," she declared as if
she had not heard him. "You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You strike me, you know,
as--in your own way--much more firm on your feet than I. Don't put it to
me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we're after all parent and
child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea has been
that it should have some effect for each of us. I don't at all, as I
told you just now," she pursued, "make out your life; but whatever it is
I hereby offer to accept it. And, on my side, I'll do everything I can
for you."

"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then with the sound of extreme relevance:
"And what CAN you?" She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her
silence. "You can describe yourself--TO yourself--as, in a fine flight,
giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to know, would
your fine flight do me?" As she still said nothing he developed a
little. "We're not possessed of so much, at this charming pass, please
to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any perch held
out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about 'giving up'! One
doesn't give up the use of a spoon because one's reduced to living on
broth. And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is partly
mine as well." She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her effort,
in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and moved
back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before. She
retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her
father's lips another remark--in which impatience, however, had already
been replaced by a free flare of appreciation. "Oh you're all right!
Don't muddle yourself up with ME!"

His daughter turned round to him. "The condition Aunt Maud makes is that
I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor speak
nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor hold any
sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you shall
simply cease to exist for me."

He had always seemed--it was one of the marks of what they called the
"unspeakable" in him--to walk a little more on his toes, as if for
jauntiness, under the touch of offence. Nothing, however, was more
wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it might
be what he sometimes wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes now. "A
very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear--I don't hesitate to
say it!" Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent at first
from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to go on:
"That's her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what does
she engage to do? You must work it, you know."

"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a moment, "how much I'm
attached to you?"

"Well, what a cruel invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I'm a poor
ruin of an old dad to make a stand about giving up--I quite agree. But
I'm not, after all, quite the old ruin not to get something FOR giving
up."

"Oh I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily now, "is that I shall get
a great deal."

He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But does she give you the
items?"

The girl went through the show. "More or less, I think. But many of them
are things I dare say I may take for granted--things women can do for
each other and that you wouldn't understand."

"There's nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn't!
But what I want to do, you see," he went on, "is to put it to your
conscience that you've an admirable opportunity; and that it's moreover
one for which, after all, damn you, you've really to thank ME."

"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what my 'conscience' has to do
with it."

"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you
know what you're a proof of, all you hard hollow people together?" He
put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. "Of the
deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in our
vulgarised brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a day
when a man like me--by which I mean a parent like me--would have been
for a daughter like you quite a distinct value; what's called in the
business world, I believe, an 'asset.'" He continued sociably to make
it out. "I'm not talking only of what you might, with the right feeling,
do FOR me, but of what you might--it's what I call your opportunity--do
WITH me. Unless indeed," he the next moment imperturbably threw off,
"they come a good deal to the same thing. Your duty as well as your
chance, if you're capable of seeing it, is to use me. Show family
feeling by seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as I have it you'd
see I'm still good--well, for a lot of things. There's in fact, my
dear," Mr. Croy wound up, "a coach-and-four to be got out of me." His
lapse, or rather his climax, failed a little of effect indeed through an
undue precipitation of memory. Something his daughter had said came back
to him. "You've settled to give away half your little inheritance?"

Her hesitation broke into laughter. "No--I haven't 'settled' anything."

"But you mean practically to let Marian collar it?" They stood there
face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could
only go on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for her in addition
to what her husband left her with? Is THAT," the remote progenitor of
such wantonness audibly wondered, "your morality?"

Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it your idea that I should
give you everything?"

The "everything" clearly struck him--to the point even of determining
the tone of his reply. "Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I
think I've sufficiently expressed it, and it's at any rate to take or to
leave. It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the basket with
all my eggs. It's my conception, in short, of your duty."

The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small
grotesque visibility. "You're wonderful on such subjects! I think I
should leave you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to sign my
aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter."

"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour that I appeal to. The only
way to play the game IS to play it. There's no limit to what your aunt
can do for you."

"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"

"What else should I mean? Marry properly--"

"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.

"And then--well, I WILL talk with you. I'll resume relations."

She looked about her and picked up her parasol. "Because you're not so
afraid of any one else in the world as you are of HER? My husband, if I
should marry, would be at the worst less of a terror? If that's what you
mean there may be something in it. But doesn't it depend a little also
on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate added as she
picked out the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't suppose your idea
of him is QUITE that he should persuade you to live with us."

"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
hope she imputed; met both imputations in fact with a sort of
intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
hands. I take her view with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence any
man she selects. If he's good enough for HER--elephantine snob as she
is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that she'll
be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My only
interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly poor,
my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."

"Well then good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflexion on this that
had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate. "Of
course you understand that it may be for long."

Her companion had hereupon one of his finest inspirations. "Why not
frankly for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
efface myself it's for the final fatal sponge I ask, well saturated and
well applied."

She turned her handsome quiet face upon him at such length that it might
indeed have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."

"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying in vain to
discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us
and we could have found each other out there's no knowing what we
mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.

She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
that I HAVE put it to you that I'm ready to come."

"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"

"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
might have found some way. I'm very sorry at all events to leave you
unwell." He turned away from her on this and, as he had done before,
took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
there's only one word you really need speak."

When he took these words up it was still with his back to her. "If I
don't strike you as having already spoken it our time has been
singularly wasted."

"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants of
me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I WILL choose.
I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."

He at last brought himself round. "Do you know, dear, you make me sick?
I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair."

But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. "Father!"

"I don't quite see what's the matter with you," he said, "and if you
can't pull yourself together I'll--upon my honour--take you in hand. Put
you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."

She was really absent, distant. "Father."

It was too much, and he met it sharply. "Well?"

"Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there's a good you can
do me and a help you can render."

"Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to make you feel?"

"Yes," she answered patiently, "but so in the wrong way. I'm perfectly
honest in what I say, and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that
I'll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid
or support from you. The case is changed--that's what has happened; my
difficulty is a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything I
should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply a question of your not
turning me away--taking yourself out of my life. It's simply a question
of your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand together. We
won't worry in advance about how or where; we'll have a faith and find a
way.' That's all--THAT would be the good you'd do me. I should HAVE you,
and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?"

If he didn't it wasn't for want of looking at her hard. "The matter with
you is that you're in love, and that your aunt knows and--for reasons,
I'm sure, perfect--hates and opposes it. Well she may! It's a matter in
which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please." Though he spoke not in
anger--rather in infinite sadness--he fairly turned her out. Before she
took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he felt, opened the
door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a generous
compassion to spare. "I'm sorry for her, deluded woman, if she builds on
you."

Kate stood a moment in the draught. "She's not the person I pity most,
for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she's not the person who's
most so. I mean," she explained, "if it's a question of what you call
building on me."

He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of
it. "You're deceiving TWO persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?"

She shook her head with detachment. "I've no intention of that sort with
respect to any one now--to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail
me"--she seemed to make it out for herself--"that has the merit at least
that it simplifies. I shall go my way--as I see my way."

"Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a
penny?"

"You demand a great deal of satisfaction," she observed, "for the little
you give."

It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to
be hustled, and though he glared at her a little this had long been the
practical limit to his general power of objection. "If you're base
enough to incur your aunt's reprobation you're base enough for my
argument. What, if you're not thinking of an utterly improper person, do
your speeches to me signify? Who IS the beggarly sneak?" he went on as
her response failed.

Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct. "He has every
disposition to make the best of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to
you."

"Then he MUST be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to
improve him for me," her father pursued, "that he's also destitute and
impossible? There are boobies and boobies even--the right and the
wrong--and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong.
Your aunt knows THEM, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you,
her judgement for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I
won't hear of any one of whom SHE won't." Which led up to his last word.
"If you should really defy us both--!"

"Well, papa?"

"Well, my sweet child, I think that--reduced to insignificance as you
may fondly believe me--I should still not be quite without some way of
making you regret it."

She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might
measure this danger. "If I shouldn't do it, you know, it wouldn't be
because I'm afraid of you."

"Oh if you don't do it," he retorted, "you may be as bold as you like!"

"Then you can do nothing at all for me?"

He showed her, this time unmistakeably--it was before her there on the
landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the
strange smell that seemed to cling to them--how vain her appeal
remained. "I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you
the best and the clearest advice." And then came up the spring that
moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be
consoled." What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her
scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.
She should have divided it with HIM.



Book First, Chapter 2


She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort
the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,
reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been
nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid
bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and
the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money
on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would turn
out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it had
proved in fact since then a residuum a trifle less scant than, with her
sister, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the
beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of
Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that SHE wanted
to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her own
interest, which she doubtless would already have done hadn't the point
been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's intervention
was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was
to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the
winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what stand she
conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first time she had seen
herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's
interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them--it
seemed really the way to live--the version that met their convenience.

The tall rich heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the
Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,
through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague
young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else
in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,
discouraging vistas, perfect telescopes of streets, and which kept
lengthening and straightening, whereas almost everything else in life
was either at the worst roundabout Cromwell Road or at the furthest in
the nearer parts of Kensington Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real"
aunt, not the wife of an uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient
days and when the greater trouble came, the person, of all persons,
properly to make some sign; in accord with which our young woman's
feeling was founded on the impression, quite cherished for years, that
the signs made across the interval just mentioned had never been really
in the note of the situation. The main office of this relative for the
young Croys--apart from giving them their fixed measure of social
greatness--had struck them as being to form them to a conception of what
they were not to expect. When Kate came to think matters over with wider
knowledge, she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been
different--she had rather perceived by this time how many other things
might have been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously
lived under a liability to the chill breath of ultima Thule they
couldn't either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the
event appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she
yet hadn't disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate
been for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that
she sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them
to her house and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the
terms that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a
grievance. This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged
her resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself,
to the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which
they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to Aunt
Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they
sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate
lived to discern, was that this was only because SHE didn't suffice to
them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet not
really because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the
rub!--because it fell short.

The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high
south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though
some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of
other matters, done up) that life at present turned to her view from
week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished
stranger. She had reached a great age--for it quite seemed to her that
at twenty-five it was late to reconsider, and her most general sense was
a shade of regret that she hadn't known earlier. The world was
different--whether for worse or for better--from her rudimentary
readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only
known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made
at all events discoveries every day, some of which were about herself
and others about other persons. Two of these--one under each head--more
particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had
never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she
blushed to see, that if in contrast with some of its old aspects life
now affected her as a dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by
reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and
velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She
liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her--liked them
literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and
nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her relative's
view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious--she had never done her
relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of her, from
morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom the growth
of acquaintance could only--strange as it might seem--keep your heart in
your mouth.

The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for
Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home in
Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent, all
winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being spent
alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a
measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her
neighbour's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet a
presence from which a sensitive niece could feel herself extremely under
pressure. She knew herself now, the sensitive niece, as having been
marked from far back. She knew more than she could have told you, by the
upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon. She knew so much that
her knowledge was what fairly kept her there, making her at times
circulate more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood
for her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread
beneath her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some
of her discoveries halfway, to have to face them or fly before them;
whereas they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off
siege heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these
weeks, what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her
mother, the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the
confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial, of
her having to recognise that should she behave, as she called it,
decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself
wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and
stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly
postponed was the question of a surrender, though she couldn't yet have
said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was at
moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming
"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air
of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and
parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim and
the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly present to
Kate that she might be devoured, and she compared herself to a trembling
kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but sure sooner
or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.

The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her
battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the
ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our
young woman on exit and entrance as a guard-house or a toll-gate. The
lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of
the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She
would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an
extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles
and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair, a
polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and that--as
if the skin were too tight--told especially at curves and corners. Her
niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet: thinking of her, with
a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she talked to herself of
Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia unmistakeable but with a pen on
her ear--and felt she should not be happy till she might on some
occasion add to the rest of the panoply a helmet, a shield, a trident
and a ledger. It wasn't in truth, however, that the forces with which,
as Kate felt, she would have to deal were those most suggested by an
image simple and broad; she was learning after all each day to know her
companion, and what she had already most perceived was the mistake of
trusting to easy analogies. There was a whole side of Britannia, the
side of her florid philistinism, her plumes and her train, her fantastic
furniture and heaving bosom, the false gods of her taste and false notes
of her talk, the sole contemplation of which would be dangerously
misleading. She was a complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she
was practical, with a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other
pocket, the pocket full of coins stamped in her image, that the world
best knew her by. She carried on in short, behind her aggressive and
defensive front, operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact as
a besieger, we have hinted, that our young lady, in the provisioned
citadel, had for the present most to think of her, and what made her
formidable in this character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral.
So at all events in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way Kate
conveniently pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that
her weight was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by
our showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the
elder, below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the
ground as possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the
dangers of life and of London? Mrs. Lowder WAS London, WAS life--the
roar of the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things,
after all, of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of
nothing--not even, it would appear, of arduous thought.

These impressions, none the less, Kate kept so much to herself that she
scarce shared them with poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her
frequent visits to whom yet continued to be to talk over everything. One
of her reasons for holding off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was
that she might be the more free to commit herself to this so much nearer
and so much less fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have
almost nothing direct to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile,
was exactly that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of
casting down her courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense
of the part, not always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of
blood might play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with
the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most
clearly to have "come into" by the death of her mother, much of that
consciousness as her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting
harassing father, her menacing uncompromising aunt, her portionless
little nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural
piety superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to
herself--but more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what
you might be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had
taken, in the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability;
those being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in
the world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured
in advance of happiness and success. The view was different now, but her
attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same. The
subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,
demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently
Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was
that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless
Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she
couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,
before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She noticed
with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she marvelled
at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what Marian took
for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born, her life
reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed in that view
wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of
course, was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left.
There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to
THEM that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she
further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing. You
always saw, in this case something else than what you were, and you got
in consequence none of the peace of your condition. However, as she
never really let Marian see what she was Marian might well not have been
aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly to her own vision not a
hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was a hypocrite of
stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was not herself. What
she most kept was the particular sentiment with which she watched her
sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make for her submission
to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps marked most sharply
how poor you might become when you minded so much the absence of wealth.
It was through Kate that Aunt Maud should be worked, and nothing
mattered less than what might become of Kate in the process. Kate was to
burn her ships in short, so that Marian should profit; and Marian's
desire to profit was quite oblivious of a dignity that had after all its
reasons--if it had only understood them--for keeping itself a little
stiff. Kate, to be properly stiff for both of them, would therefore have
had to be selfish, have had to prefer an ideal of behaviour--than which
nothing ever was more selfish--to the possibility of stray crumbs for
the four small creatures. The tale of Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder
niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had lost little of its point; the
incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr. Condrip, the parson of a dull
suburban parish, with a saintly profile which was always in evidence,
being so distinctly on record to keep criticism consistent. He had
presented his profile on system, having, goodness knew, nothing else to
present--nothing at all to full-face the world with, no imagination of
the propriety of living and minding his business. Criticism had remained
on Aunt Maud's part consistent enough; she was not a person to regard
such proceedings as less of a mistake for having acquired more of the
privilege of pathos. She hadn't been forgiving, and the only approach
she made to overlooking them was by overlooking--with the surviving
delinquent--the solid little phalanx that now represented them. Of the
two sinister ceremonies that she lumped together, the marriage and the
interment, she had been present at the former, just as she had sent
Marian before it a liberal cheque; but this had not been for her more
than the shadow of an admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course. She
disapproved of clamorous children for whom there was no prospect; she
disapproved of weeping widows who couldn't make their errors good; and
she had thus put within Marian's reach one of the few luxuries left when
so much else had gone, an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate
Croy remembered well what their mother, in a different quarter, had made
of it; and it was Marian's marked failure to pluck the fruit of
resentment that committed them as sisters to an almost equal fellowship
in abjection. If the theory was that, yes, alas, one of the pair had
ceased to be noticed, but that the other was noticed enough to make up
for it, who would fail to see that Kate couldn't separate herself
without a cruel pride? That lesson became sharp for our young lady the
day after her interview with her father.

"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said to her, "how you can
think of anything else in the world but the horrid way we're situated."

"And, pray, how do you know," Kate enquired in reply, "anything about my
thoughts? It seems to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I think
of YOU. I don't really, my dear, know what else you've to do with!"

Marian's retort on this was a stroke as to which she had supplied
herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was none the less
something of an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had foreseen her
sister's general fear; but here, ominously, was the special one. "Well,
your own business is of course your own business, and you may say
there's no one less in a position than I to preach to you. But, all the
same, if you wash your hands of me for ever in consequence, I won't, for
this once, keep back that I don't consider you've a right, as we all
stand, to throw yourself away."

It was after the children's dinner, which was also their mother's, but
which their aunt mostly contrived to keep from ever becoming her own
luncheon; and the two young women were still in the presence of the
crumpled table cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the
lingering odour of boiled food. Kate had asked with ceremony if she
might put up a window a little, and Mrs. Condrip had replied without it
that she might do as she liked. She often received such enquiries as if
they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The
four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control
of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted up for them and
whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took
it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing
from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively
obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain
prosaic result of him--as if she had somehow been pulled through him as
through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and
with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and
almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like
any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her
husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,
much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads upon
the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not unconcerned
with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them moreover Marian WAS
touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed and weighed things, noted
as an oddity that she would have taken any reflexion on them as a
reflexion on herself. If that was what marriage necessarily did to you
Kate Croy would have questioned marriage. It was at any rate a grave
example of what a man--and such a man!--might make of a woman. She could
see how the Condrip pair pressed their brother's widow on the subject of
Aunt Maud--who wasn't, after all, THEIR aunt; made her, over their
interminable cups, chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made
her more vulgar than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly
become on such a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that
Lancaster Gate was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep
it; so that, curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure
of being in her own person more permitted to them as an object of
comment than they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. The beauty
of which too was that Marian didn't love them. But they were
Condrips--they had grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie and
Maudie, like Kitty and Guy. They talked of the dead to her, which Kate
never did; it being a relation in which Kate could but mutely listen.
She couldn't indeed too often say to herself that if that was what
marriage did to you--! It may easily be guessed therefore that the
ironic light of such reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's
warning. "I don't quite see," she answered, "where in particular it
strikes you that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the
least disposition to 'throw' myself anywhere. I feel that for the
present I've been quite sufficiently thrown."

"You don't feel"--Marian brought it all out--"that you'd like to marry
Merton Densher?"

Kate took a moment to meet this enquiry. "Is it your idea that if I
should feel so I would be bound to give you notice, so that you might
step in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl asked. Then as her
sister also had a pause, "I don't know what makes you talk of Mr.
Densher," she observed.

"I talk of him just because you don't. That you never do, in spite of
what I know--that's what makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's
what makes me think of YOU. If you don't know by this time what I hope
for you, what I dream of--my attachment being what it is--it's no use my
attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact warmed to her work, and
Kate was sure she had discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss Condrips. "If
I name that person I suppose it's because I'm so afraid of him. If you
want really to know, he fills me with terror. If you want really to
know, in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."

"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him to me?"

"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it dangerous; but how can I
speak of him otherwise? I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of
him at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just now, to know."

"To know what, my dear?"

"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned, "as far and away
the worst thing that has happened to us yet."

"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"

"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe in him."

Kate was civil but mechanical. "What do you mean by not believing in
him?"

"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you MUST have it. You SHALL
have it."

"To give it to you?"

Marian met her with a readiness that was practically pert. "To HAVE it,
first. Not at any rate to go on not having it. Then we should see."

"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was talk of a kind she loathed,
but if Marian chose to be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think
of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I like the way you arrange
things--I like what you take for granted. If it's so easy for us to
marry men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any of us do anything
else. I don't see so many of them about, nor what interest I might ever
have for them. You live, my dear," she presently added, "in a world of
vain thoughts."

"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I see and you can't turn it
off that way." The elder sister paused long enough for the younger's
face to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension. "I'm not talking
of any man but Aunt Maud's man, nor of any money even, if you like, but
Aunt Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but your doing what SHE
wants. You're wrong if you speak of anything that I want of you; I want
nothing but what she does. That's good enough for me!"--and Marian's
tone struck her companion as of the lowest. "If I don't believe in
Merton Densher I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."

"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned, "that they're the
same as papa's. I had them from him, you'll be interested to know--and
with all the brilliancy you may imagine--yesterday."

Marian clearly was interested to know. "He has been to see you?"

"No, I went to him."

"Really?" Marian wondered. "For what purpose?"

"To tell him I'm ready to go to him."

Marian stared. "To leave Aunt Maud--?"

"For my father, yes."

She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with horror. "You're
ready--?"

"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."

"And pray could you tell him more?" Marian gasped in her distress. "What
in the world is he TO us? You bring out such a thing as that this way?"

They faced each other--the tears were in Marian's eyes. Kate watched
them there a moment and then said: "I had thought it well over--over and
over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going. He won't have me."

Her companion still panted--it took time to subside. "Well, I wouldn't
have you--wouldn't receive you at all, I can assure you--if he had made
you any other answer. I do feel injured--at your having been willing. If
you were to go to papa, my dear, you'd have to stop coming to me."
Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of privation from which
her companion might shrink. Such were the threats she could complacently
make, could think herself masterful for making. "But if he won't take
you," she continued, "he shows at least his sharpness."

Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
privately commented, great on that resource. But Kate had her refuge
from irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he
believes, like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I
leave her."

"So you WON'T?" As the girl at first said nothing her companion caught
at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see why,
conveniently, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain truth
of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you ever think
about THAT? It's the greatest duty of all."

"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."

"Oh I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
"Poor old papa!"

She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
made Kate turn for the time sharply away, and she gathered herself now
to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say which
of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked her. The
younger woman proposed at any rate to let discussion rest, and she
believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten minutes
elapsing, thanks to her wish not to break off short, before she could
gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian had been
discussing still, and there was something that at the last Kate had to
take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"

"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"

"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"

She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
be taken of the bloated connexion to put an affront on her own poor
home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that Kate
kept her in her "hole" and then heartlessly reflected on her being in
it. Yet she didn't explain how she had picked up the report on which her
sister had challenged her--so that it was thus left to her sister to see
in it once more a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss Condrips.
They lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their ear to the
ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian, in garments
and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger, never prowled.
There were times when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips were offered
her by fate as a warning for her own future--to be taken as showing her
what she herself might become at forty if she let things too recklessly
go. What was expected of her by others--and by so many of them--could,
all the same, on occasion, present itself as beyond a joke; and this was
just now the aspect it particularly wore. She was not only to quarrel
with Merton Densher for the pleasure of her five spectators--with the
Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set forth in pursuit of Lord
Mark on some preposterous theory of the premium attached to success.
Mrs. Lowder's hand had hung out the premium, and it figured at the end
of the course as a bell that would ring, break out into public clamour,
as soon as touched. Kate reflected sharply enough on the weak points of
this fond fiction, with the result at last of a certain chill for her
sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still took refuge in the
plea--which was after all the great point--that their aunt would be
munificent when their aunt should be content. The exact identity of her
candidate was a detail; what was of the essence was her conception of
the kind of match it was open to her niece to make with her aid. Marian
always spoke of marriages as "matches," but that was again a detail.
Mrs. Lowder's "aid" meanwhile awaited them--if not to light the way to
Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian would put up, in fine, with
somebody better; she only wouldn't put up with somebody so much worse.
Kate had once more to go through all this before a graceful issue was
reached. It was reached by her paying with the sacrifice of Mr. Densher
for her reduction of Lord Mark to the absurd. So they separated softly
enough. She was to be let off hearing about Lord Mark so long as she
made it good that she wasn't underhand about any one else. She had
denied everything and every one, she reflected as she went away--and
that was a relief; but it also made rather a clean sweep of the future.
The prospect put on a bareness that already gave her something in common
with the Miss Condrips.



Book Second, Chapter 1


Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office of
his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a sense,
or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which he was
not infrequently to be met in different parts of the town at moments
when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than once
during the present winter's end he had deviated toward three o'clock, or
toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a while, on
each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a person with
nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part, with a certain
directness over to the north side; but once that ground was reached his
behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved, seemingly at
random, from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and remained idly
agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a bench; after which
he walked about again, only again to repeat both the vagueness and the
vivacity. Distinctly he was a man either with nothing at all to do or
with ever so much to think about; and it was not to be denied that the
impression he might often thus easily make had the effect of causing the
burden of proof in certain directions to rest on him. It was a little
the fault of his aspect, his personal marks, which made it almost
impossible to name his profession.

He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
sound and generally civil; yet, though to that degree neither
extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into
an observer's hands. He was young for the House of Commons, he was loose
for the Army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the City and,
quite apart from the cut of his cloth, sceptical, it might have been
felt, for the Church. On the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy,
or perhaps even for science, while he was perhaps at the same time too
much in his mere senses for poetry and yet too little in them for art.
You would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the
potential recognition of ideas; but you would have quite fallen away
again on the question of the ideas themselves. The difficulty with
Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak--idle without
looking empty. It was the accident, possibly, of his long legs, which
were apt to stretch themselves; of his straight hair and his well-shaped
head, never, the latter, neatly smooth, and apt into the bargain, at the
time of quite other calls upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and,
supported behind by his uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him
for unconscionable periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops,
the sky. He was in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever,
liable to drop what was near and to take up what was far; he was more a
prompt critic than a prompt follower of custom. He suggested above all,
however, that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals
more or less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the
question of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must
wait for comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting
mixture that if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable
subtlety--a law that in intercourse with him it might be of profit,
though not easy, to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for
you surprises of tolerance as well as of temper.

He loitered, on the best of the relenting days, the several occasions we
speak of, along the part of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate, and
when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of her aunt's house,
crossed the road and arrived by the nearest entrance, there was a
general publicity in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous. If
their meeting was to be bold and free it might have taken place within
doors; if it was to be shy or secret it might have taken place almost
anywhere better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows. They failed indeed to
remain attached to that spot; they wandered and strolled, taking in the
course of more than one of these interviews a considerable walk, or else
picked out a couple of chairs under one of the great trees and sat as
much apart--apart from every one else--as possible. But Kate had each
time, at first, the air of wishing to expose herself to pursuit and
capture if those things were in question. She made the point that she
wasn't underhand, any more than she was vulgar; that the Gardens were
charming in themselves and this use of them a matter of taste; and that,
if her aunt chose to glare at her from the drawing-room or to cause her
to be tracked and overtaken, she could at least make it convenient that
this should be easily done. The fact was that the relation between these
young persons abounded in such oddities as were not inaptly symbolised
by assignations that had a good deal more appearance than motive. Of the
strength of the tie that held them we shall sufficiently take the
measure; but it was meanwhile almost obvious that if the great
possibility had come up for them it had done so, to an exceptional
degree, under the protection of the famous law of contraries. Any deep
harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of
their having much in common--having anything in fact but their
affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the
part of each, of being poor where the other was rich. It is nothing new
indeed that generous young persons often admire most what nature hasn't
given them--from which it would appear, after all, that our friends were
both generous.

Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
high dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
of the mind that Densher was rich for her and mysterious and strong; and
he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making that
element real. She had had all her days to take it terribly on trust, no
creature she had ever encountered having been able to testify for it
directly. Vague rumours of its existence had made their precarious way
to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck her as more likely than
that she should live and die without the chance to verify them. The
chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on the day she first met
Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the
spot what she was in presence of. That occasion indeed, for everything
that straightway flowered in it, would be worthy of high commemoration;
Densher's perception went out to meet the young woman's and quite kept
pace with her own recognition. Having so often concluded on the fact of
his weakness, as he called it, for life--his strength merely for
thought--life, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to
annex and possess. This was so much a necessity that thought by itself
only went on in the void; it was from the immediate air of life that it
must draw its breath. So the young man, ingenious but large, critical
but ardent too, made out both his case and Kate Croy's. They had
originally met before her mother's death--an occasion marked for her as
the last pleasure permitted by the approach of that event; after which
the dark months had interposed a screen and, for all Kate knew, made the
end one with the beginning.

The beginning--to which she often went back--had been a scene, for our
young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired
by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to
be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at
large--in the name of these and other attractions the company in which
Kate, by a rare privilege, found herself had been freely convoked. She
lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two or
three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate on this
occasion culminated for her in conversation with a tall fair, a slightly
unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole a not dreary, young man.
The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was indeed what he
called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct from what
surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as probably
quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be placed in
relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, this same
evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but that now
he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point they had
reached by midnight, and though for the value of such remarks everything
was in the tone, by midnight the tone was there too. She had had
originally her full apprehension of his coerced, certainly of his vague,
condition--full apprehensions often being with her immediate; then she
had had her equal consciousness that within five minutes something
between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but COME. It was
nothing to look at or to handle, but was somehow everything to feel and
to know; it was that something for each of them had happened.

They had found themselves regarding each other straight, and for a
longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that
in itself after all would have been a small affair for two such handsome
persons. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other
conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate
afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the
oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a ladder
against a garden-wall and had trusted herself so to climb it as to be
able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On reaching
the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged in a
like calculation at the same moment, and the two enquirers had remained
confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for the rest of
that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed down; and
indeed during the time that followed Kate at least had had the perched
feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a retreat. A simpler
expression of all this is doubtless but that they had taken each other
in with interest; and without a happy hazard six months later the
incident would have closed in that account of it. The accident meanwhile
had been as natural as anything in London ever is: Kate had one
afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the Underground Railway.
She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go to Queen's Road, and
the carriage in which she took her place was all but full. Densher was
already in it--on the other bench and at the furthest angle; she was
sure of him before they had again started. The day and the hour were
darkness, there were six other persons and she had been busy seating
herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as straight as if they
had come together in some bright stretch of a desert. They had on
neither part a second's hesitation; they looked across the choked
compartment exactly as if she had known he would be there and he had
expected her to come in; so that, though in the conditions they could
only exchange the greeting of movements, smiles, abstentions, it would
have been quite in the key of these passages that they should have
alighted for ease at the very next station. Kate was in fact sure the
very next station was the young man's true goal--which made it clear he
was going on only from the wish to speak to her. He had to go on, for
this purpose, to High Street Kensington, as it was not till then that
the exit of a passenger gave him his chance.

His chance put him however in quick possession of the seat facing her,
the alertness of his capture of which seemed to show her his impatience.
It helped them moreover, with strangers on either side, little to talk;
though this very restriction perhaps made such a mark for them as
nothing else could have done. If the fact that their opportunity had
again come round for them could be so intensely expressed without a
word, they might very well feel on the spot that it had not come round
for nothing. The extraordinary part of the matter was that they were not
in the least meeting where they had left off, but ever so much further
on, and that these added links added still another between High Street
and Notting Hill Gate, and then worked between the latter station and
Queen's Road an extension really inordinate. At Notting Hill Gate Kate's
right-hand neighbour descended, whereupon Densher popped straight into
that seat; only there was not much gained when a lady the next instant
popped into Densher's. He could say almost nothing--Kate scarce knew, at
least, what he said; she was so occupied with a certainty that one of
the persons opposite, a youngish man with a single eye-glass which he
kept constantly in position, had made her out from the first as visibly,
as strangely affected. If such a person made her out what then did
Densher do?--a question in truth sufficiently answered when, on their
reaching her station, he instantly followed her out of the train. That
had been the real beginning--the beginning of everything else; the other
time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning of THAT. Never
in life before had she so let herself go; for always before--so far as
small adventures could have been in question for her--there had been, by
the vulgar measure, more to go upon. He had walked with her to Lancaster
Gate, and then she had walked with him away from it--for all the world,
she said to herself, like the housemaid giggling to the baker.

This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for a
relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
they had kept company: that had come to represent, technically speaking,
alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the spot,
naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person who
wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower, she as
rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now her only
possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female, highly
modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course taken
her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form of
asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though on this
occasion she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as the
facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time as surprisingly
mild. The occasion had been in every way full of the reminder that her
hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had begun to ask
herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to." "You may
receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who in
general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and it
bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were many
explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the line
of the sombre and brooding amusement cultivated by Kate in her actual
high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs. Lowder
was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her niece to
see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following, in order
to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came again--which he
did three times, she found means to treat his visit as preponderantly to
herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him made that
remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time voluminous, that she
was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the way of energy, merely
usual she would have kept her dislike direct; whereas it was now as if
she were seeking to know him in order to see best where to "have" him.
That was one of the reflexions made in our young woman's high retreat;
she smiled from her lookout, in the silence that was only the fact of
hearing irrelevant sounds, as she caught the truth that you could easily
accept people when you wanted them so to be delivered to you. When Aunt
Maud wished them dispatched it was not to be done by deputy; it was
clearly always a matter reserved for her own hand.

But what made the girl wonder most was the implication of so much
diplomacy in respect to her own value. What view might she take of her
position in the light of this appearance that her companion feared so as
yet to upset her? It was as if Densher were accepted partly under the
dread that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment. Hadn't her
aunt considered the danger that she would in that case have broken off,
have seceded? The danger was exaggerated--she would have done nothing so
gross; but that, it would seem, was the way Mrs. Lowder saw her and
believed her to be reckoned with. What importance therefore did she
really attach to her, what strange interest could she take in their
keeping on terms? Her father and her sister had their answer to
this--even without knowing how the question struck her: they saw the
lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her fortune, and the
explanation of that appetite was that, on the accident of a nearer view
than she had before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled. They
approved, they admired in her one of the belated fancies of rich
capricious violent old women--the more marked moreover because the
result of no plot; and they piled up the possible fruits for the person
concerned. Kate knew what to think of her own power thus to carry by
storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and felt
herself as clever but as cold; and as so much too imperfectly ambitious,
futhermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she couldn't decide to
be either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her intelligence sometimes
kept her still--too still--but her want of it was restless; so that she
got the good, it seemed to her, of neither extreme. She saw herself at
present, none the less, in a situation, and even her sad disillusioned
mother, dying, but with Aunt Maud interviewing the nurse on the stairs,
had not failed to remind her that it was of the essence of situations to
be, under Providence, worked. The dear woman had died in the belief that
she was actually working the one then recognised.

Kate took one of her walks with Densher just after her visit to Mr.
Croy; but most of it went, as usual, to their sitting in talk. They had
under the trees by the lake the air of old friends--particular phases of
apparent earnestness in which they might have been settling every
question in their vast young world; and periods of silence, side by
side, perhaps even more, when "A long engagement!" would have been the
final reading of the signs on the part of a passer struck with them, as
it was so easy to be. They would have presented themselves thus as very
old friends rather than as young persons who had met for the first time
but a year before and had spent most of the interval without contact. It
was indeed for each, already, as if they were older friends; and though
the succession of their meetings might, between them, have been
straightened out, they only had a confused sense of a good many, very
much alike, and a confused intention of a good many more, as little
different as possible. The desire to keep them just as they were had
perhaps to do with the fact that in spite of the presumed diagnosis of
the stranger there had been for them as yet no formal, no final
understanding. Densher had at the very first pressed the question, but
that, it had been easy to reply, was too soon; so that a singular thing
had afterwards happened. They had accepted their acquaintance as too
short for an engagement, but they had treated it as long enough for
almost anything else, and marriage was somehow before them like a temple
without an avenue. They belonged to the temple and they met in the
grounds; they were in the stage at which grounds in general offered much
scattered refreshment. But Kate had meanwhile had so few confidants that
she wondered at the source of her father's suspicions. The diffusion of
rumour was of course always remarkable in London, and for Marian not
less--as Aunt Maud touched neither directly--the mystery had worked. No
doubt she had been seen. Of course she had been seen. She had taken no
trouble not to be seen, and it was a thing she was clearly incapable of
taking. But she had been seen how?--and what WAS there to see? She was
in love--she knew that: but it was wholly her own business, and she had
the sense of having conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost
violent conformity.

"I've an idea--in fact I feel sure--that Aunt Maud means to write to
you; and I think you had better know it." So much as this she said to
him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: "So as to make up
your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she'll say to you."

"Then will you kindly tell me?"

She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should spoil it. She'll do the
best for her own idea."

"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best,
not good enough for you?"

They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had another
pause. "Not good enough for HER."

"Oh I see. And that's necessary."

He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been
plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate, however,
let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment: "She has
behaved extraordinarily."

"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think, you know, we've been
awfully decent."

"For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for
HER. For her," said Kate, "we've been monstrous. She has been giving us
rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated, "you must know
where you are."

"That I always know. It's where YOU are that concerns me."

"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of that is what you'll
have from her." He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who
wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long
looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What
she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make
them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough
that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work
them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them and yet, as
regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the face,
she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced to
herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but,
distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of
this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character
itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that
it didn't seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might
prove difficult--was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each
other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile,
for HIM, each other was what they didn't have, and it was just the
point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point, do
what they would, to take her in. And she came in, always, while they sat
together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-and-four; she
drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently vulgar,
but yet quite that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her vulgarity that
she felt his want of means, though that might have helped her richly to
embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity that she was strong
original dangerous.

His want of means--of means sufficient for any one but himself--was
really the great ugliness, and was moreover at no time more ugly for him
than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, all shameless, face to
face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in truth
quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis, to
understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any one
else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness of his
being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a dunce
nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and also,
strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the question
of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her chance with
you, or to accept it from your conscience that her chance could be at
the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether too, otherwise,
marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of shame than
the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations of mood and
view, nevertheless, the mark on his forehead stood clear; he saw himself
remain without whether he married or not. It was a line on which his
fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of making money
were beautifully present to him; he could have handled them for his
newspaper as easily as he handled everything. He was quite aware how he
handled everything; it was another mark on his forehead: the pair of
smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on the passive fleece,
dated from the primal hour and kept each other company. He wrote, as for
print, with deplorable ease; since there had been nothing to stop him
even at the age of ten, so there was as little at twenty; it was part of
his fate in the first place and part of the wretched public's in the
second. The innumerable ways of making money were, no doubt, at all
events, what his imagination often was busy with after he had tilted his
chair and thrown back his head with his hands clasped behind it. What
would most have prolonged that attitude, moreover, was the reflexion
that the ways were ways only for others. Within the minute now--however
this might be--he was aware of a nearer view than he had yet quite had
of those circumstances on his companion's part that made least for
simplicity of relation. He saw above all how she saw them herself, for
she spoke of them at present with the last frankness, telling him of her
visit to her father and giving him, in an account of her subsequent
scene with her sister, an instance of how she was perpetually reduced to
patching-up, in one way or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.

"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
which he had it all again from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned
despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her two
young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by typhoid
fever contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had afterwards
found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the flower of
the flock, a middy on the _Britannia_, dreadfully drowned, and not even
by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while bathing, too late
in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the
home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural marriage, in itself a kind
of spiritless turning of the other cheek to fortune: her actual
wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy children, her impossible
claims, her odious visitors--these things completed the proof of the
heaviness, for them all, of the hand of fate. Kate confessedly described
them with an excess of impatience; it was much of her charm for Densher
that she gave in general that turn to her descriptions, partly as if to
amuse him by free and humorous colour, partly--and that charm was the
greatest--as if to work off, for her own relief, her constant perception
of the incongruity of things. She had seen the general show too early
and too sharply, and was so intelligent that she knew it and allowed for
that misfortune; therefore when, in talk with him, she was violent and
almost unfeminine, it was quite as if they had settled, for intercourse,
on the short cut of the fantastic and the happy language of
exaggeration. It had come to be definite between them at a primary stage
that, if they could have no other straight way, the realm of thought at
least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about
whatever they would--in other words they could say it. Saying it for
each other, for each other alone, only of course added to the taste. The
implication was thereby constant that what they said when not together
had no taste for them at all, and nothing could have served more to
launch them, at special hours, on their small floating island than such
an assumption that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our
young man, it must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who
profited most by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always
struck him she had more life than he to react from, and when she
recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard odd
offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals make little show.
It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her father's
character that engaged him most, but her picture of her adventure in
Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that character was
clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr. Croy had
originally done?

"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made him
impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and then,
little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the time,"
Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough, my
sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
now--the way, one cold black Sunday morning when, on account of an
extraordinary fog, we hadn't gone to church, she broke it to me by the
school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and apropos of nothing:
'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was that I
believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though she
could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor how she
knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it. We had
our sense always that all sorts of things HAD happened, were all the
while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was sure,
tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that that
was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural. We
were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still, and
I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to me, in
time, of her own accord--this was very much later on. He hadn't been
with us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had
some fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that
it was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had
done: 'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean except
that he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the
way I knew it was true, though I recall my saying to her then that I of
course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been conscious of it
with a sort of surprise. It has made the world seem at times more
decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of
the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the
world, has washed him out. He doesn't exist for people. And yet I'm as
sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I'm more
sure. And that," she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about my
own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence I don't know what
will satisfy you."

"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher returned, "but it doesn't, my
dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don't, you know, really tell
me anything. It's so vague that what am I to think but that you may very
well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?"

"He has done everything."

"Oh--everything! Everything's nothing."

"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular thing. It's
known--only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. YOU
could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about."

Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up. "I
wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than put
a question."

"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.

"A part of you?"

"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than
ever yet, her note of proud still pessimism. "How can such a thing as
that not be the great thing in one's life?"

She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she
took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the
great thing in your life," he said, "to depend on ME a little more."
After which, just debating, "Doesn't he belong to some club?" he asked.

She had a grave headshake. "He used to--to many."

"But he has dropped them?"

"They've dropped HIM. Of that I'm sure. It ought to do for you. I
offered him," the girl immediately continued--"and it was for that I
went to him--to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is
possible. But he won't hear of it."

Densher took this in with marked but generous wonder. "You offered
him--'impossible' as you describe him to me--to live with him and share
his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the moment only the high
beauty of it. "You ARE gallant!"

"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?" She wouldn't in the
least have this. "It wasn't courage--it was the opposite. I did it to
save myself--to escape."

He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"

"From everything."

"Do you by any chance mean from me?"

"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."

"But he won't allow it," said Densher.

"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
hold out a finger to me," Kate went on. "He simply wriggles away, in his
inimitable manner, and throws me back."

"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."

But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that showed again how
inveterately he felt in her tone something that banished the talk of
other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull desert of the
conventional, and she had already continued. "He would make himself
delightful to you."

"Even while objecting to me?"

"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. I've seen
it make him wonderful. He would appreciate you and be clever with you.
It's to ME he objects--that is as to my liking you."

"Heaven be praised then," cried Densher, "that you like me enough for
the objection!"

But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."

Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to escape ME?"

"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it's through her and
through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
through her, and through her only, that I can help HER. That's what I
mean," she again explained, "by their turning me back."

The young man thought. "Your sister turns you back too?"

"Oh with a push!"

"But have you offered to live with your sister?"

"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
call it." Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. "Sometimes,
alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
went through things--they pulled her down; I know what they were now--I
didn't then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an
insolence of success. That's what Marian keeps before me; that's what
papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position's a value, a
great value, for them both"--she followed and followed. Lucid and
ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. "It's THE value--the only one they
have."

Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their
pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure--the quickness and anxiety
playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly, as
he had never done before. "And the fact you speak of holds you!"

"Of course it holds me. It's a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me
ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to
anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I
can be made."

Densher had a pause. "Oh you might by good luck have the personal
happiness too."

Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she
gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly: "Darling!"

It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. "Will you
settle it by our being married to-morrow--as we can, with perfect ease,
civilly?"

"Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied, "till after you've
seen her."

"Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.

They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of
deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the
tone of it than the way she at last said: "You're afraid of her
yourself."

He gave rather a glazed smile. "For young persons of a great distinction
and a very high spirit we're a caution!"

"Yes," she took it straight up; "we're hideously intelligent. But
there's fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think," she
added, and for that matter not without courage, "our relation's quite
beautiful. It's not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in
things."

It made him break into a laugh that had more freedom than his smile.
"How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!"

"No, no, THAT would be vulgar. But of course," she admitted, "I do see
my danger of doing something base."

"Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"

"I SHAN'T sacrifice you. Don't cry out till you're hurt. I shall
sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want
and that I shall try for everything. That," she wound up, "is how I see
myself (and how I see you quite as much) acting for them."

"For 'them'?"--and the young man extravagantly marked his coldness.
"Thank you!"

"Don't you care for them?"

"Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?"

As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the
unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished he repented of his
roughness--and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was
one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild
glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we avoid
stupidity we may do ALL. We may keep her."

He stared. "Make her pension us?"

"Well, wait at least till we've seen."

He thought. "Seen what can be got out of her?"

Kate for a moment said nothing. "After all I never asked her; never,
when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded
claws."

"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were a vulture."

"Call it an eagle--with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great
flights. If she's a thing of the air, in short--say at once a great
seamed silk balloon--I never myself got into her car. I was her choice."

It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great
style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master.
"What she must see in you!"

"Wonders!" And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. "Everything.
There it is."

Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face
it. "So that what you mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow squaring
her?"

"See her, see her," Kate said with impatience.

"And grovel to her?"

"Ah do what you like!" And she walked in her impatience away.



Book Second, Chapter 2


His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he
overtook her, to make out more than ever in the poise of her head, the
pride of her step--he didn't know what best to call it--a part at least
of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured his
presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though at the same
moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before him, he
was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or profitable
compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do as SHE
liked--his own liking might come off as it would. He would help her to
the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of this day and the next, her
easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back,
was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the high element in
which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he wasn't quite
ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous, reasonable,
unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be clever with
all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he sometimes shook his
poor dear shabby old watch, to start it up again. It wasn't, thank
goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that "factor" (to use one of his
great newspaper-words), and with what they could muster between them it
would be little to the credit of their star, however pale, that defeat
and surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue.
It was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as at the worst a
direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged it--which was
enough--as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity in the idea of
bringing Mrs. Lowder round. When shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast
drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the
first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed
in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging
to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really
enlarged to the scale of the place.

He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an
hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while
observation and reflexion crowded on him, he asked himself what was to
be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the
hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but
part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to
and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive florid furniture,
the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as little doubt
of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found himself even
facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on, and that that
was as great an humiliation in a good cause as a proud man could desire.
It hadn't yet been so distinct to him that he made no show--literally
not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there all about him; so
almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect, were the huge
heavy objects that syllabled his hostess's story. "When all's said and
done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once all but noted that
of her to her niece; only just keeping it back at the last, keeping it
to himself with all its danger about it. It mattered because it bore so
directly, and he at all events quite felt it a thing that Kate herself
would some day bring out to him. It bore directly at present, and really
all the more that somehow, strangely, it didn't in the least
characterise the poor woman as dull or stale. She was vulgar with
freshness, almost with beauty, since there was beauty, to a degree, in
the play of so big and bold a temperament. She was in fine quite the
largest possible quantity to deal with; and he was in the cage of the
lioness without his whip--the whip, in a word, of a supply of proper
retorts. He had no retort but that he loved the girl--which in such a
house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had mentioned to him more than
once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking of it as a kind of offset
and uttering it as with a capital P, marking it as something that he
might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in some way to their
advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage he could turn it;
but the case grew less simple the longer he waited. Decidedly there was
something he hadn't enough of.

His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he
paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at the
sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as little as
before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate looked
rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any state
of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly, more
critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and they did
nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction. He hadn't
known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own rebellions
of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent lady might
decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself that spoke
to him, writing out for him with surpassing breadth and freedom the
associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities of the
mistress. Never, he felt sure, had he seen so many things so unanimously
ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have found this
last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played into the
subject for an article--an article that his impression put straight into
his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still
flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of
its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should
have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove after all but a small amount of
copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even while
he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less easy to
laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He couldn't
describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either Mid-Victorian
or Early--not being certain they were rangeable under one rubric. It was
only manifest they were splendid and were furthermore conclusively
British. They constituted an order and abounded in rare
material--precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed
of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn
everywhere so tight and curled everywhere so thick. He had never dreamed
of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and
marble and malachite. But it was above all the solid forms, the wasted
finish, the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality and
money, a good conscience and a big balance. These things finally
represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of
thought--of which, for that matter, in presence of them, he became as
for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by their
merciless difference.

His interview with Aunt Maud, none the less, took by no means the turn
he had expected. Passionate though her nature, no doubt, Mrs. Lowder on
this occasion neither threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression,
her weapons of defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them
untouched and unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly
perceived only afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived
something else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn't have
known what to call it if he hadn't called it her really imprudent good
nature. Her blandness, in other words, wasn't mere policy--he wasn't
dangerous enough for policy: it was the result, he could see, of her
fairly liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself
became more interesting, and who knew what might happen should he take
to liking HER? Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought
him at any rate but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray
powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her
explaining it, that if she had made him wait it hadn't been to wound
him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her
intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed
to say to him--not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come
home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her
first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he
hadn't taken her hint, and this enquiry assumed so many things that it
immediately made discussion frank and large. He knew, with the question
put, that the hint was just what he HAD taken; knew that she had made
him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if he didn't
take care he should understand her, and the strength of her purpose, to
say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the length of her
purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the thought too that
he wasn't going to be afraid of understanding her; he was just going to
understand and understand without detriment to the feeblest, even, of
his passions. The play of one's mind gave one away, at the best,
dreadfully, in action, in the need for action, where simplicity was all;
but when one couldn't prevent it the thing was to make it complete.
There would never be mistakes but for the original fun of mistakes. What
he must USE his fatal intelligence for was to resist. Mrs. Lowder
meanwhile might use it for whatever she liked.

It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate that
he began on his side to reflect that--with her manner of offering it as
really sufficient if he would take the trouble to embrace it--she
couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively, she seemed to show
herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did her intention
justice she would have nothing more disagreeable to do. "If I hadn't
been ready to go very much further, you understand, I wouldn't have gone
so far. I don't care what you repeat to her--the more you repeat to her
perhaps the better; and at any rate there's nothing she doesn't already
know. I don't say it for her; I say it for you--when I want to reach my
niece I know how to do it straight." So Aunt Maud delivered herself--as
with homely benevolence, in the simplest but the clearest terms;
virtually conveying that, though a word to the wise was doubtless, in
spite of the adage, NOT always enough, a word to the good could never
fail to be. The sense our young man read into her words was that she
liked him because he was good--was really by her measure good enough:
good enough that is to give up her niece for her and go his way in
peace. But WAS he good enough--by his own measure? He fairly wondered,
while she more fully expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove
so. "She's the finest possible creature--of course you flatter yourself
you know it. But I know it quite as well as you possibly can--by which I
mean a good deal better yet; and the tune to which I'm ready to prove my
faith compares favourably enough, I think, with anything you can do. I
don't say it because she's my niece--that's nothing to me: I might have
had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have brought one of them to this place
if I hadn't found her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done
something else, but I wouldn't have put up with her presence. Kate's
presence, by good fortune, I marked early. Kate's presence--unluckily
for YOU--is everything I could possibly wish. Kate's presence is, in
short, as fine as you know, and I've been keeping it for the comfort of
my declining years. I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and
letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate; and you may judge
whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for
it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've my
idea of the best."

"Oh I quite conceive," said Densher, "that your idea of the best isn't
me."

It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder's that her face in speech was like a
lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain.
The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take,
yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her
surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. "I didn't ask
you to come to hear what it isn't--I asked you to come to hear what it
IS."

"Of course," Densher laughed, "that's very great indeed."

His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely
relevant. "I want to see her high, high up--high up and in the light."

"Ah you naturally want to marry her to a duke and are eager to smooth
away any hitch."

She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it
quite forced him at first into the sense, possibly just, of his having
shown for flippant, perhaps even for low. He had been looked at so, in
blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men, but
never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than
anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion's subtlety, and
thereby of Kate's possible career. "Don't be TOO impossible!"--he feared
from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and then felt,
as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off easily. "I want
her to marry a great man." That was all; but, more and more, it was
enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would have made it so. "And
I think of her what I think. There you are."

They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of
something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he
only would. To that extent she did appeal--appealed to the intelligence
she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at
all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of course I'm
aware how little I can answer to any fond proud dream. You've a view--a
grand one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly understand what
I'm not, and I'm much obliged to you for not reminding me of it in any
rougher way." She said nothing--she kept that up; it might even have
been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in the way of
poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man couldn't
show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he preferred to
show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he WAS--on Mrs. Lowder's
basis, the only one in question--a very small quantity, and he did know,
damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be perfectly simple,
yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension throbbed. Aunt
Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on have said how.
"You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and I'm not
going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your performances with Kate
in the Park are ridiculous so far as they're meant as consideration for
me; and I had much rather see you myself--since you're, in your way, my
dear young man, delightful--and arrange with you, count with you, as I
easily, as I perfectly should. Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel
with you if it's not really necessary? It won't--it would be too
absurd!--BE necessary. I can bite your head off any day, any day I
really open my mouth; and I'm dealing with you now, see--and
successfully judge--without opening it. I do things handsomely all
round--I place you in the presence of the plan with which, from the
moment it's a case of taking you seriously, you're incompatible. Come
then as near it as you like, walk all round it--don't be afraid you'll
hurt it!--and live on with it before you."

He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it was
because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He was so
pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not proposing
he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to interfere,
that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem. Immediately
afterwards then he was to speak of these things to Kate, and what by
that time came back to him first of all was the way he had said to
her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers
says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely of course that
you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going
far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in
it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own
light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the
close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating
him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was
moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage
with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night
before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going for fifteen or
twenty weeks to America. The idea of a series of letters from the United
States from the strictly social point of view had for some time been
nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment was
now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had, in a
word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into Densher's
face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up in
surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter to
Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position as yet to
refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand confounded
his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce knowing how to
measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he hadn't quite
supposed himself the man for the class of job. This confused
consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed to his
manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question surprisingly
clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle that wasn't in
his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened this time not to
want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons, about as good as he
could let them come; he was to play his own little tune and not be
afraid: that was the whole point.

It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one
still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as
they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of June,
which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose a
week; his enquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground, and
there were reasons of state--reasons operating at the seat of empire in
Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head. Densher made no
secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide; and his account
of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to speak to her first.
She assured him on this that nothing so much as that scruple had yet
shown her how they were bound together: she was clearly proud of his
letting a thing of such importance depend on her, but she was clearer
still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his prospect and urged him
to his task; she should miss him too dreadfully--of course she should
miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke with jubilation of
what he would see and would do. She made so much of this last quantity
that he laughed at her innocence, though also with scarce the heart to
give her the real size of his drop in the daily bucket. He was struck at
the same time with her happy grasp of what had really occurred in Fleet
Street--all the more that it was his own final reading. He was to pull
the subject up--that was just what they wanted; and it would take more
than all the United States together, visit them each as he might, to let
HIM down. It was just because he didn't nose about and babble, because
he wasn't the usual gossip-monger, that they had picked him out. It was
a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently wished a new
tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would have always to
take from his example.

"How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a journalist's
wife!" Densher exclaimed in admiration even while she struck him as
fairly hurrying him off.

But she was almost impatient of the praise. "What do you expect one NOT
to understand when one cares for you?"

"Ah then I'll put it otherwise and say 'How much you care for me!'"

"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity. I SHALL, with a
chance to show it," she added, "have some imagination for you."

She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent that he felt a
queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently
arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their
destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from
Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this element
soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the parts
were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before taking his
leave, was to see why Kate had spoken with a wisdom indifferent to that,
and was to come to the vision by a devious way that deepened the final
cheer. Their faces were turned to the illumined quarter as soon as he
had answered her question on the score of their being to appearance able
to play patience, a prodigious game of patience, with success. It was
for the possibility of the appearance that she had a few days before so
earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and if after his hour with that
lady it had not struck Densher that he had seen her to the happiest
purpose the poor facts flushed with a better meaning as Kate, one by
one, took them up.

"If she consents to your coming why isn't that everything?"

"It IS everything; everything SHE thinks it. It's the probability--I
mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability--that I may be prevented from
becoming a complication for her by some arrangement, ANY arrangement,
through which you shall see me often and easily. She's sure of my want
of money, and that gives her time. She believes in my having a certain
amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my state before I put the
pistol to your head in respect to sharing it. The time this will take
figures for her as the time that will help her if she doesn't spoil her
chance by treating me badly. She doesn't at all wish moreover," Densher
went on, "to treat me badly, for I believe, upon my honour, odd as it
may sound to you, that she personally rather likes me and that if you
weren't in question I might almost become her pet young man. She doesn't
disparage intellect and culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to
adorn her board and be associated with her name; and I'm sure it has
sometimes cost her a real pang that I should be so desirable, at once,
and so impossible." He paused a moment, and his companion then saw how
strange a smile was in his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct
in her own of this informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing
that, if the truth were known, she likes me literally better than--deep
down--you yourself do: wherefore she does me the honour to think I may
be safely left to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her
margin. I'm not the sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes,
that survives use, that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit
that, and your pride and prejudice will take care of the rest!--the
pride fed full, meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you,
and the prejudice excited by the comparisons she'll enable you to make,
from which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like
me so much as when she has succeeded a little better in making me look
wretched. For then YOU'LL like me less."

Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was
a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after an
instant replied: "I see, I see--what an immense affair she must think
me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."

"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as
deep as it will."

He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to amuse
herself with. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as
you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the
other big things that in one's acquaintance with people give her a place
so apart."

"Oh she's grand," the young man allowed; "she's on the scale altogether
of the car of Juggernaut--which was a kind of image that came to me
yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The things in your
drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange idols, the mystic
excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of the car to
bristle."

"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that
aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges
that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were
complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together
than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word of
refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy, and they left it there, as
they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her
powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too
the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of
his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last--though
indeed only under artful pressure--fallen foul of his very type, his
want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents.
She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate, would
have been dreadful if he hadn't so let himself in for it.

"I was really curious, you see," he explained, "to find out from her
what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light
of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass
for."

Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why should you care?" she
asked.

"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade,
her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of: they
belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we
must keep setting up 'codes' with. Besides," he added, "I want to please
her personally."

"Ah yes, we must please her personally!" his companion echoed; and the
words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of
Densher's politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for
New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon
came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told
her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told
herself. This, if it had been so, was an accident, and it perched him
there with her for half an hour, like a cicerone and his victim on a
tower-top, before as much of the bird's-eye view of his early years
abroad, his migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German university,
as she had easy attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their
world, would have spotted him straight as to many of these points; a man
of their world, so far as they had a world, would have been through the
English mill. But it was none the less charming to make his confession
to a woman; women had in fact for such differences blessedly more
imagination and blessedly more sympathy. Kate showed at present as much
of both as his case could require; when she had had it from beginning to
end she declared that she now made out more than ever yet what she loved
him for. She had herself, as a child, lived with some continuity in the
world across the Channel, coming home again still a child; and had
participated after that, in her teens, in her mother's brief but
repeated retreats to Dresden, to Florence, to Biarritz, weak and
expensive attempts at economy from which there stuck to her--though in
general coldly expressed, through the instinctive avoidance of cheap
raptures--the religion of foreign things. When it was revealed to her
how many more foreign things were in Merton Densher than he had hitherto
taken the trouble to catalogue, she almost faced him as if he were a map
of the continent or a handsome present of a delightful new "Murray." He
hadn't meant to swagger, he had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs.
Lowder he had meant also a little to explain. His father had been, in
strange countries, in twenty settlements of the English, British
chaplain, resident or occasional, and had had for years the unusual luck
of never wanting a billet. His career abroad had therefore been
unbroken, and as his stipend had never been great he had educated his
children, at the smallest cost, in the schools nearest, which was also a
saving of railway-fares. Densher's mother, it further appeared, had
practised on her side a distinguished industry, to the success of
which--so far as success ever crowned it--this period of exile had much
contributed: she copied, patient lady, famous pictures in great museums,
having begun with a happy natural gift and taking in betimes the scale
of her opportunity. Copyists abroad of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher
had had a sense and a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection that
persuaded, that even deceived, and that made the "placing" of her work
blissfully usual. Her son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and
the effect of his telling Kate all about her, as well as about other
matters until then mixed and dim, was to render his history rich, his
sources full, his outline anything but common. He had come round, he had
come back, he insisted abundantly, to being a Briton: his Cambridge
years, his happy connexion, as it had proved, with his father's college,
amply certified to that, to say nothing of his subsequent plunge into
London, which filled up the measure. But brave enough though his descent
to English earth, he had passed, by the way, through zones of air that
had left their ruffle on his wings--he had been exposed to initiations
indelible. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.

When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,
declaring that this indeed was what was gravely the matter with him,
that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.
On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without
mitigation, that if he was various and complicated, complicated by wit
and taste, she wouldn't for the world have had him more helpless; so
that he was driven in the end to accuse her of putting the dreadful
truth to him in the hollow guise of flattery. She was making him out as
all abnormal in order that she might eventually find him impossible, and
since she could make it out but with his aid she had to bribe him by
feigned delight to help her. If her last word for him in the connexion
was that the way he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of
his having tasted of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her
to eat, this gives the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of
the flight of time in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate
showed, however, that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke
of the relief Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.

"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so
little."

His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so
much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"

Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she
builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the
view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to keep
it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."

He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.
He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her
own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even
through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm transparent
irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging like a confident
swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: "I engage
myself to you for ever."

The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated
nothing--couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole
joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you--I call God to
witness!--every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life."
That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as
quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of
the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and
spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They
moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as
fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent,
they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them.
They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact,
solemnised, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted
eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and
to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place
accordingly an affianced couple, but before they left it other things
still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a
premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked
round together to a high level of discretion. Kate's free profession was
that she wished not to deprive HIM of Mrs. Lowder's countenance, which
in the long run she was convinced he would continue to enjoy; and as by
a blest turn Aunt Maud had demanded of him no promise that would tie his
hands they should be able to propitiate their star in their own way and
yet remain loyal. One difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.

"Of course it will never do--we must remember that--from the moment you
allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long
as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears I
don't see that we deceive her. At a given hour, you see, she must be
undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the hour and to
face it. Only, after all, in that case," the young man observed, "one
doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her."

"What she'll have got from US?" Kate put it with a smile. "What she'll
have got from us," the girl went on, "is her own affair--it's for HER to
measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I never put myself upon
her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands them. What we
shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of," Kate further
explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so, for that
matter, will she."

Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the
present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular
situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it."

She hesitated. "Of our secret?"

"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented
and, as we must somehow feel, secured to us and made deeper and closer
by it." And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all
his meaning. "Our being as we are."

It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. "So gone?"

"So gone. So extremely gone. However," he smiled, "we shall go a good
deal further." Her answer to which was only the softness of her
silence--a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of
their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession of
it. They were practically united and splendidly strong; but there were
other things--things they were precisely strong enough to be able
successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in consequence of
which they would for the present, subject to some better reason, keep
their understanding to themselves. It was not indeed however till after
one more observation of Densher's that they felt the question completely
straightened out. "The only thing of course is that she may any day
absolutely put it to you."

Kate considered. "Ask me where, on my honour, we are? She may,
naturally; but I doubt if in fact she will. While you're away she'll
make the most of that drop of the tension. She'll leave me alone."

"But there'll be my letters."

The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?"

"Very, very, very many--more than ever; and you know what that is! And
then," Densher added, "there'll be yours."

"Oh I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself."

He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you
elsewhere?" After which, before she could quite answer, he added with
some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know. It's straighter."

She might again have just waited. "Of course it's straighter. Don't be
afraid I shan't be straight. Address me," she continued, "where you
like. I shall be proud enough of its being known you write to me."

He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even at the risk of its
really bringing down the inquisition?"

Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not afraid of the
inquisition. If she asks if there's anything definite between us I know
perfectly what I shall say."

"That I AM of course 'gone' for you?"

"That I love you as I shall never in my life love any one else, and that
she can make what she likes of that." She said it out so splendidly that
it was like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a tide breaking
through; and the effect of that in turn was to make her companion meet
her with such eyes that she had time again before he could otherwise
speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask YOU."

"Not while I'm away."

"Then when you come back."

"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had our particular joy. But
what I feel is," he candidly added, "that, by an idea of her own, her
superior policy, she WON'T ask me. She'll let me off. I shan't have to
lie to her."

"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.

"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.

But it was oddly, the very next moment, as if he had perhaps been a
shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a
natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the girl
had just given of her own intention. There WAS a difference in the
air--even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in truth
between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this
provoked her. She seemed to cast about an instant, and then she went
back a little resentfully to something she had suffered to pass a minute
before. She appeared to take up rather more seriously than she need the
joke about her freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a beautiful
way. "Men are too stupid--even you. You didn't understand just now why,
if I post my letters myself, it won't be for anything so vulgar as to
hide them."

"Oh you named it--for the pleasure."

"Yes; but you didn't, you don't, understand what the pleasure may be.
There are refinements--!" she more patiently dropped. "I mean of
consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation," she went on. "No," she
sadly insisted--"men DON'T know. They know in such matters almost
nothing but what women show them."

This was one of the speeches, frequent in her, that, liberally,
joyfully, intensely adopted and, in itself, as might be, embraced, drew
him again as close to her, and held him as long, as their conditions
permitted. "Then that's exactly why we've such an abysmal need of you!"



Book Third, Chapter 1


The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned that
their design was unconsidered, that the passes wouldn't be clear, nor
the air mild, nor the inns open--the two ladies who, characteristically,
had braved a good deal of possibly interested remonstrance were finding
themselves, as their adventure turned out, wonderfully sustained. It was
the judgement of the head-waiters and other functionaries on the Italian
lakes that approved itself now as interested; they themselves had been
conscious of impatiences, of bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so
that one of the things they made out together--making out as they did an
endless variety--was that in those operatic palaces of the Villa
d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however
re-enforced by a travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to
be beguiled and undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest;
they had for instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way
by the Brunig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet
them, and were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
and rest more numerous.

Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet of
having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman in
the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much, saw
everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly placed
herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated as,
humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in many
ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
with the remarkable young thing from New York--HAD mustered courage: had
perched, on the instant, at the clearest lookout it could find, and
might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later, it
had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakeable flash of a signal.

Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
in the interest of the particular peace that New York couldn't give. It
was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many things--perhaps
even too many--New York COULD give; but this was felt to make no
difference in the important truth that what you had most to do, under
the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation
as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else could, and it
had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such measure of
assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the moment had not
faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in any degree
ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then unheralded
and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately haggard,
anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
two-and-twenty summers, in spite of her marks, whose hair was somehow
exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently confessed
to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for robes of
mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New York
mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history, confused as
yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters,
almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had
required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of affecting, of
romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in
respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's back, a set of New
York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and
in particular was strange--a combination in itself of a nature to engage
Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the strangeness that most
determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as she had to be that it
was greater than any one else--any one but the sole Susan
Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston was not in
the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing Boston, and that
any assumed affinity between the two characters was delusive and vain.
SHE was seeing her, and she had quite the finest moment of her life in
now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision. She couldn't explain
it--no one would understand. They would say clever Boston things--Mrs.
Stringham was from Burlington Vermont, which she boldly upheld as the
real heart of New England, Boston being "too far south"--but they would
only darken counsel.

There could be no better proof (than this quick intellectual split) of
the impression made on our friend, who shone herself, she was well
aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made her
usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost first
her husband and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's death, she
had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more sharply single
than before. Yet she sat rather coldly light, having, as she called it,
enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by bread alone: how
little indeed she was regularly content with that diet appeared from the
name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a contributor to the
best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she fondly believed she had
her "note," the art of showing New England without showing it wholly in
the kitchen. She had not herself been brought up in the kitchen; she
knew others who had not; and to speak for them had thus become with her
a literary mission. To BE in truth literary had ever been her dearest
thought, the thought that kept her bright little nippers perpetually in
position. There were masters, models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom
she finally accounted so and in whose light she ingeniously laboured;
there were others whom, however chattered about, she ranked with the
inane, for she bristled with discriminations; but all categories failed
her--they ceased at least to signify--as soon as she found herself in
presence of the real thing, the romantic life itself. That was what she
saw in Mildred--what positively made her hand a while tremble too much
for the pen. She had had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even
New England refined and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as
she was of small neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and
ambitions, mixed with something moral, personal, that was still more
intensely responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill
turn if their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would
be left of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of
everything else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she
went about her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she
was really all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt
hat, so Tyrolese, yet somehow, though feathered from the eagle's wing,
so truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
evening, her _Transcript_ with the same interfusion of suspense and
resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in the
magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the real
thing all the while was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back to New
York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite distinct, of
why it WAS real, and whether she should ever be so near it again.

For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself always as
that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
any one like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities, and that
simple remark of Milly's--if simple it was--became the most important
thing that had ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in
short, in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the key
of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor young
woman's history. That the potential heiress of all the ages should never
have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber, after all, to the
_Transcript_ was a truth that--in especial as announced with modesty,
with humility, with regret--described a situation. It laid upon the
elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a weight of responsibility;
but in particular it led her to ask whom poor Mildred HAD then seen, and
what range of contacts it had taken to produce such queer surprises.
That was really the enquiry that had ended by clearing the air: the key
of knowledge was felt to click in the lock from the moment it flashed
upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been starved for culture.
Culture was what she herself represented for her, and it was living up
to that principle that would surely prove the great business. She knew,
the clever lady, what the principle itself represented, and the limits
of her own store; and a certain alarm would have grown upon her if
something else hadn't grown faster. This was, fortunately for her--and
we give it in her own words--the sense of a harrowing pathos. That,
primarily, was what appealed to her, what seemed to open the door of
romance for her still wider than any, than a still more reckless,
connexion with the "picture-papers." For such was essentially the point:
it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to have, as was evident, thousands and
thousands a year, to have youth and intelligence and, if not beauty, at
least in equal measure a high dim charming ambiguous oddity, which was
even better, and then on top of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the
freedom of the wind in the desert--it was unspeakably touching to be so
equipped and yet to have been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded
mistakes.

It brought our friend's imagination back again to New York, where
aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact
caused a visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest. As
Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could
against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the remarkable
thing was that even at the end of three weeks she HAD held out. But by
this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free; it was dealing
with new quantities, a different proportion altogether--and that had
made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone home in convenient
possession of her subject. New York was vast, New York was startling,
with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward generations that
accounted for anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant tribe of
which the rare creature was the final flower, the immense extravagant
unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins,
lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls,
preserved, though so exposed, in the marble of famous French
chisels--all this, to say nothing of the effect of closer growths of the
stem, was to have had one's small world-space both crowded and enlarged.
Our couple had at all events effected an exchange; the elder friend had
been as consciously intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding
in personal revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This
was poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
even than Maeterlinck and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they managed
and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths of the
merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her central
clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious enthusiasms, had
reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that she really might act
on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was positively afraid of
what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to avoid it with piety and
passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to leave her untouched because
no touch one could apply, however light, however just, however earnest
and anxious, would be half good enough, would be anything but an ugly
smutch upon perfection--this now imposed itself as a consistent, an
inspiring thought.

Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the kind
of question her delicacy might have to contend with. Would she start for
Europe with her young friend at the earliest possible date, and should
she be willing to do so without making conditions? The enquiry was
launched by wire; explanations, in sufficiency, were promised; extreme
urgency was suggested and a general surrender invited. It was to the
honour of her sincerity that she made the surrender on the spot, though
it was not perhaps altogether to that of her logic. She had wanted, very
consciously, from the first, to give something up for her new
acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that she was practically giving
up all. What settled this was the fulness of a particular impression,
the impression that had throughout more and more supported her and which
she would have uttered so far as she might by saying that the charm of
the creature was positively in the creature's greatness. She would have
been content so to leave it; unless indeed she had said, more
familiarly, that Mildred was the biggest impression of her life. That
was at all events the biggest account of her, and none but a big clearly
would do. Her situation, as such things were called, was on the grand
scale; but it still was not that. It was her nature, once for all--a
nature that reminded Mrs. Stringham of the term always used in the
newspapers about the great new steamers, the inordinate number of "feet
of water" they drew; so that if, in your little boat, you had chosen to
hover and approach, you had but yourself to thank, when once motion was
started, for the way the draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of
water, and odd though it might seem that a lonely girl, who was not
robust and who hated sound and show, should stir the stream like a
leviathan, her companion floated off with the sense of rocking violently
at her side. More than prepared, however, for that excitement, Mrs.
Stringham mainly failed of ease in respect to her own consistency. To
attach herself for an indefinite time seemed a roundabout way of holding
her hands off. If she wished to be sure of neither touching nor
smutching, the straighter plan would doubtless have been not to keep her
friend within reach. This in fact she fully recognised, and with it the
degree to which she desired that the girl should lead her life, a life
certain to be so much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty,
however, by good fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further
recognised, as she was speedily able to do, that she Susan Shepherd--the
name with which Milly for the most part amused herself--was NOT anybody
else. She had renounced that character; she had now no life to lead; and
she honestly believed that she was thus supremely equipped for leading
Milly's own. No other person whatever, she was sure, had to an equal
degree this qualification, and it was really to assert it that she
fondly embarked.

Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and gone since then, and
one of the best of them doubtless had been the voyage itself, by the
happy southern course, to the succession of Mediterranean ports, with
the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or three others had preceded this;
incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last fortnight at home,
and one of which had determined on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush to New
York, forty-eight breathless hours there, previous to her final rally.
But the great sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the picture,
so that for many days other questions and other possibilities sounded
with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound in a
Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically prevailed,
up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still further up and
across the Alps, which were also partly known to Mrs. Stringham; only
perhaps "taken" to a time not wholly congruous, hurried in fact on
account of the girl's high restlessness. She had been expected, she had
frankly promised, to be restless--that was partly why she was
"great"--or was a consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet she had
not perhaps altogether announced herself as straining so hard at the
cord. It was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that she had
arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through the
wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher sides,
and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the openness, the
eagerness without point and the interest without pause--all a part of
the charm of her oddity as at first presented--had become more striking
in proportion as they triumphed over movement and change. She had arts
and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could have been given, but
which were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as the art of
being almost tragically impatient and yet making it as light as air; of
being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear as noon; of being
unmistakeably gay and yet making it as soft as dusk. Mrs. Stringham by
this time understood everything, was more than ever confirmed in wonder
and admiration, in her view that it was life enough simply to feel her
companion's feelings; but there were special keys she had not yet added
to her bunch, impressions that of a sudden were apt to affect her as
new.

This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such depths,
it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself suddenly
draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that now
troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
suspected presence of something behind the state--which, however, could
scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What a fresh
motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was in short not to be
divined. It was but half an explanation to say that excitement, for each
of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they had left behind, or
tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs. Stringham liked to
call them--was once more coming into sight as objects loom through smoke
when smoke begins to clear; for these were general appearances from
which the girl's own aspect, her really larger vagueness, seemed rather
to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to a personal anxiety
indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her taking occasion to
wonder if what she had more than anything else got hold of mightn't be
one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the rarest--as she called it
so that she might call it nothing worse--cases of American intensity.
She had just had a moment of alarm--asked herself if her young friend
were merely going to treat her to some complicated drama of nerves. At
the end of a week, however, with their further progress, her young
friend had effectively answered the question and given her the
impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of something that had a reality
compared with which the nervous explanation would have been coarse. Mrs.
Stringham found herself from that hour, in other words, in presence of
an explanation that remained a muffled and intangible form, but that
assuredly, should it take on sharpness, would explain everything and
more than everything, would become instantly the light in which Milly
was to be read.

Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our
young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the
sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite
without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her
associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their
confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, to a
consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good lady, on a
last analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness. She
exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because THEY were so far
from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day by the Brunig the
spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a proof of
what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the rest, been
reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young friend as if
at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't pounce, she hadn't
come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention secretive, all the same,
and her observation scientific. She struck herself as hovering like a
spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing signs. This would last,
however, only till she should fairly know what was the matter; and to
watch was after all, meanwhile, a way of clinging to the girl, not less
than an occupation, a satisfaction in itself. The pleasure of watching
moreover, if a reason were needed, came from a sense of her beauty. Her
beauty hadn't at all originally seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs.
Stringham had even in the first flush of friendship not named it grossly
to any one; having seen early that for stupid people--and who, she
sometimes secretly asked herself, wasn't stupid?--it would take a great
deal of explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was
mentioned first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and
then she was there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that
met her own perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special
items; while, in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of
herself employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to
pretend she was also stupid and so have done with the matter; spoke of
her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially dense
insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things." This was
her own way of describing a face that, thanks doubtless to rather too
much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together with too
little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was expressive,
irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When Milly smiled
it was a public event--when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They
had stopped on the Brunig for luncheon, and there had come up for them
under the charm of the place the question of a longer stay.

Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but which,
on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed itself
ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of her
younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a term of
continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form of silver
medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked with
alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were taken
highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed her
familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the best.
These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature and with
extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had embarked,
sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her presence. She had
given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and Germany that were
to leave them ever afterwards a standard of comparison for all cycles of
Cathay, and to stamp the younger in especial--Susan was the
younger--with a character, that, as Mrs. Stringham had often had
occasion, through life, to say to herself, made all the difference. It
made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over and over again and in
the most remote connexions, that, thanks to her parent's lonely thrifty
hardy faith, she was a woman of the world. There were plenty of women
who were all sorts of things that she wasn't, but who, on the other
hand, were not that, and who didn't know SHE was (which she liked--it
relegated them still further) and didn't know either how it enabled her
to judge them. She had never seen herself so much in this light as
during the actual phase of her associated, if slightly undirected,
pilgrimage; and the consciousness gave perhaps to her plea for a pause
more intensity than she knew. The irrecoverable days had come back to
her from far off; they were part of the sense of the cool upper air and
of everything else that hung like an indestructible scent to the torn
garment of youth--the taste of honey and the luxury of milk, the sound
of cattle-bells and the rush of streams, the fragrance of trodden balms
and the dizziness of deep gorges.

Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess, the
only one she had yet had to deal with, and this, in its way too, made
all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the wearer--it
was for every one else an office nobly filled. It might have represented
possibly, with its involved loneliness and other mysteries, the weight
under which she fancied her companion's admirable head occasionally, and
ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite assented at luncheon to
their staying over, and had left her to look at rooms, settle questions,
arrange about their keeping on their carriage and horses; cares that had
now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a matter of course and that yet
for some reason, on this occasion particularly, brought home to her--all
agreeably, richly, almost grandly--what it was to live with the great.
Her young friend had in a sublime degree a sense closed to the general
question of difficulty, which she got rid of furthermore not in the
least as one had seen many charming persons do, by merely passing it on
to others. She kept it completely at a distance: it never entered the
circle; the most plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to
tread the path of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service
was in other words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court
life without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of
money, and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that
if one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most made
it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading person she
couldn't have imagined; but it prevailed even as the truth of truths
that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might leave her
conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible and never
ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was in the fine
folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over
the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the curious and
splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the mode du jour,
that peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the
merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance; it
lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume
of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself. She
couldn't dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it
away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it
away in any softened sigh. She couldn't have lost it if she had
tried--that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be THE thing
you were. When at the end of an hour she hadn't returned to the house
Mrs. Stringham, though the bright afternoon was yet young, took, with
precautions, the same direction, went to join her in case of her caring
for a walk. But the purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct
than that of a due regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that,
once more, the good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her
slightly "underhand" even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that,
however, and she didn't care, sure as she was that what she really
wanted wasn't to overstep but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop
in time that she went softly, but she had on this occasion further to go
than ever yet, for she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety,
the footpath she believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside
and into the higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they
had so often wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then
it obscured itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small
cluster of brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs.
Stringham reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a
bewildered old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication
that sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long
before passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way
would drop again, as our unappeased enquirer found it in fact, a quarter
of an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led
somewhere, yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the
mountain appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether,
though probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her
uncertainty moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the
presence on a fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz
volume the girl had brought out and that therefore pointed to her
shortly previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as she
hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs. Stringham,
I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was quite an
accident that she hadn't, before they were over, betrayed by her deeper
agitation the fact of her own nearness.

The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a sharp
turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously
and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great extent and
beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of
it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not stopping till it
was all before her; and here, on what struck her friend as the dizzy
edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of
itself and its final business, but the girl's seat was a slab of rock at
the end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to
the right at gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune, if not
by the worst, as to be at last completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham
stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the danger of such a
perch for a mere maiden; her liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be
precipitated by a single false movement, by a turn of the head--how
could one tell?--into whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the
minute, roared in the poor lady's ears, but without reaching, as
happened, Milly's. It was a commotion that left our observer intensely
still and holding her breath. What had first been offered her was the
possibility of a latent intention--however wild the idea--in such a
posture; of some betrayed accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible
hidden obsession. But since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a
sound, a syllable, must have produced the start that would be fatal, so
even the lapse of a few seconds had partly a reassuring effect. It gave
her time to receive the impression which, when she some minutes later
softly retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This
was the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating
there she wasn't meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she sat,
much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had
nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of
the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain,
it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among
them or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham had
decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she saw,
or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to sound
in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to withdraw as
she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her breath, and she
never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.

Not many minutes probably, yet they hadn't seemed few, and they had
given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while
waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when,
late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point of
the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the pencil
attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--a bientot!--across the
cover; after which, even under the girl's continued delay, she had
measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw that the great
thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction that the future
wasn't to exist for her princess in the form of any sharp or simple
release from the human predicament. It wouldn't be for her a question of
a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would be a question of
taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to the general muster
of which indeed her face might have been directly presented as she sat
there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to say to herself during
still another wait of some length that if her young friend still
continued absent it wouldn't be because--whatever the opportunity--she
had cut short the thread. She wouldn't have committed suicide; she knew
herself unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage; this
was the very vision in which she had, with no little awe, been
discovered. The image that thus remained with the elder lady kept the
character of a revelation. During the breathless minutes of her watch
she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's type, aspect, marks, her
history, her state, her beauty, her mystery, all unconsciously betrayed
themselves to the Alpine air, and all had been gathered in again to feed
Mrs. Stringham's flame. They are things that will more distinctly appear
for us, and they are meanwhile briefly represented by the enthusiasm
that was stronger on our friend's part than any doubt. It was a
consciousness she was scarce yet used to carrying, but she had as
beneath her feet a mine of something precious. She seemed to herself to
stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared. The mine but needed working
and would certainly yield a treasure. She wasn't thinking, either, of
Milly's gold.



Book Third, Chapter 2


The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the
Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she hadn't the book with
her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at all.
Her comrade's decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of having
followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully enough,
the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared itself.
"Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that after
all--?"

Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the
question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately
made such a sign that Milly's words gave place to visible relief at her
assent. "You don't care for our stop here--you'd rather go straight on?
We'll start then with the peep of tomorrow's dawn--or as early as you
like; it's only rather late now to take the road again." And she smiled
to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was what
the girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping," she added;
"so it serves me right."

Milly made in general the most of her good friend's jokes; but she
humoured this one a little absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it
was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they
would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist's
interest in the detail of the matter--in spite of a declaration from the
elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere--appeared almost
immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to
think till supper of where, with the world all before them, they might
go--supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of lighted
candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside
inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal
a peculiar poetry--such being the mild adventures, the refinements of
impression, that they, as they would have said, went in for. It was now
as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to "lie down"; but at the
end of three minutes more she wasn't lying down, she was saying instead,
abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of four thousand miles:
"What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when you saw him alone,
Doctor Finch said to you?"

It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question
had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the
effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false
answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the "ninth," in New
York, the time she had seen Doctor Finch alone, and to recall the words
he had then uttered; and when everything had come back it was quite, at
first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely
mattered. He hadn't, however, in fact; it was only as if he might
perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth--within ten
days of their sailing--that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm,
a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had suddenly
been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an upset as
threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident had
happily soon presented itself as slight, and there had been in the event
but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced again not
only possible, but, as representing "change," highly advisable; and if
the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself with the Doctor this
was clearly no more at his instance than at her own. Almost nothing had
passed between them but an easy exchange of enthusiasms in respect to
the remedial properties of "Europe"; and due assurance, as the facts
came back to her, she was now able to give. "Nothing whatever, on my
word of honour, that you mayn't know or mightn't then have known. I've
no secret with him about you. What makes you suspect it? I don't quite
make out how you know I did see him alone."

"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don't mean," she went on,
"during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your
heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last
thing before you went home."

Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"

"HE didn't himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of it
now for the first time. That's exactly why!" Milly declared--with
something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her
companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and,
chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with the
question? "But if you're not, as you now assure me, in his confidence,"
she smiled, "it's no matter."

"I'm not in his confidence--he had nothing to confide. But are you
feeling unwell?"

The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she
named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb
Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face, but
this her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often brightest
when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little mysteriously
to smile. "I don't know--haven't really the least idea. But it might be
well to find out."

Mrs. Stringham at this flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in
pain?"

"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder--!"

"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"

"Well, if I shall have much of it."

Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"

"Of everything. Of everything I have."

Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
everything; so that when you say 'much' of it--"

"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
I HAVE got it."

She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you've got an
ailment?"

"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.

"Ah THAT--like almost nobody else."

"Then for how long?"

Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her,
half-enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And
then as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking
perhaps a shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near
doctor." This too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and
a silence, sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend
decidedly lost herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in
distress."

"I don't think I've really EVERYTHING," Milly said as if to explain--and
as if also to put it pleasantly.

"But what on earth can I do for you?"

The girl debated, then seemed on the point of being able to say; but
suddenly changed and expressed herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm
only too happy!"

It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
"Then what's the matter?"

"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."

"But what is it you think you haven't got?"

Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim
show of joy. "The power to resist the bliss of what I HAVE!"

Mrs. Stringham took it in--her sense of being "put off" with it, the
possible, probable irony of it--and her tenderness renewed itself in the
positive grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will you see?"--for it was as
if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors. "Where
will you first go?"

Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came back
with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness that
testified for her companion to something that again particularly pleased
her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just concluded,
Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a hooked needle and
a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was always provided--this
mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no doubt, by their
prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been in sympathy. One
had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the
joy of life, and everything DID then fit. She couldn't stop for the joy,
but she could go on for it, and with the pulse of her going on she
floated again, was restored to her great spaces. There was no evasion of
any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in one's sitting there
while the twilight deepened and feeling still more finely that the
position of this young lady was magnificent. The evening at that height
had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers had bespoken a fire
with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its brave presence
through the small panes of the low clean windows, with incidents at the
inn-door, the yellow diligence, the great waggons, the hurrying hooded
private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful friend, of old stories,
old pictures, historic flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had
happened, things indeed that by a sort of strange congruity helped her
to read the meanings of the greatest interest into the relation in which
she was now so deeply involved. It was natural that this record of the
magnificence of her companion's position should strike her as after all
the best meaning she could extract; for she herself was seated in the
magnificence as in a court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a
method of progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would
evidently have a great deal more to give. By the time the candles were
lighted for supper and the short white curtains drawn Milly had
reappeared, and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That
charm moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without
further loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight
to London."

It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their
departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated
and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an
avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have
been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved, like a siege, by
gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine stride was therefore the more
exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
who, besides, was afterwards to recall as a piece of that very
"exposition" dear to the dramatist the terms in which, between their
smoky candles, the girl had put her preference and in which still other
things had come up, come while the clank of waggon-chains in the sharp
air reached their ears, with the stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets
and the foreign questions, foreign answers, that were all alike a part
of the cheery converse of the road. The girl brought it out in truth as
she might have brought a huge confession, something she admitted herself
shy about and that would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled
over her that what she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they
were to be had, and that, if her friend really wished to know, the
vision of this same equivocal quantity was what had haunted her during
their previous days, in museums and churches, and what was again
spoiling for her the pure taste of scenery. She was all for
scenery--yes; but she wanted it human and personal, and all she could
say was that there would be in London--wouldn't there?--more of that
kind than anywhere else. She came back to her idea that if it wasn't for
long--if nothing should happen to be so for HER--why the particular
thing she spoke of would probably have most to give her in the time,
would probably be less than anything else a waste of her remainder. She
produced this last consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs.
Stringham was not again disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if
talk of early dying was in order--to match it from her own future. Good,
then; they would eat and drink because of what might happen to-morrow;
and they would direct their course from that moment with a view to such
eating and drinking. They ate and drank that night, in truth, as in the
spirit of this decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt
itself the clearer.

It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that is,
in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people" was
not so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself with particular
persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that they would,
completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely unknowing.
They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs. Stringham put
forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing at first but
the observation on the girl's side that what she had in mind was no
thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing was further
from her than to desire the opportunities represented for the compatriot
in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn't a question, in short,
of the people the compatriot was after; it was the human, the English
picture itself, as they might see it in their own way--the concrete
world inferred so fondly from what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
Stringham did every justice to this concrete world, but when later on an
occasion chanced to present itself she made a point of not omitting to
remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance one or two of the
human particles of its concretion. This still, however, failed, in
vulgar parlance, to "fetch" Milly, so that she had presently to go all
the way. "Haven't I understood from you, for that matter, that you gave
Mr. Densher something of a promise?"

There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, the partner of
these hours quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had to be
a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the event,
accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so unusually
"bright" young Englishman who had made his appearance in New York on
some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before their
departure, and who had been three or four times in her house during the
brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's subsequent
stay with her; but she required much reminding before it came back to
her that she had mentioned to this companion just afterwards the
confidence expressed by the personage in question in her never doing so
dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase was, looking a
fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his confidence, the form of
which might have appeared a trifle free--this she now reasserted; she
had done nothing either to impair or to enhance it; but she had also
left Mrs. Stringham, in the connexion and at the time, rather sorry to
have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him again after that, the
elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to notice that Milly
appeared not to have done so--which the girl might easily have betrayed;
and, interested as she was in everything that concerned her, she had
made out for herself, for herself only and rather idly, that, but for
interruptions, the young Englishman might have become a better
acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was one of the signs that
in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a young person with the
world before her, for sympathy and wonder. Isolated, unmothered,
unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her big house, her big
fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to "receive," for all her
few years, as an older woman might have done--as was done, precisely, by
princesses who had public considerations to observe and who came of age
very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs. Stringham then that Mr.
Densher had gone off somewhere else in connexion with his errand before
her visit to New York, it had been also not undiscoverable that he had
come back for a day or two later on, that is after her own second
excursion--that he had in fine reappeared on a single occasion on his
way to the West: his way from Washington as she believed, though he was
out of sight at the time of her joining her friend for their departure.
It hadn't occurred to her before to exaggerate--it had not occurred to
her that she could; but she seemed to become aware to-night that there
had been just enough in this relation to meet, to provoke, the free
conception of a little more.

She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or no promise, Milly
would at a pinch be able, in London, to act on his permission to make
him a sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her ability,
though evident, would be none the less quite wasted, inasmuch as the
gentleman would to a certainty be still in America. He had a great deal
to do there--which he would scarce have begun; and in fact she might
very well not have thought of London at all if she hadn't been sure he
wasn't yet near coming back. It was perceptible to her companion that
the moment our young woman had so far committed herself she had a sense
of having overstepped; which was not quite patched up by her saying the
next minute, possibly with a certain failure of presence of mind, that
the last thing she desired was the air of running after him. Mrs.
Stringham wondered privately what question there could be of any such
appearance--the danger of which thus suddenly came up; but she said for
the time nothing of it--she only said other things: one of which was,
for instance, that if Mr. Densher was away he was away, and this the end
of it: also that of course they must be discreet at any price. But what
was the measure of discretion, and how was one to be sure? So it was
that, as they sat there, she produced her own case: SHE had a possible
tie with London, which she desired as little to disown as she might wish
to risk presuming on it. She treated her companion, in short, for their
evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting
English girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so that
it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
appeared to our friend interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
events now make if Milly didn't object.

Milly in general objected to nothing, and though she asked a question or
two she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
answers to them--kindled on Mrs. Stringham's part a backward train: she
hadn't known till to-night how much she remembered, or how fine it might
be to see what had become of large high-coloured Maud, florid, alien,
exotic--which had been just the spell--even to the perceptions of youth.
There was the danger--she frankly touched it--that such a temperament
mightn't have matured, with the years, all in the sense of fineness: it
was the sort of danger that, in renewing relations after long breaks,
one had always to look in the face. To gather in strayed threads was to
take a risk--for which, however, she was prepared if Milly was. The
possible "fun," she confessed, was by itself rather tempting; and she
fairly sounded, with this--wound up a little as she was--the note of fun
as the harmless final right of fifty years of mere New England virtue.
Among the things she was afterwards to recall was the indescribable look
dropped on her, at that, by her companion; she was still seated there
between the candles and before the finished supper, while Milly moved
about, and the look was long to figure for her as an inscrutable comment
on HER notion of freedom. Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise
word, Milly showed perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her
attention had been mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a
resource unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half-surprised,
half-beguiled her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that,
she brought out before she went to bed an easy, a light "Risk
everything!"

This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
in excited reflexion, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just sensibly
outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had left her
behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the corresponding date in
her own life--not the second, the sad one, with its dignity of sadness,
but the first, with the meagreness of its supposed felicity--she had
been, in the same spirit, almost patronisingly pitied. If that
suspicion, even when it had ceased to matter, had never quite died out
for her, there was doubtless some oddity in its now offering itself as a
link, rather than as another break, in the chain; and indeed there might
well have been for her a mood in which the notion of the development of
patronage in her quondam schoolmate would have settled her question in
another sense. It was actually settled--if the case be worth our
analysis--by the happy consummation, the poetic justice, the generous
revenge, of her having at last something to show. Maud, on their parting
company, had appeared to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also
in general quite the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions,
promotions, expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might
be; she rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder
might have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all
justice--she would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the
trophy producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the
candles were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her
neat portfolio. She hadn't lost the old clue; there were connexions she
remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
wrote on the spot.



Book Fourth, Chapter 1


It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered but the truth
nearest to hand in saying to the gentleman on her right--who was, by the
same token, the gentleman on her hostess's left--that she scarce even
then knew where she was: the words marking her first full sense of a
situation really romantic. They were already dining, she and her friend,
at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it seemed to her, with every
English accessory; though her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder's existence,
and still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so recent and so
sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt to call her companion for a
lighter change, had only had to wave a neat little wand for the
fairy-tale to begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now
glittered--for, with Mrs. Stringham's new sense of success, it came to
that--in the character of a fairy godmother. Milly had almost insisted
on dressing her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no fault
of the girl's if the good lady hadn't now appeared in a peaked hat, a
short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch.
The good lady bore herself in truth not less contentedly than if these
insignia had marked her work; and Milly's observation to Lord Mark had
doubtless just been the result of such a light exchange of looks with
her as even the great length of the table couldn't baffle. There were
twenty persons between them, but this sustained passage was the sharpest
sequel yet to that other comparison of views during the pause on the
Swiss pass. It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune had been
unduly precipitated--as if properly they were in the position of having
ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of proportion grave.
She couldn't at this moment for instance have said whether, with her
quickened perceptions, she were more enlivened or oppressed; and the
case might in fact have been serious hadn't she, by good fortune, from
the moment the picture loomed, quickly made up her mind that what
finally most concerned her was neither to seek nor to shirk, wasn't even
to wonder too much, but was to let things come as they would, since
there was little enough doubt of how they would go.

Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner--not by Mrs. Lowder, but
by the handsome girl, that lady's niece, who was now at the other end
and on the same side as Susie; he had taken her in, and she meant
presently to ask him about Miss Croy, the handsome girl, actually
offered to her sight--though now in a splendid way--but for the second
time. The first time had been the occasion--only three days before--of
her calling at their hotel with her aunt and then making, for our other
two heroines, a great impression of beauty and eminence. This impression
had remained so with Milly that at present, and although her attention
was aware at the same time of everything else, her eyes were mainly
engaged with Kate Croy when not engaged with Susie. That wonderful
creature's eyes moreover readily met them--she ranked now as a wonderful
creature; and it seemed part of the swift prosperity of the American
visitors that, so little in the original reckoning, she should yet
appear conscious, charmingly, frankly conscious, of possibilities of
friendship for them. Milly had easily and, as a guest, gracefully
generalised: English girls had a special strong beauty which
particularly showed in evening dress--above all when, as was strikingly
the case with this one, the dress itself was what it should be. That
observation she had all ready for Lord Mark when they should, after a
little, get round to it. She seemed even now to see that there might be
a good deal they would get round to; the indication being that, taken up
once for all with her other neighbour, their hostess would leave them
much to themselves. Mrs. Lowder's other neighbour was the Bishop of
Murrum--a real bishop, such as Milly had never seen, with a complicated
costume, a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument, and a face all
the portrait of a prelate; while the gentleman on our young lady's left,
a gentleman thick-necked, large and literal, who looked straight before
him and as if he were not to be diverted by vain words from that
pursuit, clearly counted as an offset to the possession of Lord Mark. As
Milly made out these things--with a shade of exhilaration at the way she
already fell in--she saw how she was justified of her plea for people
and her love of life. It wasn't then, as the prospect seemed to show, so
difficult to get into the current, or to stand at any rate on the bank.
It was easy to get near--if they WERE near; and yet the elements were
different enough from any of her old elements, and positively rich and
strange.

She asked herself if her right-hand neighbour would understand what she
meant by such a description of them should she throw it off; but another
of the things to which precisely her sense was awakened was that no,
decidedly, he wouldn't. It was nevertheless by this time open to her
that his line would be to be clever; and indeed, evidently, no little of
the interest was going to be in the fresh reference and fresh effect
both of people's cleverness and of their simplicity. She thrilled, she
consciously flushed, and all to turn pale again, with the certitude--it
had never been so present--that she should find herself completely
involved: the very air of the place, the pitch of the occasion, had for
her both so sharp a ring and so deep an undertone. The smallest things,
the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the sound of words,
especially of names, across the table, the shape of the forks, the
arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants, the walls of
the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in a play; and
they marked for her moreover her alertness of vision. She had never, she
might well believe, been in such a state of vibration; her sensibility
was almost too sharp for her comfort: there were for example more
indications than she could reduce to order in the manner of the friendly
niece, who struck her as distinguished and interesting, as in fact
surprisingly genial. This young woman's type had, visibly, other
possibilities; yet here, of its own free movement, it had already
sketched a relation. Were they, Miss Croy and she, to take up the tale
where their two elders had left it off so many years before?--were they
to find they liked each other and to try for themselves whether a scheme
of constancy on more modern lines could be worked? She had doubted, as
they came to England, of Maud Manningham, had believed her a broken reed
and a vague resource, had seen their dependence on her as a state of
mind that would have been shamefully silly--so far as it WAS
dependence--had they wished to do anything so inane as "get into
society." To have made their pilgrimage all for the sake of such society
as Mrs. Lowder might have in reserve for them--that didn't bear thinking
of at all, and she herself had quite chosen her course for curiosity
about other matters. She would have described this curiosity as a desire
to see the places she had read about, and THAT description of her motive
she was prepared to give her neighbour--even though, as a consequence of
it, he should find how little she had read. It was almost at present as
if her poor prevision had been rebuked by the majesty--she could
scarcely call it less--of the event, or at all events by the commanding
character of the two figures (she could scarcely call THAT less either)
mainly presented. Mrs. Lowder and her niece, however dissimilar, had at
least in common that each was a great reality. That was true, primarily,
of the aunt--so true that Milly wondered how her own companion had
arrived in other years at so odd an alliance; yet she none the less felt
Mrs. Lowder as a person of whom the mind might in two or three days
roughly make the circuit. She would sit there massive at least while one
attempted it; whereas Miss Croy, the handsome girl, would indulge in
incalculable movements that might interfere with one's tour. She was the
amusing resisting ominous fact, none the less, and each other person and
thing was just such a fact; and it served them right, no doubt, the pair
of them, for having rushed into their adventure.

Lord Mark's intelligence meanwhile, however, had met her own quite
sufficiently to enable him to tell her how little he could clear up her
situation. He explained, for that matter--or at least he hinted--that
there was no such thing to-day in London as saying where any one was.
Every one was everywhere--nobody was anywhere. He should be put to
it--yes, frankly--to give a name of any sort or kind to their hostess's
"set." WAS it a set at all, or wasn't it, and were there not really no
such things as sets in the place any more?--was there anything but the
groping and pawing, that of the vague billows of some great greasy sea
in mid-Channel, of masses of bewildered people trying to "get" they
didn't know what or where? He threw out the question, which seemed
large; Milly felt that at the end of five minutes he had thrown out a
great many, though he followed none more than a step or two; perhaps he
would prove suggestive, but he helped her as yet to no discriminations:
he spoke as if he had given them up from too much knowledge. He was thus
at the opposite extreme from herself, but, as a consequence of it, also
wandering and lost; and he was furthermore, for all his temporary
incoherence, to which she guessed there would be some key, as packed a
concretion as either Mrs. Lowder or Kate. The only light in which he
placed the former of these ladies was that of an extraordinary woman--a
most extraordinary woman, and "the more extraordinary the more one knows
her," while of the latter he said nothing for the moment but that she
was tremendously, yes, quite tremendously, good-looking. It was some
time, she thought, before his talk showed his cleverness, and yet each
minute she believed in that mystery more, quite apart from what her
hostess had told her on first naming him. Perhaps he was one of the
cases she had heard of at home--those characteristic cases of people in
England who concealed their play of mind so much more than they
advertised it. Even Mr. Densher a little did that. And what made Lord
Mark, at any rate, so real either, when this was a trick he had
apparently so mastered? His type somehow, as by a life, a need, an
intention of its own, took all care for vividness off his hands; that
was enough. It was difficult to guess his age--whether he were a young
man who looked old or an old man who looked young; it seemed to prove
nothing, as against other things, that he was bald and, as might have
been said, slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry: there was
such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life in him, and his eyes, at
moments--though it was an appearance they could suddenly lose--were as
candid and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat, very light, and
so fair that there was little other indication of his moustache than his
constantly feeling it--which was again boyish--he would have affected
her as the most intellectual person present if he had not affected her
as the most frivolous. The latter quality was rather in his look than in
anything else, though he constantly wore his double eye-glass, which
was, much more, Bostonian and thoughtful.

The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal
designation, which represented--as yet, for our young woman, a little
confusedly--a connexion with an historic patriciate, a class that in
turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element she
had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion." The supreme
social element in New York had never known itself but as reduced to that
category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied to a territorial
and political aristocracy, the label was probably too simple, she had
for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is true, enriched her
idea with the perception that her interlocutor was indifferent; yet
this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were, saw her but little
further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first place, he would much
rather get on with her than not, and in the second was only thinking of
too many matters of his own. If he kept her in view on the one hand and
kept so much else on the other--the way he crumbed up his bread was a
proof--why did he hover before her as a potentially insolent noble? She
couldn't have answered the question, and it was precisely one of those
that swarmed. They were complicated, she might fairly have said, by his
visibly knowing, having known from afar off, that she was a stranger and
an American, and by his none the less making no more of it than if she
and her like were the chief of his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but
imperturbably, irreclaimably, for granted, and it wouldn't in the least
help that she herself knew him, as quickly, for having been in her
country and threshed it out. There would be nothing for her to explain
or attenuate or brag about; she could neither escape nor prevail by her
strangeness; he would have, for that matter, on such a subject, more to
tell her than to learn from her. She might learn from HIM why she was so
different from the handsome girl--which she didn't know, being merely
able to feel it; or at any rate might learn from him why the handsome
girl was so different from her.

On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately
laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience,
definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she
should say on her other side--which was what Americans were always
doing. She needn't in conscience say anything at all; but Americans
never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (SHE had interposed the
"poor creatures!") what not to do. The burdens they took on--the things,
positively, they made an affair of! This easy and after all friendly
jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend's part, the note
of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she gave him a
prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting that her
desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round was justly founded on the
lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested in that,
and it was not till afterwards she fully knew how much more information
about their friend he had taken than given. Here again for instance was
a characteristic note: she had, on the spot, with her first plunge into
the obscure depths of a society constituted from far back, encountered
the interesting phenomenon of complicated, of possibly sinister motive.
However, Maud Manningham (her name, even in her presence, somehow still
fed the fancy) HAD, all the same, been lovely, and one was going to meet
her now quite as far on as one had one's self been met. She had been
with them at their hotel--they were a pair--before even they had
supposed she could have got their letter. Of course indeed they had
written in advance, but they had followed that up very fast. She had
thus engaged them to dine but two days later, and on the morrow again,
without waiting for a return visit, without waiting for anything, she
had called with her niece. It was as if she really cared for them, and
it was magnificent fidelity--fidelity to Mrs. Stringham, her own
companion and Mrs. Lowder's former schoolmate, the lady with the
charming face and the rather high dress down there at the end.

Lord Mark took in through his nippers these balanced attributes of
Susie. "But isn't Mrs. Stringham's fidelity then equally magnificent?"

"Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as if she had anything
to GIVE."

"Hasn't she got you?" Lord Mark asked without excessive delay.

"Me--to give Mrs. Lowder?" Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in the
light of such an offering. "Oh I'm rather a poor present; and I don't
feel as if, even at that, I had as yet quite been given."

"You've been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the
same thing." He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for
himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To be seen, you must
recognise, IS, for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of
being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your
friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder already who's getting the benefit. Look
round the table, and you'll make out, I think, that you're being, from
top to bottom, jumped at."

"Well then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel that I like it better than
being made fun of."

It was one of the things she afterwards saw--Milly was for ever seeing
things afterwards--that her companion had here had some way of his own,
quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his consideration. She
wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor
protested. She said to herself at any rate that he had led her on; and
what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. "Does she
know much about you?"

"No, she just likes us."

Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no
laugh. "I mean YOU particularly. Has that lady with the charming face,
which IS charming, told her?"

Milly cast about. "Told her what?"

"Everything."

This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her--made her
feel for a moment that as a matter of course she was a subject for
disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. "Oh as for that you must
ask HER."

"Your clever companion?"

"Mrs. Lowder."

He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were
certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly
upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as, should
he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell him. "And I
shall have at any rate in the meantime the interest of seeing what she
does with you. That will teach me more or less, you see, how much she
knows."

Milly followed this--it was lucid, but it suggested something apart.
"How much does she know about YOU?"

"Nothing," said Lord Mark serenely. "But that doesn't matter--for what
she does with me." And then as to anticipate Milly's question about the
nature of such doing: "This for instance--turning me straight on for
YOU."

The girl thought. "And you mean she wouldn't if she did know--?"

He met it as if it were really a point. "No. I believe, to do her
justice, she still would. So you can be easy."

Milly had the next instant then acted on the permission. "Because you're
even at the worst the best thing she has?"

With this he was at last amused. "I was till you came. You're the best
now."

It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his knowing,
but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of making her
believe them, though still with wonder. That really from this first of
their meetings was what was most to abide with her: she accepted almost
helplessly--she surrendered so to the inevitable in it--being the sort
of thing, as he might have said, that he at least thoroughly believed he
had, in going about, seen enough of for all practical purposes. Her
submission was naturally moreover not to be impaired by her learning
later on that he had paid at short intervals, though at a time
apparently just previous to her own emergence from the obscurity of
extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where his nameable
friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His impression,
his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still visibly rich. It
had helped him to place her, and she was more and more sharply conscious
of having--as with the door sharply slammed upon her and the guard's
hand raised in signal to the train--been popped into the compartment in
which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her that many a girl
would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the kind of mind that
thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and taking is
precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had practically just
learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her rumbling
compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their friend's
actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came to, he
presently assured her, and this was what it was to be a success; it
always happened before one could know it. One's ignorance was in fact
often the greatest part of it. "You haven't had time yet," he said;
"this is nothing. But you'll see. You'll see everything. You CAN, you
know--everything you dream of."

He made her more and more wonder; she almost felt as if he were showing
her visions while he spoke; and strangely enough, though it was visions
that had drawn her on, she hadn't had them in connexion--that is in such
preliminary and necessary connexion--with such a face as Lord Mark's,
such eyes and such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He had for an
instant the effect of making her ask herself if she were after all going
to be afraid; so distinct was it for fifty seconds that a fear passed
over her. There they were again--yes, certainly: Susie's overture to
Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but they had pressed in that gaiety an
electric bell that continued to sound. Positively while she sat there
she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered during these
moments why the others didn't hear it. They didn't stare, they didn't
smile, and the fear in her that I speak of was but her own desire to
stop it. That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had ceased; she
seemed to have seen in a quick though tempered glare that there were two
courses for her, one to leave London again the first thing in the
morning, the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would do nothing at
all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had already done it,
and her chance was gone. She gave herself up--she had the strangest
sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she had turned a corner before
she went on again with Lord Mark. Inexpressive but intensely
significant, he met as no one else could have done the very question she
had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Brunig. Should she have it,
whatever she did have, that question had been, for long? "Ah so possibly
not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore, don't you see? I'M
the way." It was vivid that he might be, in spite of his absence of
flourish; the way being doubtless just IN that absence. The handsome
girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she felt, kept her also in
view--Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would perhaps be the way as well, for
in her too was the absence of flourish, though she had little else, so
far as one could tell, in common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed COULD
one tell, what did one understand, and of what was one, for that matter,
provisionally conscious but of their being somehow together in what they
represented? Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really
with a guess at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this
effect what then did she know about it and in what degree had she felt
it herself? Did that represent, as between them, anything particular,
and should she have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying
by a mutual intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking?
Nothing was so odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in
each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation;
and this anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might
well, might almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to
live fast. It was queerly a question of the short run and the
consciousness proportionately crowded.

These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs.
Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so
admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have
been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was
just a part likewise that while plates were changed and dishes presented
and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted and
phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like
plashes of a slow thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more stout
and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison, more
thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from every one
and every thing: it was just a part that while this process went forward
our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny again as if
she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly
in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever it was it had showed in this
brief interval as better than the alternative; and it now presented
itself altogether in the image and in the place in which she had left
it. The image was that of her being, as Lord Mark had declared, a
success. This depended more or less of course on his idea of the
thing--into which at present, however, she wouldn't go. But, renewing
soon, she had asked him what he meant then that Mrs. Lowder would do
with her, and he had replied that this might safely be left. "She'll get
back," he pleasantly said, "her money." He could say it too--which was
singular--without affecting her either as vulgar or as "nasty"; and he
had soon explained himself by adding: "Nobody here, you know, does
anything for nothing."

"Ah if you mean that we shall reward her as hard as ever we can, nothing
is more certain. But she's an idealist," Milly continued, "and
idealists, in the long run, I think, DON'T feel that they lose."

Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this
charming. "Ah she strikes you as an idealist?"

"She idealises US, my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a
light," said Milly. "That's all I've got to hold on by. So don't deprive
me of it."

"I wouldn't think of such a thing for the world. But do you suppose," he
continued as if it were suddenly important for him--"do you suppose she
sees ME in a light?"

She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention
attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because,
placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her
too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a
course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an
archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy at the
same time steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact found
of a sudden her ease--found it all as she bethought herself that what
Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her quality and, as
perhaps might be said her value, from Lord Mark. She wished him, the
wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he thought of
Miss Theale. Why his judgement so mattered remained to be seen; but it
was this divination that in any case now determined Milly's rejoinder.
"No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all here know
each other--I see that--so far as you know anything. You know what
you're used to, and it's your being used to it--that, and that
only--that makes you. But there are things you don't know."

He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point.
"Things that I don't--with all the pains I take and the way I've run
about the world to leave nothing unlearned?"

Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim--its not
being negligible--that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit.
"You're blase, but you're not enlightened. You're familiar with
everything, but conscious really of nothing. What I mean is that you've
no imagination."

Lord Mark at this threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the
opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more
flagrantly diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess's notice.
Mrs. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something
racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her screw,
her cruise among the islands. "Oh I've heard that," the young man
replied, "before!"

"There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard ME of
course before, in my country, often enough."

"Oh never too often," he protested. "I'm sure I hope I shall still hear
you again and again."

"But what good then has it done you?" the girl went on as if now frankly
to amuse him.

"Oh you'll see when you know me."

"But most assuredly I shall never know you."

"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the good!"

If it established thus that they couldn't or wouldn't mix, why did Milly
none the less feel through it a perverse quickening of the relation to
which she had been in spite of herself appointed? What queerer
consequence of their not mixing than their talking--for it was what they
had arrived at--almost intimately? She wished to get away from him, or
indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was present to him.
She saw already--wonderful creature, after all, herself too--that there
would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and that the special
sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out of the question.
Everything else might come in--only never that; and with such an
arrangement they would perhaps even go far. This in fact might quite
have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of the
handsome girl. If she was to keep herself out she could naturally best
do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly put in Kate Croy,
being ready to that extent--as she was not at all afraid for her--to
sacrifice her if necessary. Lord Mark himself, for that matter, had made
it easy by saying a little while before that no one among them did
anything for nothing. "What then"--she was aware of being abrupt--"does
Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What has she to gain by
HER lovely welcome? Look at her NOW!" Milly broke out with
characteristic freedom of praise, though pulling herself up also with a
compunctious "Oh!" as the direction thus given to their eyes happened to
coincide with a turn of Kate's face to them. All she had meant to do was
to insist that this face was fine; but what she had in fact done was to
renew again her effect of showing herself to its possessor as conjoined
with Lord Mark for some interested view of it. He had, however, promptly
met her question.

"To gain? Why your acquaintance."

"Well, what's my acquaintance to HER? She can care for me--she must feel
that--only by being sorry for me; and that's why she's lovely: to be
already willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of the
disinterested."

There were more things in this than one that Lord Mark might have taken
up; but in a minute he had made his choice. "Ah then I'm nowhere, for
I'm afraid I'M not sorry for you in the least. What do you make then,"
he asked, "of your success?"

"Why just the great reason of all. It's just because our friend there
sees it that she pities me. She understands," Milly said; "she's better
than any of you. She's beautiful."

He appeared struck with this at last--with the point the girl made of
it; to which she came back even after a diversion created by a dish
presented between them. "Beautiful in character, I see. IS she so? You
must tell me about her."

Milly wondered. "But haven't you known her longer than I? Haven't you
seen her for yourself?"

"No--I've failed with her. It's no use. I don't make her out. And I
assure you I really should like to." His assurance had in fact for his
companion a positive suggestion of sincerity; he affected her as now
saying something he did feel; and she was the more struck with it as she
was still conscious of the failure even of curiosity he had just shown
in respect to herself. She had meant something--though indeed for
herself almost only--in speaking of their friend's natural pity; it had
doubtless been a note of questionable taste, but it had quavered out in
spite of her and he hadn't so much as cared to enquire "Why 'natural'?"
Not that it wasn't really much better for her that he shouldn't:
explanations would in truth have taken her much too far. Only she now
perceived that, in comparison, her word about this other person really
"drew" him; and there were things in that probably, many things, as to
which she would learn more and which glimmered there already as part and
parcel of that larger "real" with which, in her new situation, she was
to be beguiled. It was in fact at the very moment, this element, not
absent from what Lord Mark was further saying. "So you're wrong, you
see, as to our knowing all about each other. There are cases where we
break down. I at any rate give HER up--up, that is, to you. You must do
her for me--tell me, I mean, when you know more. You'll notice," he
pleasantly wound up, "that I've confidence in you."

"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing in this, as she
thought, a fine, though for such a man a surprisingly artless, fatuity.
It was as if there might have been a question of her falsifying for the
sake of her own show--that is of the failure of her honesty to be proof
against her desire to keep well with him herself. She didn't, none the
less, otherwise protest against his remark; there was something else she
was occupied in seeing. It was the handsome girl alone, one of his own
species and his own society, who had made him feel uncertain; of his
certainties about a mere little American, a cheap exotic, imported
almost wholesale and whose habitat, with its conditions of climate,
growth and cultivation, its immense profusion but its few varieties and
thin development, he was perfectly satisfied. The marvel was too that
Milly understood his satisfaction--feeling she expressed the truth in
presently saying: "Of course; I make out that she must be difficult;
just as I see that I myself must be easy." And that was what, for all
the rest of this occasion, remained with her--as the most interesting
thing that COULD remain. She was more and more content herself to be
easy; she would have been resigned, even had it been brought straighter
home to her, to passing for a cheap exotic. Provisionally, at any rate,
that protected her wish to keep herself, with Lord Mark, in abeyance.
They HAD all affected her as inevitably knowing each other, and if the
handsome girl's place among them was something even their initiation
couldn't deal with--why then she would indeed be a quantity.



Book Fourth, Chapter 2


That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was really, no doubt, what
most prevailed at first for our slightly gasping American pair; it found
utterance for them in their frequent remark to each other that they had
no one but themselves to thank. It dropped from Milly more than once
that if she had ever known it was so easy--! though her exclamation
mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however, was a trifle to
Mrs. Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that in this case she
would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner, and she perhaps
on the contrary meant--for it would have been like her--that she
wouldn't have come at all; why it was so easy being at any rate a matter
as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick up views. Susie kept
some of these lights for the present to herself, since, freely
communicated, they might have been a little disturbing; with which,
moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding the two ladies
were in many cases quantities of things--and of other things--to talk
about. Their immediate lesson accordingly was that they just had been
caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave that was actually
holding them aloft and that would naturally dash them wherever it liked.
They meanwhile, we hasten to add, made the best of their precarious
position, and if Milly had had no other help for it she would have found
not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's state. The girl had had
nothing to say to her, for three days, about the "success" announced by
Lord Mark--which they saw, besides, otherwise established; she was too
taken up, too touched, by Susie's own exaltation. Susie glowed in the
light of her justified faith; everything had happened that she had been
acute enough to think least probable; she had appealed to a possible
delicacy in Maud Manningham--a delicacy, mind you, but BARELY
possible--and her appeal had been met in a way that was an honour to
human nature. This proved sensibility of the lady of Lancaster Gate
performed verily for both our friends during these first days the office
of a fine floating gold-dust, something that threw over the prospect a
harmonising blur. The forms, the colours behind it were strong and
deep--we have seen how they already stood out for Milly; but nothing,
comparatively, had had so much of the dignity of truth as the fact of
Maud's fidelity to a sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much
more than of her great place in the world, which she was moreover
conscious of not as yet wholly measuring. That was what was more vivid
even than her being--in senses more worldly and in fact almost in the
degree of a revelation--English and distinct and positive, with almost
no inward but with the finest outward resonance.

Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was
"large"; yet it was not exactly a case, as to the soul, of echoing
chambers: she might have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly as possible over its
accumulated contents--a packed mass, for her American admirer, of
curious detail. When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
figured her friends as not small--which was the way she mostly figured
them--there was a certain implication that they were spacious because
they were empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious because
she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose, with
a projectile, of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to
Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their
renewal--a charm as of sitting in springtime, during a long peace, on
the daisied grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her
psychological instincts, certainly, Mrs. Stringham had noted that the
"sentiment" she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a
matter of action and movement, was not, save for the interweaving of a
more frequent plump "dearest" than she would herself perhaps have used,
a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded with interest on this
further mark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy. The
joy, for her, was to know why she acted--the reason was half the
business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there might have been no reason:
"why" was the trivial seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg,
omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Mrs. Lowder's
desire was clearly sharp that their young companions should also prosper
together; and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly, during the
first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate, she was not occupied in
telling, as it were, about her, she was occupied in hearing much of the
history of her hostess's brilliant niece.

They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder women, to give and to
take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that
what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of
thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of
immorality, in having to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that she didn't know where
it would end; and the principle of her uneasiness was that Mrs. Lowder's
life bristled for her with elements that she was really having to look
at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the world, the
world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to it by the
Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston--it would surely
have sunk the stoutest Cunarder--and she couldn't pretend that she faced
the prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice. She was in the act
herself of having one, directed precisely to their present spectacle.
She could but seek strength in the thought that she had never had
one--or had never yielded to one, which came to the same thing--before.
The sustaining sense of it all moreover as literary material--that quite
dropped from her. She must wait, at any rate, she should see: it struck
her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure, lurid. She reflected in
the watches of the night that she was probably just going to love it for
itself--that is for itself and Milly. The odd thing was that she could
think of Milly's loving it without dread--or with dread at least not on
the score of conscience, only on the score of peace. It was a mercy at
all events, for the hour, that their two spirits jumped together.

While, for this first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep at
Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily, appeared to be indeed
on the whole quite as romantically, provided for. The handsome English
girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a picture
stepping by magic out of its frame: it was a case in truth for which
Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had lost none of
her grasp, but quite the contrary, of that other conceit in virtue of
which Milly was the wandering princess: so what could be more in harmony
now than to see the princess waited upon at the city gate by the
worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses? It was the real
again, evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the princess too;
princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased way, on the
plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they pounced, at city
gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was why, after effigies,
processions and other stately games, frank human company was pleasant to
them. Kate Croy really presented herself to Milly--the latter abounded
for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it--as the wondrous London girl in
person (by what she had conceived, from far back, of the London girl;
conceived from the tales of travellers and the anecdotes of New York,
from old porings over _Punch_ and a liberal acquaintance with the
fiction of the day). The only thing was that she was nicer, since the
creature in question had rather been, to our young woman, an image of
dread. She had thought of her, at her best, as handsome just as Kate
was, with turns of head and tones of voice, felicities of stature and
attitude, things "put on" and, for that matter, put off, all the marks
of the product of a packed society who should be at the same time the
heroine of a strong story. She placed this striking young person from
the first in a story, saw her, by a necessity of the imagination, for a
heroine, felt it the only character in which she wouldn't be wasted; and
this in spite of the heroine's pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from
gush, her umbrellas and jackets and shoes--as these things sketched
themselves to Milly--and something rather of a breezy boy in the
carriage of her arms and the occasional freedom of her slang.

When Milly had settled that the extent of her good will itself made her
shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were
by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the
happiest hour they were to know, attacking in friendly independence
their great London--the London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments, "sights" oddly
unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course; these
two rejoicing not less in their intimacy and each thinking the other's
young woman a great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed to Susan
Shepherd more than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered
trouble, besides all the rest of her history; and that if she had so
good-naturedly helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was exactly to
create a diversion, to give herself something else to think about. But
on the case thus postulated our young American had as yet had no light:
she only felt that when the light should come it would greatly deepen
the colour; and she liked to think she was prepared for anything. What
she already knew moreover was full, to her vision, of English, of
eccentric, of Thackerayan character--Kate Croy having gradually become
not a little explicit on the subject of her situation, her past, her
present, her general predicament, her small success, up to the present
hour, in contenting at the same time her father, her sister, her aunt
and herself. It was Milly's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that
the girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, to content--it being
manifest that such a creature couldn't help having; a creature not
perhaps, if one would, exactly formed to inspire passions, since that
always implied a certain silliness, but essentially seen, by the
admiring eye of friendship, under the clear shadow of some probably
eminent male interest. The clear shadow, from whatever source projected,
hung at any rate over Milly's companion the whole week, and Kate Croy's
handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights, in the presence
alike of old masters passive in their glory and of thoroughly new ones,
the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins and brandished snipping
shears.

It was meanwhile a pretty part of the intercourse of these young ladies
that each thought the other more remarkable than herself--that each
thought herself, or assured the other she did, a comparatively dusty
object and the other a favourite of nature and of fortune and covered
thereby with the freshness of the morning. Kate was amused, amazed, at
the way her friend insisted on "taking" her, and Milly wondered if Kate
were sincere in finding her the most extraordinary--quite apart from her
being the most charming--person she had come across. They had talked, in
long drives, and quantities of history had not been wanting--in the
light of which Mrs. Lowder's niece might superficially seem to have had
the best of the argument. Her visitor's American references, with their
bewildering immensities, their confounding moneyed New York, their
excitements of high pressure, their opportunities of wild freedom, their
record of used-up relatives, parents, clever eager fair slim
brothers--these the most loved--all engaged, as well as successive
superseded guardians, in a high extravagance of speculation and
dissipation that had left this exquisite being her black dress, her
white face and her vivid hair as the mere last broken link: such a
picture quite threw into the shade the brief biography, however
sketchily amplified, of a mere middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And
though that indeed might be but a Bayswater way of putting it, in
addition to which Milly was in the stage of interest in Bayswater ways,
this critic so far prevailed that, like Mrs. Stringham herself, she
fairly got her companion to accept from her that she was quite the
nearest approach to a practical princess Bayswater could hope ever to
know. It was a fact--it became one at the end of three days--that Milly
actually began to borrow from the handsome girl a sort of view of her
state; the handsome girl's impression of it was clearly so sincere. This
impression was a tribute, a tribute positively to power, power the
source of which was the last thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were
passages, under all their skylights, the succession of their shops being
large, in which the latter's easy yet the least bit dry manner
sufficiently gave out that if SHE had had so deep a pocket--!

It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of
expenditure that she appeared to charge her friend, but with not having
the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree
the habit of a conscious dependence on others. Such moments, when all
Wigmore Street, for instance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl
herself to be facing the different rustlers, usually so undiscriminated,
as individual Britons too, Britons personal, parties to a relation and
perhaps even intrinsically remarkable--such moments in especial
determined for Kate a perception of the high happiness of her
companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus immense; she had to ask
nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her
fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her,
she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, these days, was
altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the phase
moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on together, she
would abide in that generosity. She had at such a point as this no
suspicion of a rift within the lute--by which we mean not only none of
anything's coming between them, but none of any definite flaw in so much
clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at Mrs. Lowder's
banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark as kindly used by the young
woman on the other side because of some faintly-felt special propriety
in it, so there really did match with this, privately, on the young
woman's part, a feeling not analysed but divided, a latent impression
that Mildred Theale was not, after all, a person to change places, to
change even chances with. Kate, verily, would perhaps not quite have
known what she meant by this discrimination, and she came near naming it
only when she said to herself that, rich as Milly was, one probably
wouldn't--which was singular--ever hate her for it. The handsome girl
had, with herself, these felicities and crudities: it wasn't obscure to
her that, without some very particular reason to help, it might have
proved a test of one's philosophy not to be irritated by a mistress of
millions, or whatever they were, who, as a girl, so easily might have
been, like herself, only vague and cruelly female. She was by no means
sure of liking Aunt Maud as much as SHE deserved, and Aunt Maud's
command of funds was obviously inferior to Milly's. There was thus
clearly, as pleading for the latter, some influence that would later on
become distinct; and meanwhile, decidedly, it was enough that she was as
charming as she was queer and as queer as she was charming--all of which
was a rare amusement; as well, for that matter, as further sufficient
that there were objects of value she had already pressed on Kate's
acceptance. A week of her society in these conditions--conditions that
Milly chose to sum up as ministering immensely, for a blind vague
pilgrim, to aid and comfort--announced itself from an early hour as
likely to become a week of presents, acknowledgements, mementoes,
pledges of gratitude and admiration, that were all on one side. Kate as
promptly embraced the propriety of making it clear that she must
forswear shops till she should receive some guarantee that the contents
of each one she entered as a humble companion shouldn't be placed at her
feet; yet that was in truth not before she had found herself in
possession, under whatever protests, of several precious ornaments and
other minor conveniences.

Great was the absurdity too that there should have come a day, by the
end of the week, when it appeared that all Milly would have asked in
definite "return," as might be said, was to be told a little about Lord
Mark and to be promised the privilege of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far
other amusements had been offered her, but her eagerness was shamelessly
human, and she seemed really to count more on the revelation of the
anxious lady at Chelsea than on the best nights of the opera. Kate
admired, and showed it, such an absence of fear: to the fear of being
bored in such a connexion she would have been so obviously entitled.
Milly's answer to this was the plea of her curiosities--which left her
friend wondering as to their odd direction. Some among them, no doubt,
were rather more intelligible, and Kate had heard without wonder that
she was blank about Lord Mark. This young lady's account of him, at the
same time, professed itself frankly imperfect; for what they best knew
him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing difficult to explain. One knew
people in general by something they had to show, something that, either
for them or against, could be touched or named or proved; and she could
think of no other case of a value taken as so great and yet flourishing
untested. His value was his future, which had somehow got itself as
accepted by Aunt Maud as if it had been his good cook or his
steamlaunch. She, Kate, didn't mean she thought him a humbug; he might
do great things--but they were as yet, so to speak, all he had done. On
the other hand it was of course something of an achievement, and not
open to every one, to have got one's self taken so seriously by Aunt
Maud. The best thing about him doubtless, on the whole, was that Aunt
Maud believed in him. She was often fantastic, but she knew a humbug,
and--no, Lord Mark wasn't that. He had been a short time in the House,
on the Tory side, but had lost his seat on the first opportunity, and
this was all he had to point to. However, he pointed to nothing; which
was very possibly just a sign of his real cleverness, one of those that
the really clever had in common with the really void. Even Aunt Maud
frequently admitted that there was a good deal, for her view of
him, to bring up the rear. And he wasn't meanwhile himself
indifferent--indifferent to himself--for he was working Lancaster Gate
for all it was worth: just as it was, no doubt, working him, and just as
the working and the worked were in London, as one might explain, the
parties to every relation.

Kate did explain, for her listening friend; every one who had anything
to give--it was true they were the fewest--made the sharpest possible
bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing
furthermore was that this might be in cases a happy understanding. The
worker in one connexion was the worked in another; it was as broad as it
was long--with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully
oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of it, as Aunt
Maud, by every appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as Lord Mark, it
was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since if he didn't he was a greater
brute than one could believe. She, Kate, hadn't yet, it was true, made
out what he was doing for her--besides which the dear woman needed him,
even at the most he could do, much less than she imagined; so far as all
of which went, moreover, there were plenty of things on every side she
hadn't yet made out. She believed, on the whole, in any one Aunt Maud
took up; and she gave it to Milly as worth thinking of that, whatever
wonderful people this young lady might meet in the land, she would meet
no more extraordinary woman. There were greater celebrities by the
million, and of course greater swells, but a bigger PERSON, by Kate's
view, and a larger natural handful every way, would really be far to
seek. When Milly enquired with interest if Kate's belief in HER was
primarily on the lines of what Mrs. Lowder "took up," her interlocutress
could handsomely say yes, since by the same principle she believed in
herself. Whom but Aunt Maud's niece, pre-eminently, had Aunt Maud taken
up, and who was thus more in the current, with her, of working and of
being worked? "You may ask," Kate said, "what in the world I have to
give; and that indeed is just what I'm trying to learn. There must be
something, for her to think she can get it out of me. She WILL get
it--trust her; and then I shall see what it is; which I beg you to
believe I should never have found out for myself." She declined to treat
any question of Milly's own "paying" power as discussable; that Milly
would pay a hundred per cent--and even to the end, doubtless, through
the nose--was just the beautiful basis on which they found themselves.

These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries of
gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became quickly,
between the pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing herself
delighted to know that something was to be done with her. If the most
remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better, and if the
most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand together why what
could be jollier for each? When she reflected indeed a little on the
oddity of her wanting two at once Kate had the natural reply that it was
exactly what showed her sincerity. She invariably gave way to feeling,
and feeling had distinctly popped up in her on the advent of her
girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump was always, in presence of
anything that moved her, interesting to see; visibly enough, moreover,
it hadn't for a long time jumped anything like so far. This in fact, as
we already know, remained the marvel for Milly Theale, who, on sight of
Mrs. Lowder, had found fifty links in respect to Susie absent from the
chain of association. She knew so herself what she thought of Susie that
she would have expected the lady of Lancaster Gate to think something
quite different; the failure of which endlessly mystified her. But her
mystification was the cause for her of another fine impression, inasmuch
as when she went so far as to observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd--and
especially Susan Shepherd emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant
past--ought by all the proprieties simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her
confidant agreed to this without a protest and abounded in the sense of
her wonder. Susan Shepherd at least bored the niece--that was plain;
this young woman saw nothing in her--nothing to account for anything,
not even for Milly's own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to
the latter's mind a fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome
girl--representing more than merely showed--that poor Susie was simply
as nought to her. This was in a manner too a general admonition to poor
Susie's companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which
she had best most look out. It just faintly rankled in her that a person
who was good enough and to spare for Milly Theale shouldn't be good
enough for another girl; though, oddly enough, she could easily have
forgiven Mrs. Lowder herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it,
and Kate Croy felt it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she
grasped the reason, and the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it
sufficiently the reason that the handsome girl was, with twenty other
splendid qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn't she suggest, as
no one yet had ever done for her new friend, that there might be a wild
beauty in that, and even a strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally
brutal--which Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed the only way; she
wasn't even aggressively so, but rather indifferently, defensively and,
as might be said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in
advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew with singular
quickness what she wasn't, as they said in New York, going to like. In
that way at least people were clearly quicker in England than at home;
and Milly could quite see after a little how such instincts might become
usual in a world in which dangers abounded. There were clearly more
dangers roundabout Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or
could dream of in Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there
were more precautions, and it was a remarkable world altogether in which
there could be precautions, on whatever ground, against Susie.



Book Fourth, Chapter 3


She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance
she might have had privately to extend to tepid appreciation; since the
late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered
and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more
besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four
o'clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one about
anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepherd at
midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have
been mentioned, she hadn't yet--hadn't, that is, at the end of six
days--produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement
made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a
change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had sociably
revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies in the
admirable equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel--a heavier, more
emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever, with "stables"
notoriously mismanaged, known at home; whereby, in the course of the
circuit, more than once repeated, it had "come out," as Mrs. Stringham
said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were, of all people, acquainted
with Mildred's other English friend, the gentleman, the one connected
with the English newspaper (Susie hung fire a little over his name) who
had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present adventures.
He had been named of course in Battersea Park--else he couldn't have
been identified; and Susie had naturally, before she could produce her
own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to make it plain that
her allusion was to Mr. Merton Densher. This was because Milly had at
first a little air of not knowing whom she meant; and the girl really
kept, as well, a certain control of herself while she remarked that the
case was surprising, the chance one in a thousand. They knew him, both
Maud and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered too, rather well, though
indeed it wasn't on any show of intimacy that he had happened to be
mentioned. It hadn't been--Susie made the point--she herself who brought
him in: he had in fact not been brought in at all, but only referred to
as a young journalist known to Mrs. Lowder and who had lately gone to
their wonderful country--Mrs. Lowder always said "your wonderful
country"--on behalf of his journal. But Mrs. Stringham had taken it
up--with the tips of her fingers indeed; and that was the confession:
she had, without meaning any harm, recognised Mr. Densher as an
acquaintance of Milly's, though she had also pulled herself up before
getting in too far. Mrs. Lowder had been struck, clearly--it wasn't too
much to say; then she also, it had rather seemed, had pulled herself up;
and there had been a little moment during which each might have been
keeping something from the other. "Only," said Milly's informant, "I
luckily remembered in time that I had nothing whatever to keep--which
was much simpler and nicer. I don't know what Maud has, but there it is.
She was interested, distinctly, in your knowing him--in his having met
you over there with so little loss of time. But I ventured to tell her
it hadn't been so long as to make you as yet great friends. I don't know
if I was right."

Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there had been moments
enough in the matter now--before the elder woman's conscience had done
itself justice--to enable Milly to reply that although the fact in
question doubtless had its importance she imagined they wouldn't find
the importance overwhelming. It WAS odd that their one Englishman should
so instantly fit; it wasn't, however, miraculous--they surely all had
often seen how extraordinarily "small," as every one said, was the
world. Undoubtedly also Susie had done just the plain thing in not
letting his name pass. Why in the world should there be a mystery?--and
what an immense one they would appear to have made if he should come
back and find they had concealed their knowledge of him! "I don't know,
Susie dear," the girl observed, "what you think I have to conceal."

"It doesn't matter, at a given moment," Mrs. Stringham returned, "what
you know or don't know as to what I think; for you always find out the
very next minute, and when you do find out, dearest, you never REALLY
care. Only," she presently asked, "have you heard of him from Miss
Croy?"

"Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven't mentioned him. Why
should we?"

"That YOU haven't I understand; but that your friend hasn't," Susie
opined, "may mean something."

"May mean what?"

"Well," Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, "I tell you all when I
tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be
better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her
niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks
she won't."

Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts--as
they so far possessed them--it all sounded a little complicated. "Is it
because there's anything between them?"

"No--I gather not; but Maud's state of mind is precautionary. She's
afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she's
afraid of everything."

"She's afraid, you mean," Milly asked, "of their--a--liking each other?"

Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. "My dear child, we
move in a labyrinth."

"Of course we do. That's just the fun of it!" said Milly with a strange
gaiety. Then she added: "Don't tell me that--in this for instance--there
are not abysses. I want abysses."

Her friend looked at her--it was not unfrequently the case--a little
harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require; and another
person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought
of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much
her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion's words as
symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her
highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be
quaint with the new quaintness--the great Boston gift; it had been
happily her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new
indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite
cherished her, as a social resource, by reason of it. It shouldn't
therefore fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. "Ah
then let us hope we shall sound the depths--I'm prepared for the
worst--of sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece--we're not
ignorant of that, are we?--to marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"

"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"

"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she doesn't know it."

Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She
had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as deep
as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many
directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her
as in a clear cold wave that there was a possible account of their
relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have
figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She
couldn't say at any rate whether or no Kate had made the point that her
aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
out--which had been, moreover, eminently guessable--that she was
involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over
nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt
extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all
values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she
couldn't in the least have defined--and she was at least, even during
these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the
difference it did make. Yet all the same the effect for her was, almost
violently, of that gentleman's having been there--having been where she
had stood till now in her simplicity--before her. It would have taken
but another free moment to make her see abysses--since abysses were what
she wanted--in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in New York,
about his English friends. There had really been in New York little time
for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it out for
herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy and that Miss Croy
was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was to be added
at the same time that even if his silence had been a labyrinth--which
was absurd in view of all the other things too he couldn't possibly have
spoken of--this was exactly what must suit her, since it fell under the
head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie. These things, however,
came and went, and it set itself up between the companions, for the
occasion, in the oddest way, both that their happening all to know Mr.
Densher--except indeed that Susie didn't, but probably would--was a fact
attached, in a world of rushing about, to one of the common orders of
chance; and yet further that it was amusing--oh awfully amusing!--to be
able fondly to hope that there was "something IN" its having been left
to crop up with such suddenness. There seemed somehow a possibility that
the ground or, as it were, the air might in a manner have undergone some
pleasing preparation; though the question of this possibility would
probably, after all, have taken some threshing out. The truth,
moreover--and there they were, already, our pair, talking about it, the
"truth"!--hadn't in fact quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of
Mrs. Lowder's request to her old friend.

It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation that nothing should
be said to Kate--it was on all this might cover in Aunt Maud that the
idea of an interesting complication could best hope to perch; and when
in fact, after the colloquy we have reported, Milly saw Kate again
without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the
newer by its containing measurably a small element of anxiety: when she
had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more
free. Yet it WAS, none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a
still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate
continued even now pre-eminently to remain for her; and a reason--this
was the great point--of which the young woman herself could have no
suspicion. Twice over thus, for two or three hours together, Milly found
herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her, in the light of the knowledge
that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes had more or less
familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather MORE
beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with
the thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully as one would,
into thousands of faces in which one might one's self never trace it;
but just the odd result of the thought was to intensify for the girl
that side of her friend which she had doubtless already been more
prepared than she quite knew to think of as the "other," the not wholly
calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was aware of this; but the other
side was what had, of a sudden, been turned straight toward her by the
show of Mr. Densher's propinquity. She hadn't the excuse of knowing it
for Kate's own, since nothing whatever as yet proved it particularly to
be such. Never mind; it was with this other side now fully presented
that Kate came and went, kissed her for greeting and for parting,
talked, as usual, of everything but--as it had so abruptly become for
Milly--THE thing. Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have
tasted so sharply a difference in this pair of occasions hadn't she been
tasting so peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that
afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter hadn't mainly been
that she herself was so "other," so taken up with the unspoken; the
strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she asked
herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became conscious of
being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how
Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly Theale should give
her to feel. Kate would never--and not from ill will nor from duplicity,
but from a sort of failure of common terms--reduce it to such a one's
comprehension or put it within her convenience.

It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more,
Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a
one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved,
to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of
his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of "poor Marian," so often
referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our
young woman's first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the
sense of how in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
could be opposed, how common ground for a place in the world could quite
fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in an
hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order Mrs.
Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void as yet,
no doubt, of ambiguity--though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark could
exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same time for
Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been
said, in quite another geography. She wouldn't have been to be found on
the same social map, and it was as if her visitors had turned over page
after page together before the final relief of their benevolent "Here!"
The interval was bridged of course, but the bridge verily was needed,
and the impression left Milly to wonder if, in the general connexion, it
were of bridges or of intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined
would find itself most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast,
there were neither--neither the difference itself, from position to
position, nor, on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good
manner, the conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it.
The conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the
difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social
atlas--these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady,
in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary
legend--a mixed wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly
of Dickens--under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed.
She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening, that the
legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the adored
author of "The Newcomes," in fine, had been on the whole the note: the
picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather perhaps showing
less than she had feared, a certain possibility of Pickwickian outline.
She explained how she meant by this that Mrs. Condrip hadn't altogether
proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even--for she might have proved almost
anything, from the way poor worried Kate had spoken--a widowed and
aggravated Mrs. Micawber.

Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly
that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life such
experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed
"booked"--as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying--to miss:
she had begun to have a little, for her fellow observer, these moments
of fanciful reaction (reaction in which she was once more all Susan
Shepherd) against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her
overwhelming connexion with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never
lost sight for long of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always
there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to
pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for it.
They had, however, to-night another matter in hand; which proved to be
presently, on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea, the
revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was away
with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small complaint, had
suddenly (without its being in the least "led up to") broken ground on
the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with impatience as a person in
love with her sister. "She wished me, if I cared for Kate, to know,"
Milly said--"for it would be quite too dreadful, and one might do
something."

Susie wondered. "Prevent anything coming of it? That's easily said. Do
what?"

Milly had a dim smile. "I think that what she would like is that I
should come a good deal to see HER about it."

"And doesn't she suppose you've anything else to do?"

The girl had by this time clearly made it out. "Nothing but to admire
and make much of her sister--whom she doesn't, however, herself in the
least understand--and give up one's time, and everything else, to it."
It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented
approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather indescribably
disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham seen
her companion exalted, and by the very play of something within, into a
vague golden air that left irritation below. That was the great thing
with Milly--it was her characteristic poetry, or at least it was Susan
Shepherd's. "But she made a point," the former continued, "of my keeping
what she says from Kate. I'm not to mention that she has spoken."

"And why," Mrs. Stringham presently asked, "is Mr. Densher so dreadful?"

Milly had, she thought, a delay to answer--something that suggested a
fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. "It
isn't so much he himself." Then the girl spoke a little as for the
romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come
in. "It's the state of his fortunes."

"And is that very bad?"

"He has no 'private means,' and no prospect of any. He has no income,
and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He's as poor,
she calls it, as 'poverty,' and she says she knows what that is."

Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something.
"But isn't he brilliantly clever?"

Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. "I haven't
the least idea."

To which, for the time, Susie only replied "Oh!"--though by the end of a
minute she had followed it with a slightly musing "I see"; and that in
turn with: "It's quite what Maud Lowder thinks."

"That he'll never do anything?"

"No--quite the contrary: that he's exceptionally able."

"Oh yes; I know"--Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had
already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs.
Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any
such person. Mr. Densher, she holds--that's the way, at any rate, it was
explained to me--won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he
were public she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were
rich--without being anything else--she'd do her best to swallow him. As
it is she taboos him."

"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, "she told
you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.

"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."

"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."

"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and one of those sudden
slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue that
had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion, Milly
turned away. Yet the matter wasn't left so, that night, between them,
albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first come
back to it. Milly's own nearest approach at least, for a little, to
doing so, was to remark that they appeared all--every one they saw--to
think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh, not
untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a subject
for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to others: she
made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have told, by any
too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud Manningham.
She did her worldliness with grand proper silences--if it mightn't
better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand occasional
pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in justice to
herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of fortune, between
her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in the midst of her
money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if with a masterful high
manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and bright, as if it
weren't there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at all--which was
possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any rate far away on
the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in order to get at her
nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece of her property. It
was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was keeping her wealth as
for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would figure as large, as
honourably unselfish, on the day they should take effect. She would
impose her will, but her will would be only that a person or two
shouldn't lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to
submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn't be
imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested for. It was
too soon, since she wasn't interested for herself. Even the richest
woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless had
plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple, sublime
without it--whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it or not;
and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be these things
just as much. Only then she might very well have, like Aunt Maud, a
manner. Such were the connexions, at all events, in which the colloquy
of our two ladies freshly flickered up--in which it came round that the
elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the afternoon, named Mr.
Densher as an acquaintance.

"Oh no--I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered," the girl
explained, "Mrs. Lowder's wish."

"But that," her friend observed after a moment, "was for silence to
Kate."

"Yes--but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate."

"Why so?--since she must dislike to talk about him."

"Mrs. Condrip must?" Milly thought. "What she would like most is that
her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she
can tell her will help that--" But the girl dropped suddenly here, as if
her companion would see.

Her companion's interest, however, was all for what she herself saw.
"You mean she'll immediately speak?" Mrs. Stringham gathered that this
was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. "How will it be
against him that you know him?"

"Oh how can I say? It won't be so much one's knowing him as one's having
kept it out of sight."

"Ah," said Mrs. Stringham as for comfort, "YOU haven't kept it out of
sight. Isn't it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?"

"It isn't my acquaintance with him," Milly smiled, "that she has
dissimulated."

"She has dissimulated only her own? Well then the responsibility's
hers."

"Ah but," said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, "she has a
right to do as she likes."

"Then so, my dear, have you!" smiled Susan Shepherd.

Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as
if this were what one loved her for. "We're not quarrelling about it,
Kate and I, YET."

"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that I don't see what Mrs.
Condrip would gain."

"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought. "I only meant that I
don't see what I myself should gain."

"But it will have to come out--that he knows you both--some time."

Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he comes back?"

"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to
'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."

This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful. "I
might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might give
him what they call here the 'tip'--that he's not to know me when we
meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."

"Do you want to run away from him?"

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. "I don't know
WHAT I want to run away from!"

It dispelled, on the spot--something, to the elder woman's ear, in the
sad, sweet sound of it--any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense
was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like
some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for
every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion;
and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make
the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave
now for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you
like."

But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"

"Oh this is nothing yet."

"No indeed--to what it will be."

"You're not--and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had
been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."

"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I LOOK as sound and
strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just
sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's
where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even
one's MOST 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as
appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I've
lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I
were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see," she
wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I'm
gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."

"I'd die FOR you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.

"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."

"But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next
weeks."

"Then we'll go back."

Susie blenched. "Back to America?"

"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying
'here' for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be,
even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she
insisted, "I DON'T know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn't
matter--and I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that everything
will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her that she joked
about it now, hadn't her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such
unnameable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She made up for
failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn't, that is, been
at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain not to
be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I must face the
music. It isn't at any rate its 'coming out,'" she added; "it's that
Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury."

Her companion wondered. "But how to HIS?"

"Why if he pretends to love her--!"

"And does he only 'pretend'?"

"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far
as to make up to other people."

The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as with gaiety, for a
comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to YOU?"

"No--but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to
believe."

"That, given the fact of his having evidently more or less followed up
his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm,
he must have been all ready if you had a little bit led him on?"

Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said after a moment
and as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don't think she'd
quite wish to suggest that I made up to HIM; for that I should have had
to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is," she
added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience--"that her being
able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy
would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him, to do him in her
sister's mind a useful ill turn."

Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite
for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New
England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what
New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment
to make out how many her young friend had actually undertaken to see
round. Finally, too, weren't they braving the deeps? They got their
amusement where they could. "Isn't it only," she asked, "rather probable
she'd see that Kate's knowing him as (what's the pretty old word?)
volage--?"

"Well?" She hadn't filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could
Milly.

"Well, might but do what that often does--by all OUR blessed little laws
and arrangements at least: excite Kate's own sentiment instead of
depressing it."

The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. "Kate's own
sentiment? Oh she didn't speak of that. I don't think," she added as if
she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, "I don't think
Mrs. Condrip imagines SHE'S in love."

It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then what's her fear?"

"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly himself keeping it
up--the fear of some final result from THAT."

"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted--"she looks far
ahead!"

At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague "sports."
"No--it's only we who do."

"Well, don't let us be more interested for them than they are for
themselves!"

"Certainly not"--the girl promptly assented. A certain interest
nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. "It wasn't of
anything on Kate's own part she spoke."

"You mean she thinks her sister distinctly doesn't care for him?"

It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she
meant; but there it presently was. "If she did care Mrs. Condrip would
have told me."

What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then
they had been talking so. "But did you ask her?"

"Ah no!"

"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.

Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't have asked her for
the world.



Book Fifth, Chapter 1


Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a
confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was
entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that his
intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she WERE
confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither justice nor
injustice was what had been in question between them. He had presented
himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan Shepherd at
home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade, and Susan's
fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and missed them, and
then had come and found them once more: besides letting them easily see
that if it hadn't by this time been the end of everything--which they
could feel in the exhausted air, that of the season at its last
gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were such as they would
have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at any rate their modest
general plea--that there was no place they would have liked to go to;
there was only the sense of finding they liked, wherever they were, the
place to which they had been brought. Such was highly the case as to
their current consciousness--which could be indeed, in an equally
eminent degree, but a matter of course; impressions this afternoon
having by a happy turn of their wheel been gathered for them into a
splendid cluster, an offering like an armful of the rarest flowers. They
were in presence of the offering--they had been led up to it; and if it
had been still their habit to look at each other across distances for
increase of unanimity his hand would have been silently named between
them as the hand applied to the wheel. He had administered the touch
that, under light analysis, made the difference--the difference of their
not having lost, as Susie on the spot and at the hour phrased it again
and again, both for herself and for such others as the question might
concern, so beautiful and interesting an experience; the difference
also, in fact, of Mrs. Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was
superficially with Mrs. Lowder they had come, and though it was further
with that lady that our young woman was directly engaged during the
half-hour or so of her most agreeably inward response to the scene.

The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
full-flushed but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connexion with this
revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of
reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of APPOINTED
felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while
everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy murmurous
welcome, the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once
so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or
that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned
the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as
distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted
from somebody, while a fuller flood somehow kept bearing her up--all the
freshness of response of her young life, the freshness of the first and
only prime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax was
the fact of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud, what was
really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor shaky
maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the
matter--for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it came to.
Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was doubtless
precisely a part of the brilliant life--since the brilliant life, as one
had faintly figured it, just WAS humanly led--that all impressions
within its area partook of its brilliancy; still, letting that pass, it
fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal for one to be able to
take in so comfortably one's companion's broad blandness. "You must stay
among us--you must stay; anything else is impossible and ridiculous; you
don't know yet, no doubt--you can't; but you will soon enough: you can
stay in ANY position." It had been as the murmurous consecration to
follow the murmurous welcome; and even if it were but part of Aunt
Maud's own spiritual ebriety--for the dear woman, one could see, was
spiritually "keeping" the day--it served to Milly, then and afterwards,
as a high-water mark of the imagination.

It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the
other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was
a "success"--the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no
numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been
plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as
much, and all gratuitous and genial--if, in portions, not exactly
hitherto THE revelation--as three unprepared weeks could have been
expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was doing,
Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk herself
into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It was fine,
the girl fully felt, the way she did talk HER, little as, at bottom, our
young woman needed it or found other persuasions at fault. It was in
particular during the minutes of her grateful absorption of iced
coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her wisdom--that she most had in
view Lord Mark's relation to her being there, or at least to the
question of her being amused at it. It wouldn't have taken much by the
end of five minutes quite to make her feel that this relation was
charming. It might, once more, simply have been that everything,
anything, was charming when one was so justly and completely charmed;
but, frankly, she hadn't supposed anything so serenely sociable could
settle itself between them as the friendly understanding that was at
present somehow in the air. They were, many of them together, near the
marquee that had been erected on a stretch of sward as a temple of
refreshment and that happened to have the property--which was all to the
good--of making Milly think of a "durbar"; her iced coffee had been a
consequence of this connexion, through which, further, the bright
company scattered about fell thoroughly into place. Certain of its
members might have represented the contingent of "native
princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious term!--and
Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for choice he but
presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family. The Lancaster
Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included its American
recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person blessedly
easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her, and she was
the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by Milly, in a
sort of soft midsummer madness, a straight skylark-flight of charity, to
Aunt Maud.

Kate had for her new friend's eyes the extraordinary and attaching
property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful stranger,
to cut her connexions and lose her identity, letting the imagination for
the time make what it would of them--make her merely a person striking
from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but who was above all
a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given her, as a party to a
relation, a greater freshness than this sense, which sprang up at its
own hours, of one's being as curious about her as if one hadn't known
her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon as Milly had seen her
after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her knowledge of Merton Densher;
she had LOOKED then other and, as Milly knew the real critical mind
would call it, more objective; and our young woman had foreseen it of
her on the spot that she would often look so again. It was exactly what
she was doing this afternoon; and Milly, who had amusements of thought
that were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when
conventionally "too big," could almost settle to the game of what one
would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn't know her. She
became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great
facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named and fitted. This was
doubtless but a way of feeling that it was of her essence to be
peculiarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded when its
demand was highest. There were probably ways enough, on these lines, for
such a consciousness; another of them would be for instance to say that
she was made for great social uses. Milly wasn't wholly sure she herself
knew what great social uses might be--unless, as a good example, to
exert just that sort of glamour in just that sort of frame were one of
them: she would have fallen back on knowing sufficiently that they
existed at all events for her friend. It imputed a primness, all round,
to be reduced but to saying, by way of a translation of one's amusement,
that she was always so RIGHT--since that, too often, was what the
_insupportables_ themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud,
what she had to content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of
saying she was lovely. It served, despite everything, the purpose,
strengthened the bond that for the time held the two ladies together,
distilled in short its drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view.
That was really the view Milly had, for most of the rest of the
occasion, to give herself to immediately taking in; but it didn't
prevent the continued play of those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements
of the mind, at which we have already glanced.

Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to Kate,
that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she expressed no
more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Didn't it by this
time sufficiently shine out that it was precisely AS the very luxury she
was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and waited for?
Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the circumstance none
the less made clear that they were all swimming together in the blue. It
came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed slowly to pass and repass and
conveniently to linger before them; he was personally the note of the
blue--like a suspended skein of silk within reach of the broiderer's
hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle took a length of him at rhythmic
intervals; and one of the accessory truths that flickered across to
Milly was that he ever so consentingly knew he was being worked in. This
was almost like an understanding with her at Mrs. Lowder's expense,
which she would have none of; she wouldn't for the world have had him
make any such point as that he wouldn't have launched them at
Matcham--or whatever it was he HAD done--only for Aunt Maud's beaux
yeux. What he had done, it would have been guessable, was something he
had for some time been desired in vain to do; and what they were all now
profiting by was a change comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope
delayed. What had caused the cessation easily showed itself as none of
Milly's business; and she was luckily, for that matter, in no real
danger of hearing from him directly that her individual weight had been
felt in the scale. Why then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but
subdued participation that he might absolutely have been saying to her
"Yes, let the dear woman take her own tone"? "Since she's here she may
stay," he might have been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But
you and I are different." Milly knew SHE was different in truth--his own
difference was his own affair; but also she knew that after all, even at
their distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
practically placed her--it came round again to that--under no obligation
whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her letting Mrs.
Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty--they would have spoiled
nothing.

"You must stay on with us; you CAN, you know, in any position you like;
any, any, ANY, my dear child"--and her emphasis went deep. "You must
make your home with us; and it's really open to you to make the most
beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake--under any of
any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take care of
you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate, and you
must stay a little FOR her; nothing for a long time has happened to me
so good as that you and she should have become friends. It's beautiful;
it's great; it's everything. What makes it perfect is that it should
have come about through our dear delightful Susie, restored to me, after
so many years, by such a miracle. No--that's more charming to me than
even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been good to
one--positively; for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new
friend--undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's
like changing one's bankers--after fifty: one doesn't do that. That's
why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your
wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper--coming back at last as
straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy."
Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of herself
made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its trimming;
but Aunt Maud wasn't to be deterred by a weak joke from keeping it up.
The young person under her protection could feel besides that she kept
it up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy
woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her
affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.
Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord
Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within
range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly's empty
ice-plate--down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she
talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle,
a shelter with the weight of an Eastern carpet. An Eastern carpet, for
wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on rather than under;
still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn't be, she
could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything. It
was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time involved
Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it was
comprehensive and genial, and it made our young woman understand things
Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities, as well as characterisations
that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most frequent on the
lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a grand natural force.



Book Fifth, Chapter 2


A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be fully
present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this stage,
with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of an
hour--her only one--with Lord Mark. "Have you seen the picture in the
house, the beautiful one that's so like you?"--he was asking that as he
stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth intimation that
any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her of wasn't quite
a reason for his having no joy at all.

"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures. But if I'm 'like'
anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me--!" It needed in
short for Milly some evidence which he only wanted to supply. She was
the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on
every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more
easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round
her its mystic circle. Their progress meanwhile was not of the
straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by the
appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples, in
clusters, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate "I say, Mark."
What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so
domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her,
while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow strollers more
vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little
battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far
back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for
continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively,
a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of friendly
empty words and kind lingering eyes that took somehow pardonable
liberties. The lingering eyes looked her over, the lingering eyes were
what went, in almost confessed simplicity, with the pointless "I say,
Mark"; and what was really most flagrant of all was that, as a pleasant
matter of course, if she didn't mind, he seemed to suggest their letting
people, poor dear things, have the benefit of her.

The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in the
benefit, measured by him in mere manner--for wonderful, of a truth, was,
as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis--that her present
good nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild common
carnival of good nature--a mass of London people together, of sorts and
sorts, but who mainly knew each other and who, in their way, did, no
doubt, confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was there;
questions about her would be passing; the easiest thing was to run the
gauntlet with HIM--just as the easiest thing was in fact to trust him
generally. Couldn't she know for herself, passively, how little harm
they meant her?--to that extent that it made no difference whether or
not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps
the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give
back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark
civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault, this oddity of
what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it without question
might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It was inevitable to
supply the probable description--that of the awfully rich young American
who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all accounts, to know; and she
had really but one instant of speculation as to fables or fantasies
perchance originally launched. She asked herself once only if Susie
could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her; for the question, on
the spot, was really blown away for ever. She knew in fact on the spot
and with sharpness just why she had "elected" Susan Shepherd: she had
had from the first hour the conviction of her being precisely the person
in the world least possibly a trumpeter. So it wasn't their fault, it
wasn't their fault, and anything might happen that would, and everything
now again melted together, and kind eyes were always kind eyes--if it
were never to be worse than that! She got with her companion into the
house; they brushed, beneficently, past all their accidents. The
Bronzino was, it appeared, deep within, and the long afternoon light
lingered for them on patches of old colour and waylaid them, as they
went, in nooks and opening vistas.

It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had really had something
other than this spoken pretext in view; as if there were something he
wanted to say to her and were only--consciously yet not awkwardly, just
delicately--hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had
practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture;
since what it appeared to amount to was "Do let a fellow who isn't a
fool take care of you a little." The thing somehow, with the aid of the
Bronzino, was done; it hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were
a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being;
and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of
the same sound as Mrs. Lowder's so recent reminder. She too wished to
take care of her--and wasn't it, a peu pres, what all the people with
the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together--the beauty
and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer glow: it was
a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so
curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as she afterwards made
out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in particular--it was she herself
who said all. She couldn't help that--it came; and the reason it came
was that she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the
mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it
just then so strange and fair--as wonderful as he had said: the face of
a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly
dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned
with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with
time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at
all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of
other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her
brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage--only unaccompanied
by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in
words that had nothing to do with her. "I shall never be better than
this."

He smiled for her at the portrait. "Than she? You'd scarce need to be
better, for surely that's well enough. But you ARE, one feels, as it
happens, better; because, splendid as she is, one doubts if she was
good."

He hadn't understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to
him, and she didn't care if for the minute he noticed her tears. It was
probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was
perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any
connexion whatever. "I mean that everything this afternoon has been too
beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right
again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it."

Though he still didn't understand her he was as nice as if he had; he
didn't ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking after
her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a world of
practice in it. "Oh we must talk about these things!"

Ah they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would; and
she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a
world, on her side, of slowness. "I wish I could see the resemblance. Of
course her complexion's green," she laughed; "but mine's several shades
greener."

"It's down to the very hands," said Lord Mark.

"Her hands are large," Milly went on, "but mine are larger. Mine are
huge."

"Oh you go her, all round, 'one better'--which is just what I said. But
you're a pair. You must surely catch it," he added as if it were
important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have
invented his plea.

"I don't know--one never knows one's self. It's a funny fancy, and I
don't imagine it would have occurred--"

"I see it HAS occurred"--he had already taken her up. She had her back,
as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which was
open, and on her turning as he spoke she saw that they were in the
presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested
enquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware
of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best
of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought a
lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was
showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a re-enforcement. Kate
herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.

"YOU had noticed too?"--she smiled at him without looking at Milly.
"Then I'm not original--which one always hopes one has been. But the
likeness is so great." And now she looked at Milly--for whom again it
was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. "Yes, there you are, my dear, if
you want to know. And you're superb." She took now but a glance at the
picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends not
too straight. "Isn't she superb?"

"I brought Miss Theale," Lord Mark explained to the latter, "quite off
my own bat."

"I wanted Lady Aldershaw," Kate continued to Milly, "to see for
herself."

"Les grands esprits se rencontrent!" laughed her attendant gentleman, a
high but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person who
represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front teeth
and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.

Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the
Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had
noticed you. It IS wonderful," she went on with her back to the picture,
but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering, felt directing
her motions now. It was enough--they were introduced, and she was saying
"I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming--" She wasn't
fresh, for she wasn't young, even though she denied at every pore that
she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for the midsummer
daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues. She didn't
think, at this pass, that she could "come" anywhere--Milly didn't; and
she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from the
question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady's mouth
and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the right way
to treat her--at least for him; as she had only dropped, smiling, and
then turned away with him. She had been dealt with--it would have done
an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little helpless, addressing
himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were a large loud whistle;
he had been sighing sympathy, in his way, while the lady made her
overture; and Milly had in this light soon arrived at their identity.
They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was the clever one. A
minute or two later the situation had changed, and she knew it
afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate. She was herself
saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie could be found; but
she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it. The prospect,
through opened doors, stretched before her into other rooms, down the
vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady Aldershaw, who, close
to him and much intent, seemed to show from behind as peculiarly expert.
Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been left in the middle of the room,
while Kate, with her back to him, was standing before her with much
sweetness of manner. The sweetness was all for HER; she had the sense of
the poor gentleman's having somehow been handled as Lord Mark had
handled his wife. He dangled there, he shambled a little; then he
bethought himself of the Bronzino, before which, with his eye-glass, he
hovered. It drew from him an odd vague sound, not wholly distinct from a
grunt, and a "Humph--most remarkable!" which lighted Kate's face with
amusement. The next moment he had creaked away over polished floors
after the others and Milly was feeling as if SHE had been rude. But Lord
Aldershaw was in every way a detail and Kate was saying to her that she
hoped she wasn't ill.

Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and
the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the while
seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in
something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were
strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had
had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time,
was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape
from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her
friend's appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even
through the call made by the others on her attention; something that was
perversely THERE, she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at least
for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every renewal
of their meeting. "Is it the way she looks to HIM?" she asked
herself--the perversity being how she kept in remembrance that Kate was
known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate--nor in him assuredly; and she
had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them as
if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn't make it up--he was too
far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She did
so now with a strange soft energy--the impulse immediately acting. "Will
you render me to-morrow a great service?"

"Any service, dear child, in the world."

"But it's a secret one--nobody must know. I must be wicked and false
about it."

"Then I'm your woman," Kate smiled, "for that's the kind of thing I
love. DO let us do something bad. You're impossibly without sin, you
know."

Milly's eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion's.

"Ah I shan't perhaps come up to your idea. It's only to deceive Susan
Shepherd."

"Oh!" said Kate as if this were indeed mild.

"But thoroughly--as thoroughly as I can."

"And for cheating," Kate asked, "my powers will contribute? Well, I'll
do my best for you." In accordance with which it was presently settled
between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence
for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for
enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name
should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days
been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she
explained, the greatest of medical lights--if she had got hold, as she
believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom of the serpent) of the
right, the special man. She had written to him three days before, and he
had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had come to her on the eve
that she couldn't go alone. Her maid on the other hand wasn't good
enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened above all with high
indulgence. "And I'm betwixt and between, happy thought! Too good for
what?"

Milly thought. "Why to be worried if it's nothing. And to be still more
worried--I mean before she need be--if it isn't."

Kate fixed her with deep eyes. "What in the world is the matter with
you?" It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a
challenge really to produce something; so that Milly felt her for the
moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little,
doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints, of
ignorant youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the matter with
her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about; and she
immediately declared, for conciliation, that if she were merely fanciful
Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered, in return, the
hope that, since she could come out and be so charming, could so
universally dazzle and interest, she wasn't all the while in distress or
in anxiety--didn't believe herself to be in any degree seriously
menaced. "Well, I want to make out--to make out!" was all that this
consistently produced. To which Kate made clear answer: "Ah then let us
by all means!"

"I thought," Milly said, "you'd like to help me. But I must ask you,
please, for the promise of absolute silence."

"And how, if you ARE ill, can your friends remain in ignorance?"

"Well, if I am it must of course finally come out. But I can go for a
long time." Milly spoke with her eyes again on her painted
sister's--almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there
before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. "That will be one of
my advantages. I think I could die without its being noticed."

"You're an extraordinary young woman," her friend, visibly held by her,
declared at last. "What a remarkable time to talk of such things!"

"Well, we won't talk, precisely"--Milly got herself together again. "I
only wanted to make sure of you."

"Here in the midst of--!" But Kate could only sigh for wonder--almost
visibly too for pity.

It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word; partly
as if from a yearning, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just as
Kate was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were already giving
a sense to her whimsical "shot," with Lord Mark, at Mrs. Lowder's first
dinner. Exactly this--the handsome girl's compassionate manner, her
friendly descent from her own strength--was what she had then foretold.
She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste of it. "Here in
the midst of what?"

"Of everything. There's nothing you can't have. There's nothing you
can't do."

"So Mrs. Lowder tells me."

It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more of that; then,
however, without waiting, she went on. "We all adore you."

"You're wonderful--you dear things!" Milly laughed.

"No, it's YOU." And Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it. "In
three weeks!"

Milly kept it up. "Never were people on such terms! All the more
reason," she added, "that I shouldn't needlessly torment you."

"But me? what becomes of ME?" said Kate.

"Well, you"--Milly thought--"if there's anything to bear you'll bear
it."

"But I WON'T bear it!" said Kate Croy.

"Oh yes you will: all the same! You'll pity me awfully, but you'll help
me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So there we are." There they
were then, since Kate had so to take it; but there, Milly felt, she
herself in particular was; for it was just the point at which she had
wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself that she didn't
horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what better proof could
there be than this quite special confidence? If she desired to show Kate
that she really believed Kate liked her, how could she show it more than
by asking her help?



Book Fifth, Chapter 3


What it really came to, on the morrow, this first time--the time Kate
went with her--was that the great man had, a little, to excuse himself;
had, by a rare accident--for he kept his consulting-hours in general
rigorously free--but ten minutes to give her; ten mere minutes which he
yet placed at her service in a manner that she admired still more than
she could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention
that he set between them on the table. He was presently to jump into his
carriage, but he promptly made the point that he must see her again, see
her within a day or two; and he named for her at once another
hour--easing her off beautifully too even then in respect to her
possibly failing of justice to her errand. The minutes affected her in
fact as ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items could muster,
and they would probably have gone without her doing much more than
secure another hearing, hadn't it been for her sense, at the last, that
she had gained above all an impression. The impression--all the sharp
growth of the final few moments--was neither more nor less than that she
might make, of a sudden, in quite another world, another straight
friend, and a friend who would moreover be, wonderfully, the most
appointed, the most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection,
inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character scientifically,
ponderably, proveably--not just loosely and sociably. Literally,
furthermore, it wouldn't really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett's
friendship, in the least: perhaps what made her most stammer and pant
was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had
interested him even beyond her intention, find she was in fact launched
in some current that would lose itself in the sea of science. At the
same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was a
moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of explaining,
and threw herself, without violence, only with a supreme pointless
quaver that had turned the next instant to an intensity of interrogative
stillness, upon his general good will. His large settled face, though
firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard; he looked, in the
oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and half like a bishop,
and she was soon sure that, within some such handsome range, what it
would show her would be what was good, what was best for her. She had
established, in other words, in this time-saving way, a relation with
it; and the relation was the special trophy that, for the hour, she bore
off. It was like an absolute possession, a new resource altogether,
something done up in the softest silk and tucked away under the arm of
memory. She hadn't had it when she went in, and she had it when she came
out; she had it there under her cloak, but dissimulated, invisibly
carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced Kate Croy. That young
lady had of course awaited her in another room, where, as the great man
was to absent himself, no one else was in attendance; and she rose for
her with such a face of sympathy as might have graced the vestibule of a
dentist. "Is it out?" she seemed to ask as if it had been a question of
a tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in no suspense at all.

"He's a dear. I'm to come again."

"But what does he say?"

Milly was almost gay. "That I'm not to worry about anything in the
world, and that if I'll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me
he'll take care of me for ever and ever."

Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. "But does he allow then that
you're ill?"

"I don't know what he allows, and I don't care. I SHALL know, and
whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it.
I don't hate it a bit."

Still, however, Kate stared. "But could he, in so few minutes, ask you
enough--?"

"He asked me scarcely anything--he doesn't need to do anything so
stupid," Milly said. "He can tell. He knows," she repeated; "and when I
go back--for he'll have thought me over a little--it will be all right."

Kate after a moment made the best of this. "Then when are we to come?"

It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked--at least it
was one of the reasons--she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the
light of her OTHER identity, the identity she would have for Mr.
Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable
light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on, necessarily
disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from the fact that,
with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves that made for
his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were twenty, there
were fifty, but none of them turned up. This in particular was of course
not a juncture at which the least of them would naturally be present;
but it would make, none the less, Milly saw, another day practically all
stamped with avoidance. She saw in a quick glimmer, and with it all
Kate's unconsciousness; and then she shook off the obsession. But it had
lasted long enough to qualify her response. No, she had shown Kate how
she trusted her; and that, for loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear
thing, now that the ice is broken I shan't trouble YOU again."

"You'll come alone?"

"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute
discretion still."

Outside, at a distance from the door, on the wide pavement of the great
contiguous square, they had to wait again while their carriage, which
Milly had kept, completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the
coachman for reasons of his own. The footman was there and had indicated
that he was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. "But
don't you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?"

This pulled Milly up still shorter--so short in fact that she yielded as
soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. "I see. Then
you CAN tell."

"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as silent as the tomb if
I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn't
keep from me how you find out that you really are."

"Well then I won't ever. But you see for yourself," Milly went on, "how
I really am. I'm satisfied. I'm happy."

Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it. The way things turn out
for you--!"

Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken. She
had ceased to be Mr. Densher's image; she stood for nothing but herself,
and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a fair
bargain and it would do. "Of course I like it. I feel--I can't otherwise
describe it--as if I had been on my knees to the priest. I've confessed
and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."

Kate's eyes never quitted her. "He must have liked YOU."

"Oh--doctors!" Milly said. "But I hope," she added, "he didn't like me
too much." Then as if to escape a little from her friend's deeper
sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes,
turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness, however,
was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London with its
dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a thing of
blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the sense--an
impression that broke the next moment through the girl's tightened lips.
"Oh it's a beautiful big world, and every one, yes, every one--!" It
presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she didn't actually
look as much as if she were crying as she must have looked to Lord Mark
among the portraits at Matcham.

Kate at all events understood. "Every one wants to be so nice?"

"So nice," said the grateful Milly.

"Oh," Kate laughed, "we'll pull you through! And won't you now bring
Mrs. Stringham?"

But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. "Not till I've
seen him once more."

She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly
justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed
between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend--that
character having for him in the interval built itself up still
higher--the first thing he asked her was whether she had been
accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely
free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even--as she felt
she might become--to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of no
alarm from his thus perhaps wishing she had not come alone. It was
exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her
acquaintance with him had somehow increased and his own knowledge in
particular received mysterious additions. They had been together,
before, scarce ten minutes, but the relation, the one the ten minutes
had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this not,
on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside manner,
which she would have disliked--much rather from a quiet pleasant air in
him of having positively asked about her, asked here and asked there and
found out. Of course he couldn't in the least have asked, or have wanted
to; there was no source of information to his hand, and he had really
needed none: he had found out simply by his genius--and found out, she
meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that she didn't
dislike this--the state of being found out about; but that on the
contrary it was truly what she had come for, and that for the time at
least it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck herself
as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had from the
beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness to come,
after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions that she was
in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how little she had
hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held up by the mere
process--since that was perhaps on the cards--of being let down, this
would only testify in turn to her queer little history. THAT sense of
loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was ridiculously
true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into the scales
represented her first approach to the taste of orderly living. Such was
Milly's romantic version--that her life, especially by the fact of this
second interview, WAS put into the scales; and just the best part of the
relation established might have been, for that matter, that the great
grave charming man knew, had known at once, that it was romantic, and in
that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt, her only fear, was whether
he perhaps wouldn't even take advantage of her being a little romantic
to treat her as romantic altogether. This doubtless was her danger with
him; but she should see, and dangers in general meanwhile dropped and
dropped.

The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious "handsome"
room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat
sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer--the
very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself
solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth
to see the world, and this then was to be the world's light, the rich
dusk of a London "back," these the world's walls, those the world's
curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long ago;
she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries,
photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and glazed,
who made up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so much of
the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean truths,
unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into
pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept distinct,
she also wondered what SHE would eventually decide upon to present in
gratitude. She would give something better at least than the brawny
Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she felt he
knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly romancing
at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more urgent, all
over the place. So much for her secrets with him, none of which really
required to be phrased. It would have been thoroughly a secret for her
from any one else that without a dear lady she had picked up just before
coming over she wouldn't have a decently near connexion of any sort, for
such an appeal as she was making, to put forward: no one in the least,
as it were, to produce for respectability. But HIS seeing it she didn't
mind a scrap, and not a scrap either his knowing how she had left the
dear lady in the dark. She had come alone, putting her friend off with a
fraud: giving a pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn't know
what--the amusement of being for once in the streets by herself. The
streets by herself were new to her--she had always had in them a
companion or a maid; and he was never to believe moreover that she
couldn't take full in the face anything he might have to say. He was
softly amused at her account of her courage; though he yet showed it
somehow without soothing her too grossly. Still, he did want to know
whom she had. Hadn't there been a lady with her on Wednesday?

"Yes--a different one. Not the one who's travelling with me. I've told
HER."

Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air--the greatest charm of
all--of giving her lots of time. "You've told her what?"

"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."

"And how many persons will she tell?"

"Oh she's devoted. Not one."

"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another friend for you?"

It didn't take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a
moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly WOULD want to fill out
his notion of her--even a little, as it were, to warm the air for her.
That however--and better early than late--he must accept as of no use;
and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on the
subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from the
very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a considerable
chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she could tell him
nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that it would
importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another; but they all together
wouldn't make--well, I don't know what to call it but the difference. I
mean when one IS--really alone. I've never seen anything like the
kindness." She pulled up a minute while he waited--waited again as if
with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her, talk. What she
herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as it were, in
public. She HAD never seen anything like the kindness, and she wished to
do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and justice was not
wronged by her being able presently to stick to her point. "Only one's
situation is what it is. It's ME it concerns. The rest is delightful and
useless. Nobody can really help. That's why I'm by myself to-day. I WANT
to be--in spite of Miss Croy, who came with me last. If you can help, so
much the better--and also of course if one can a little one's self.
Except for that--you and me doing our best--I like you to see me just as
I am. Yes, I like it--and I don't exaggerate. Shouldn't one, at the
start, show the worst--so that anything after that may be better? It
wouldn't make any real difference--it WON'T make any, anything that may
happen won't--to any one. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you,
just as I am; and--if you do in the least care to know--it quite
positively bears me up."

She put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give
her all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was
strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did accordingly take
it straight home. It showed him--showed him in spite of himself--as
allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively remote, things in
fact quite, as she would have said, outside, delicately to weigh with
him; showed him as interested on her behalf in other questions beside
the question of what was the matter with her. She accepted such an
interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind--his own
BEING the highest, magnificently--because otherwise obviously it
wouldn't be there; but she could at the same time take it as a direct
source of light upon herself, even though that might present her a
little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know more about a patient
than how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn't be, even on the
part of the greatest of doctors, anything but some form or other of the
desire to let the patient down easily. When that was the case the
reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly, pity; and when pity held
up its telltale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution,
bobbing before a window, what was the inference but that the patient was
bad? He might say what he would now--she would always have seen the head
at the window; and in fact from this moment she only wanted him to say
what he would. He might say it too with the greater ease to himself as
there wasn't one of her divinations that--AS her own--he would in any
way put himself out for. Finally, if he was making her talk she WAS
talking, and what it could at any rate come to for him was that she
wasn't afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest thing in the world for her
he would show her he believed she wasn't; which undertaking of hers--not
to have misled him--was what she counted at the moment as her
presumptuous little hint to him that she was as good as himself. It put
forward the bold idea that he could really BE misled; and there actually
passed between them for some seconds a sign, a sign of the eyes only,
that they knew together where they were. This made, in their brown old
temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then what followed it was that
he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and the whole thing wound up
for that consummation with his kind dim smile. Such kindness was
wonderful with such dimness; but brightness--that even of sharp
steel--was of course for the other side of the business, and it would
all come in for her to one tune or another. "Do you mean," he asked,
"that you've no relations at all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even
a cousin nor an aunt?"

She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or a
freak of nature at a show. "Nobody whatever"--but the last thing she had
come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor--a survivor of a
general wreck. You see," she added, "how that's to be taken into
account--that every one else HAS gone. When I was ten years old there
were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I'm all that's left. But
they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm American. Not that I
mean that makes me worse. However, you'll probably know what it makes
me."

"Yes"--he even showed amusement for it. "I know perfectly what it makes
you. It makes you, to begin with, a capital case."

She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene. "Ah
there you are!"

"Oh no; there 'we' aren't at all! There I am only--but as much as you
like. I've no end of American friends: there THEY are, if you please,
and it's a fact that you couldn't very well be in a better place than in
their company. It puts you with plenty of others--and that isn't pure
solitude." Then he pursued: "I'm sure you've an excellent spirit; but
don't try to bear more things than you need." Which after an instant he
further explained. "Hard things have come to you in youth, but you
mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the right to
be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in
which happiness may come."

"Oh I'll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily returned. "And it seems
to me, for that matter, that I'm accepting a new one every day. Now
THIS!" she smiled.

"This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me," the great
man said, "for unlimited interest. But I'm only, after all, one element
in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don't mind who knows.
Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends."

"Ah you do want to see some one!" she broke out. "You want to get at
some one who cares for me." With which, however, as he simply met this
spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young
persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the
possibilities of THEIR familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain
by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most
reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the subject
of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete. "That's of
course by itself a great boon; so please don't think I don't know it. I
can do exactly what I like--anything in all the wide world. I haven't a
creature to ask--there's not a finger to stop me. I can shake about till
I'm black and blue. That perhaps isn't ALL joy; but lots of people, I
know, would like to try it." He had appeared about to put a question,
but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for she understood
him the next moment as having thus taken it from her that her means were
as great as might be. She had simply given it to him so, and this was
all that would ever pass between them on the odious head. Yet she
couldn't help also knowing that an important effect, for his judgement,
or at least for his amusement--which was his feeling, since,
marvellously, he did have feeling--was produced by it. All her little
pieces had now then fallen together for him like the morsels of coloured
glass that used to make combinations, under the hand, in the depths of
one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood. "So that if it's a question
of my doing anything under the sun that will help--!"

"You'll DO anything under the sun? Good." He took that beautifully, ever
so pleasantly, for what it was worth; but time was needed--the minutes
or so were needed on the spot--to deal even provisionally with the
substantive question. It was convenient, in its degree, that there was
nothing she wouldn't do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably vague
that she should have to do anything. They thus appeared to be taking
her, together, for the moment, and almost for sociability, as prepared
to proceed to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which was in turn
that after much interrogation, auscultation, exploration, much noting of
his own sequences and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up the
vagueness, they might have struck themselves, or may at least strike us,
as coming back from an undeterred but useless voyage to the North Pole.
Milly was ready, under orders, for the North Pole; which fact was
doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her friend's actual
abstention from orders. "No," she heard him again distinctly repeat it,
"I don't want you for the present to do anything at all; anything, that
is, but obey a small prescription or two that will be made clear to you,
and let me within a few days come to see you at home."

It was at first heavenly. "Then you'll see Mrs. Stringham." But she
didn't mind a bit now.

"Well, I shan't be afraid of Mrs. Stringham." And he said it once more
as she asked once more: "Absolutely not; I 'send' you nowhere. England's
all right--anywhere that's pleasant, convenient, decent, will be all
right. You say you can do exactly as you like. Oblige me therefore by
being so good as to do it. There's only one thing: you ought of course,
now, as soon as I've seen you again, to get out of London."

Milly thought. "May I then go back to the Continent?"

"By all means back to the Continent. Do go back to the Continent."

"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps," she quickly added, "you
won't want to keep seeing me."

He had it all ready; he had really everything all ready. "I shall follow
you up; though if you mean that I don't want you to keep seeing ME--"

"Well?" she asked.

It was only just here that he struck her the least bit as stumbling.
"Well, see all you can. That's what it comes to. Worry about nothing.
You HAVE at least no worries. It's a great rare chance."

She had got up, for she had had from him both that he would send her
something and would advise her promptly of the date of his coming to
her, by which she was virtually dismissed. Yet for herself one or two
things kept her. "May I come back to England too?"

"Rather! Whenever you like. But always, when you do come, immediately
let me know."

"Ah," said Milly, "it won't be a great going to and fro."

"Then if you'll stay with us so much the better."

It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience of her; and the
fact itself affected her as so precious that she yielded to the wish to
get more from it. "So you don't think I'm out of my mind?"

"Perhaps that IS," he smiled, "all that's the matter."

She looked at him longer. "No, that's too good. Shall I at any rate
suffer?"

"Not a bit."

"And yet then live?"

"My dear young lady," said her distinguished friend, "isn't to 'live'
exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?"



Book Fifth, Chapter 4


She had gone out with these last words so in her ears that when once she
was well away--back this time in the great square alone--it was as if
some instant application of them had opened out there before her. It was
positively, that effect, an excitement that carried her on; she went
forward into space under the sense of an impulse received--an impulse
simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up for the
hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself. No one in
the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no tie would
have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside her without
some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush, that her only
company must be the human race at large, present all round her, but
inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be, then and there,
the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had somehow of a sudden
become her element; grey immensity was what her distinguished friend
had, for the moment, furnished her world with and what the question of
"living," as he put it to her, living by option, by volition, inevitably
took on for its immediate face. She went straight before her, without
weakness, altogether with strength; and still as she went she was more
glad to be alone, for nobody--not Kate Croy, not Susan Shepherd
either--would have wished to rush with her as she rushed. She had asked
him at the last whether, being on foot, she might go home so, or
elsewhere, and he had replied as if almost amused again at her
extravagance: "You're active, luckily, by nature--it's beautiful:
therefore rejoice in it. BE active, without folly--for you're not
foolish: be as active as you can and as you like." That had been in fact
the final push, as well as the touch that most made a mixture of her
consciousness--a strange mixture that tasted at one and the same time of
what she had lost and what had been given her. It was wonderful to her,
while she took her random course, that these quantities felt so equal:
she had been treated--hadn't she?--as if it were in her power to live;
and yet one wasn't treated so--was one?--unless it had come up, quite as
much, that one might die. The beauty of the bloom had gone from the
small old sense of safety--that was distinct: she had left it behind her
there for ever. But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big
dim experiment or struggle in which she might more responsibly than ever
before take a hand, had been offered her instead. It was as if she had
had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a
familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress;
and to take up and shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon,
a musket, a spear, a battle-axe--conducive possibly in a higher degree
to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military
posture.

She felt this instrument, for that matter, already on her back, so that
she proceeded now in very truth after the fashion of a soldier on a
march--proceeded as if, for her initiation, the first charge had been
sounded. She passed along unknown streets, over dusty littery ways,
between long rows of fronts not enhanced by the August light; she felt
good for miles and only wanted to get lost; there were moments at
corners, where she stopped and chose her direction, in which she quite
lived up to his injunction to rejoice that she was active. It was like a
new pleasure to have so new a reason; she would affirm without delay her
option, her volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded
her was a fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn't care if
she made it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due
course "whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet
this would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was
quite as if she saw in people's eyes the reflexion of her appearance and
pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not haunted
by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped, sable-plumed, all
but incongruously shod and gazing about them with extravagance; she
might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in by-ways, in
side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers' carts, which
she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her shoulder,
have announced herself as freshly on the war-path. But for the fear of
overdoing the character she would here and there have begun
conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as this
would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she
wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally
found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's Park,
round which on two or three occasions with Kate Croy her public chariot
had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was the real
thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous roads, well
within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass. Here were
benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of ball, with
their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers anxious and tired
like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same
box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim
breathing-space, but the practical question of life? They could live if
they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so: she saw them
all about her, on seats, digesting the information, recognising it again
as something in a slightly different shape familiar enough, the blessed
old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with
them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that
she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair
that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with
superiority, a fee.

The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because
she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This
and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her
linger and rest; there was an accepted spell in the sense that nobody in
the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that
this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before, at
every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly able to
put it to herself that that hadn't been a life. This present kind of
thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her distinguished
friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished her also, it was
true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too much of her
isolation; at the same time, however, as he clearly desired to deny her
no decent source of interest. He was interested--she arrived at that--in
her appealing to as many sources as possible; and it fairly filtered
into her, as she sat and sat, that he was essentially propping her up.
Had she been doing it herself she would have called it bolstering--the
bolstering that was simply for the weak; and she thought and thought as
she put together the proofs that it was as one of the weak he was
treating her. It was of course as one of the weak that she had gone to
him--but oh with how sneaking a hope that he might pronounce her, as to
all indispensables, a veritable young lioness! What indeed she was
really confronted with was the consciousness that he hadn't after all
pronounced her anything: she nursed herself into the sense that he had
beautifully got out of it. Did he think, however, she wondered, that he
could keep out of it to the end?--though as she weighed the question she
yet felt it a little unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour,
questions numerous and strange; but she had happily, before she moved,
worked round to a simplification. Stranger than anything for instance
was the effect of its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he
might perhaps have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful
beneficent dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless
there that what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised
intention of standing by her as a friend. Wasn't that what women always
said they wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen
they couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt,
sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make
husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was by a similar law the
expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn't
make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that HER doctor
was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the
damning little fact--if she could talk of damnation: that she could
believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking
her. She hadn't gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be
judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
rule, of observing the difference. She could like HIM, as she distinctly
did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so was now, so
obviously for herself, compatible with judgement. Yet it would have been
all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final and merciful wave,
chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her assistance.

It came of a sudden when all other thought was spent. She had been
asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant
by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with
futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should
attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the
Regent's Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was
ill; or she didn't matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should
prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high
pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
amusements, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in
fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that
judgement in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
judgement it was that made her sensation simple. He HAD distinguished
her--that was the chill. He hadn't known--how could he?--that she was
devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the
suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as to
an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses, her
funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny
manners--funny, like those of Americans at their best, without being
vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the compassion
he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation for herself
was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced her to her
ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl--with her rent to pay for
example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her rent to pay,
her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet it fell away
from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the great man had
doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the poor girl, and
see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too would be thinking.
It came back for that matter perhaps to views already presented. She
looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered melancholy
comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in
the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, with
them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little
to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking
that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing,
insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could.

She found after this, for the day or two, more amusement than she had
ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of
deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference
was the mere fancy--as this WAS one--of a countermove to her great man.
His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion made her
suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own all right
for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself to enjoy
this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or at least
for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs. Stringham
would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of her
independent long excursion showing, she could feel, as almost cynically
superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to avail
herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting to
wonder for an hour if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair. Hadn't
she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence, promptings of the
finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would have called the
straight tip? It must immediately be mentioned, however, that, quite
apart from a remembrance of the distinctness of Kate's promise, Milly,
the next thing, found her explanation in a truth that had the merit of
being general. If Susie at this crisis suspiciously spared her, it was
really that Susie was always suspiciously sparing her--yet occasionally
too with portentous and exceptional mercies. The girl was conscious
of how she dropped at times into inscrutable impenetrable
deferences--attitudes that, though without at all intending it, made a
difference for familiarity, for the ease of intimacy. It was as if she
recalled herself to manners, to the law of court-etiquette--which last
note above all helped our young woman to a just appreciation. It was
definite for her, even if not quite solid, that to treat her as a
princess was a positive need of her companion's mind; wherefore she
couldn't help it if this lady had her transcendent view of the way the
class in question were treated. Susan had read history, had read Gibbon
and Froude and Saint-Simon; she had high lights as to the special
allowances made for the class, and, since she saw them, when young, as
effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic and infinitely refined, one
must take it for amusing if she inclined to an indulgence verily
Byzantine. If one COULD only be Byzantine!--wasn't THAT what she
insidiously led one on to sigh? Milly tried to oblige her--for it really
placed Susan herself so handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies
of that race--it would be somewhere in Gibbon--were apparently not
questioned about their mysteries. But oh poor Milly and hers! Susan at
all events proved scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic
at Ravenna. Susan was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that
consideration might, like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan
finally disencumbered--! What starved generations wasn't Mrs. Stringham,
in fancy, going to make up for?

Kate Croy came straight to the hotel--came that evening shortly before
dinner; specifically and publicly moreover, in a hansom that, driven
apparently very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost with the
clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly, alone, as happened, in the
great garnished void of their sitting-room, where, a little, really,
like a caged Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer long-drawn
almost sinister delay of night, an effect she yet liked--Milly, at the
sound, one of the French windows standing open, passed out to the
balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general entrance, and so
was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying her cabman,
happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had a shilling
back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony, looked down at
her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took place between
them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what Kate had called
for, and the tone was thus almost by accident determined for Milly
before her friend came up. What was also, however, determined for her
was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image presented to her,
the splendid young woman who looked so particularly handsome in
impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the peculiar
property of somebody else's vision, that this fine freedom in short was
the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she looked to
him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by the strange
sense of seeing through that distant person's eyes. It lasted, as usual,
the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting it produced an
effect. It produced in fact more than one, and we take them in their
order. The first was that it struck our young woman as absurd to say
that a girl's looking so to a man could possibly be without connexions;
and the second was that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly was
in mental possession of the main connexion it must have for herself.

She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it in straight
response to Kate's frank "Well, what?" The enquiry bore of course, with
Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's scene, the great man's
latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as the cheerful
demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when news is not, in
one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She couldn't have said
what it was exactly that on the instant determined her; the nearest
description of it would perhaps have been as the more vivid impression
of all her friend took for granted. The contrast between this free
quantity and the maze of possibilities through which, for hours, she had
herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for the moment, a
grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it helped forward
in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely had nothing to
tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something else--an influence
at the particular juncture still more obscure. Kate had lost, on the way
upstairs, the look--THE look--that made her young hostess so subtly
think and one of the signs of which was that she never kept it for many
moments at once; yet she stood there, none the less, so in her bloom and
in her strength, so completely again the "handsome girl" beyond all
others, the "handsome girl" for whom Milly had at first gratefully taken
her, that to meet her now with the note of the plaintive would amount
somehow to a surrender, to a confession. SHE would never in her life be
ill; the greatest doctor would keep her, at the worst, the fewest
minutes; and it was as if she had asked just WITH all this practical
impeccability for all that was most mortal in her friend. These things,
for Milly, inwardly danced their dance; but the vibration produced and
the dust kicked up had lasted less than our account of them. Almost
before she knew it she was answering, and answering beautifully, with no
consciousness of fraud, only as with a sudden flare of the famous
"will-power" she had heard about, read about, and which was what her
medical adviser had mainly thrown her back on. "Oh it's all right. He's
lovely."

Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the
further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs.
Stringham. "You mean you've been absurd?"

"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for
our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done
something for her safety.

And Kate really hung on her lips. "There's nothing at all the matter?"

"Nothing to worry about. I shall need a little watching, but I shan't
have to do anything dreadful, or even in the least inconvenient. I can
do in fact as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to put it so
made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into their places.

Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed
her. "My love, you're too sweet! It's too dear! But it's as I was sure."
Then she grasped the full beauty. "You can do as you like?"

"Quite. Isn't it charming?"

"Ah but catch you," Kate triumphed with gaiety, "NOT doing--! And what
SHALL you do?"

"For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy"--Milly was completely
luminous--"having got out of my scrape."

"Learning, you mean, so easily, that you ARE well?"

It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her mouth.
"Learning, I mean, so easily, that I AM well."

"Only no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't,"
Kate went on, "want this of you."

"Mercy no--I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places."

"But not beastly 'climates'--Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?"

"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in for pleasure."

"Oh the duck!"--Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded. "But
what kind of pleasure?"

"The highest," Milly smiled.

Her friend met it as nobly. "Which IS the highest?"

"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must help me."

"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate asked, "from the moment I
first laid eyes on you?" Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round,
do you need?"



Book Fifth, Chapter 5


Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had really for the time
brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor's
arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out,
from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily
perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually
waited for was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding on
which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get at
Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would see
how he liked it. What was between THEM they might settle as between
them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they were at
liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire Susan
Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at the
worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it
would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself ready
to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to her of
her "appetite," her account of which, she felt, must have been vague.
But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of the best.
Gross, greedy, ravenous--these were doubtless the proper names for her:
she was at all events resigned in advance to the machinations of
sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion was to be the last
but two or three of their stay in London; and the evening of that day
practically ranked for them as, in the matter of outside relations, the
last of all. People were by this time quite scattered, and many of those
who had so liberally manifested in calls, in cards, in evident sincerity
about visits, later on, over the land, had positively passed in music
out of sight; whether as members, these latter, more especially, of Mrs.
Lowder's immediate circle or as members of Lord Mark's--our friends
being by this time able to make the distinction. The general pitch had
thus decidedly dropped, and the occasions still to be dealt with were
special and few. One of these, for Milly, announced itself as the
doctor's call already mentioned, as to which she had now had a note from
him: the single other, of importance, was their appointed
leave-taking--for the shortest separation--in respect to Mrs. Lowder and
Kate. The aunt and the niece were to dine with them alone, intimately
and easily--as easily as should be consistent with the question of their
afterwards going on together to some absurdly belated party, at which
they had had it from Aunt Maud that they would do well to show. Sir Luke
was to make his appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect to that
complication Milly had already her plan.

The night was at all events hot and stale, and it was late enough by the
time the four ladies had been gathered in, for their small session, at
the hotel, where the windows were still open to the high balconies and
the flames of the candles, behind the pink shades--disposed as for the
vigil of watchers--were motionless in the air in which the season lay
dead. What was presently settled among them was that Milly, who betrayed
on this occasion a preference more marked than usual, shouldn't hold
herself obliged to climb that evening the social stair, however it might
stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs. Lowder and Mrs. Stringham facing the
ordeal together, Kate Croy should remain with her and await their
return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to send Susan Shepherd forth;
she saw her go with complacency, liked, as it were, to put people off
with her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved to the
carriage, the further denudation--a markedly ebbing tide--of her little
benevolent back. If it wasn't quite Aunt Maud's ideal, moreover, to take
out the new American girl's funny friend instead of the new American
girl herself, nothing could better indicate the range of that lady's
merit than the spirit in which--as at the present hour for instance--she
made the best of the minor advantage. And she did this with a broad
cheerful absence of illusion; she did it--confessing even as much to
poor Susie--because, frankly, she WAS good-natured. When Mrs. Stringham
observed that her own light was too abjectly borrowed and that it was as
a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was valued, Aunt Maud
concurred to the extent of the remark: "Well, my dear, you're better
than nothing." To-night furthermore it came up for Milly that Aunt Maud
had something particular in mind. Mrs. Stringham, before adjourning with
her, had gone off for some shawl or other accessory, and Kate, as if a
little impatient for their withdrawal, had wandered out to the balcony,
where she hovered for the time unseen, though with scarce more to look
at than the dim London stars and the cruder glow, up the street, on a
corner, of a small public-house in front of which a fagged cab-horse was
thrown into relief. Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt as
soon as she had spoken that what she was doing was somehow for use.

"Dear Susan tells me that you saw in America Mr. Densher--whom I've
never till now, as you may have noticed, asked you about. But do you
mind at last, in connexion with him, doing something for me?" She had
lowered her fine voice to a depth, though speaking with all her rich
glibness; and Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already
guessing the sense of her appeal. "Will you name him, in any way you
like, to HER"--and Aunt Maud gave a nod at the window; "so that you may
perhaps find out whether he's back?"

Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at this; it was a wonder,
she afterwards thought, that she could be conscious of so many at once.
She smiled hard, however, for them all. "But I don't know that it's
important to me to 'find out.'" The array of things was further
swollen, however, even as she said this, by its striking her as too much
to say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less. "Except you mean of
course that it's important to YOU." She fancied Aunt Maud was looking at
her almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that gave her another
impulse. "You know I never HAVE yet named him to her; so that if I
should break out now--"

"Well?"--Mrs. Lowder waited.

"Why she may wonder what I've been making a mystery of. She hasn't
mentioned him, you know," Milly went on, "herself."

"No"--her friend a little heavily weighed it--"she wouldn't. So it's
she, you see then, who has made the mystery."

Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. "There has been of
course no particular reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor
there. "Do you think," she asked, "he IS back?"

"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me
definitely to know."

"Then can't you ask her yourself?"

"Ah we never speak of him!"

It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause.
"Do you mean he's an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?"

Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove of HER for the poor
young man. She doesn't care for him."

"And HE cares so much--?"

"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said Mrs. Lowder, "that he
privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don't want her
worried. Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
concluded, "do I want HIM."

Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. "But what can I do?"

"You can find out where they are. If I myself try," Mrs. Lowder
explained, "I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them deceiving
me."

"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for her, "suppose them deceiving
you."

"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink even though
Milly's questions might have been taken as drawing her rather further
than she had originally meant to go--"well, Kate's thoroughly aware of
my views for her, and that I take her being with me at present, in the
way she IS with me, if you know what I mean, for a loyal assent to them.
Therefore as my views don't happen to provide a place at all for Mr.
Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him"--therefore in short she had
been prompted to this step, though she completed her sense, but
sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.

It assisted them for the moment perhaps, however, that Milly was able to
pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it. "You
do like him then?"

"Oh dear yes. Don't you?"

Milly waited, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of
something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but
she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having failed
to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible answers,
the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud, as well,
that she had cheerfully smiled. "I did--three times--in New York." So
came and went, in these simple words, the speech that was to figure for
her, later on, that night, as the one she had ever uttered that cost her
most. She was to lie awake for the gladness of not having taken any line
so really inferior as the denial of a happy impression.

For Mrs. Lowder also moreover her simple words were the right ones; they
were at any rate, that lady's laugh showed, in the natural note of the
racy. "You dear American thing! But people may be very good and yet not
good for what one wants."

"Yes," the girl assented, "even I suppose when what one wants is
something very good."

"Oh my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all I want! I
want everything at once and together--and ever so much for you too, you
know. But you've seen us," Aunt Maud continued; "you'll have made out."

"Ah," said Milly, "I DON'T make out;" for again--it came that way in
rushes--she felt an obscurity in things. "Why, if our friend here
doesn't like him--"

"Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?" Mrs.
Lowder did justice to the question. "My dear, how can you ask? Put
yourself in her place. She meets me, but on HER terms. Proud young women
are proud young women. And proud old ones are--well, what I am. Fond of
you as we both are, you can help us."

Milly tried to be inspired. "Does it come back then to my asking her
straight?"

At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. "Oh if you've so many
reasons not--!"

"I've not so many," Milly smiled--"but I've one. If I break out so
suddenly on my knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken
before?"

Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. "Why should you care what she makes? You
may have only been decently discreet."

"Ah I HAVE been," the girl made haste to say.

"Besides," her friend went on, "I suggested to you, through Susan, your
line."

"Yes, that reason's a reason for ME."

"And for ME," Mrs. Lowder insisted. "She's not therefore so stupid as
not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that
I had asked you to say nothing."

"And may I tell her that you've asked me now to speak?"

Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up.
"You can't do it without--?"

Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. "I'll do
what I can if you'll kindly tell me one thing more." She faltered a
little--it was so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have been
writing to her?"

"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to know!" Mrs. Lowder was at
last impatient. "Push in for yourself and I dare say she'll tell you."

Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. "It will be
pushing in," she continued to smile, "for YOU." She allowed her
companion, however, no time to take this up. "The point will be that if
he HAS been writing she may have answered."

"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"

"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple," Milly said, "that
if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me."

"Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?"

The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural Mrs. Lowder
herself should so fail of subtlety. "It will make the difference that
he'll have written her in reply that he knows me. And that, in turn,"
our young woman explained, "will give an oddity to my own silence."

"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The
only oddity," Aunt Maud lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in HER
not having spoken."

"Ah there we are!" said Milly.

And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend.
"Then it HAS troubled you?"

But the enquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with fine
inconsequence to her face. "Not really the least little bit!" And,
quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the point,
to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap how much
she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the intervention of still
other things. Mrs. Lowder was in the first place already beforehand,
already affected as by the sudden vision of her having herself pushed
too far. Milly could never judge from her face of her uppermost
motive--it was so little, in its hard smooth sheen, that kind of human
countenance. She looked hard when she spoke fair; the only thing was
that when she spoke hard she didn't likewise look soft. Something, none
the less, had arisen in her now--a full appreciable tide, entering by
the rupture of some bar. She announced that if what she had asked was to
prove in the least a bore her young friend was not to dream of it;
making her young friend at the same time, by the change in her tone,
dream on the spot more profusely. She spoke, with a belated light, Milly
could apprehend--she could always apprehend--from pity; and the result
of that perception, for the girl, was singular: it proved to her as
quickly that Kate, keeping her secret, had been straight with her. From
Kate distinctly then, as to why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew
nothing, and was thereby simply putting in evidence the fine side of her
own character. This fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by
a kindled preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest
than her own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must
have been thinking round the case much more than she had supposed; and
this remark could affect the girl as quickly and as sharply as any other
form of the charge of weakness. It was what every one, if she didn't
look out, would soon be saying--"There's something the matter with you!"
What one was therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish was
that there was nothing at all. "I shall like to help you; I shall like,
so far as that goes, to help Kate herself," she made such haste as she
could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the
room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a
little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to
begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity this
friend was giving them--referring it, however, so far as words went, to
the other friend and breaking off with an amused: "How tremendously
Susie must be beautifying!"

It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her
allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure
that must signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my dear. We
shall after all soon enough see."

"If he HAS come back we shall certainly see," Milly after a moment
replied; "for he'll probably feel that he can't quite civilly not come
to see me. Then THERE," she remarked, "we shall be. It wouldn't then,
you see, come through Kate at all--it would come through him. Except,"
she wound up with a smile, "that he won't find me."

She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her guest, in spite
of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so floated her
on that she couldn't stop--by very much the same trick it had played her
with her doctor. "Shall you run away from him?"

She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. "Then," she
went on, "you'll deal with Kate directly."

"Shall you run away from HER?" Mrs. Lowder profoundly enquired, while
they became aware of Susie's return through the room, opening out behind
them, in which they had dined.

This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with it,
everything she felt in the connexion rose to her lips for a question
that, even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep colourless.
"Is it your own belief that he IS with her?"

Aunt Maud took it in--took in, that is, everything of the tone that she
just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds was but to make
their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and was
asking if Kate had gone--an enquiry at once answered by this young
lady's reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where,
looking at them, she had paused--producing thus on Aunt Maud's part
almost too impressive a "Hush!" Mrs. Lowder indeed without loss of time
smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but Milly's words
to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece directly, struck our
young woman as already recoiling on herself. Directness, however evaded,
would be, fully, for HER; nothing in fact would ever have been for her
so direct as the evasion. Kate had remained in the window, very handsome
and upright, the outer dark framing in a highly favourable way her
summery simplicities and lightnesses of dress. Milly had, given the
relation of space, no real fear she had heard their talk; only she
hovered there as with conscious eyes and some added advantage. Then
indeed, with small delay, her friend sufficiently saw. The conscious
eyes, the added advantage were but those she had now always at
command--those proper to the person Milly knew as known to Merton
Densher. It was for several seconds again as if the TOTAL of her
identity had been that of the person known to him--a determination
having for result another sharpness of its own. Kate had positively but
to be there just as she was to tell her he had come back. It seemed to
pass between them in fine without a word that he was in London, that he
was perhaps only round the corner; and surely therefore no dealing of
Milly's with her would yet have been so direct.



Book Fifth, Chapter 6


It was doubtless because this queer form of directness had in itself,
for the hour, seemed so sufficient that Milly was afterwards aware of
having really, all the while--during the strange indescribable session
before the return of their companions--done nothing to intensify it. If
she was most aware only afterwards, under the long and discurtained
ordeal of the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really, till their
evening's end came, ceased after a little to miss anything from their
ostensible comfort. What was behind showed but in gleams and glimpses;
what was in front never at all confessed to not holding the stage. Three
minutes hadn't passed before Milly quite knew she should have done
nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew it moreover by much the
same light that had acted for her with that lady and with Sir Luke
Strett. It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a
current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery,
generosity--she scarce could say which--by others; that not she but the
current acted, and that somebody else always was the keeper of the lock
or the dam. Kate for example had but to open the flood-gate: the current
moved in its mass--the current, as it had been, of her doing as Kate
wanted. What, somehow, in the most extraordinary way in the world, HAD
Kate wanted but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had ever
been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held her breath with the
appreciation of it. If she hadn't been sure her companion would have had
nothing, from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she would almost
have seen the admirable creature "cutting in" to anticipate a danger.
This fantasy indeed, while they sat together, dropped after a little;
even if only because other fantasies multiplied and clustered, making
fairly, for our young woman, the buoyant medium in which her friend
talked and moved. They sat together, I say, but Kate moved as much as
she talked; she figured there, restless and charming, just perhaps a
shade perfunctory, repeatedly quitting her place, taking slowly, to and
fro, in the trailing folds of her light dress, the length of the
room--almost avowedly performing for the pleasure of her hostess.

Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that she and her niece, as
allies, could practically conquer the world; but though it was a speech
about which there had even then been a vague grand glamour the girl read
into it at present more of an approach to a meaning. Kate, for that
matter, by herself, could conquer anything, and SHE, Milly Theale, was
probably concerned with the "world" only as the small scrap of it that
most impinged on her and that was therefore first to be dealt with. On
this basis of being dealt with she would doubtless herself do her share
of the conquering: she would have something to supply, Kate something to
take--each of them thus, to that tune, something for squaring with Aunt
Maud's ideal. This in short was what it came to now--that the occasion,
in the quiet late lamplight, had the quality of a rough rehearsal of the
possible big drama. Milly knew herself dealt with--handsomely,
completely: she surrendered to the knowledge, for so it was, she felt,
that she supplied her helpful force. And what Kate had to take Kate took
as freely and to all appearance as gratefully; accepting afresh, with
each of her long, slow walks, the relation between them so established
and consecrating her companion's surrender simply by the interest she
gave it. The interest to Milly herself we naturally mean; the interest
to Kate Milly felt as probably inferior. It easily and largely came for
their present talk, for the quick flight of the hour before the breach
of the spell--it all came, when considered, from the circumstance, not
in the least abnormal, that the handsome girl was in extraordinary
"form." Milly remembered her having said that she was at her best late
at night; remembered it by its having, with its fine assurance, made her
wonder when SHE was at her best and how happy people must be who had
such a fixed time. She had no time at all; she was never at her
best--unless indeed it were exactly, as now, in listening, watching,
admiring, collapsing. If Kate moreover, quite mercilessly, had never
been so good, the beauty and the marvel of it was that she had never
really been so frank: being a person of such a calibre, as Milly would
have said, that, even while "dealing" with you and thereby, as it were,
picking her steps, she could let herself go, could, in irony, in
confidence, in extravagance, tell you things she had never told before.
That was the impression--that she was telling things, and quite
conceivably for her own relief as well; almost as if the errors of
vision, the mistakes of proportion, the residuary innocence of spirit
still to be remedied on the part of her auditor, had their moments of
proving too much for her nerves. She went at them just now, these
sources of irritation, with an amused energy that it would have been
open to Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called
for--as to this the other was distinct--by the way that in certain
connexions the American mind broke down. It seemed at least--the
American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly--not to
understand English society without a separate confrontation with ALL the
cases. It couldn't proceed by--there was some technical term she lacked
until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then, differently,
instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up and introduced
to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all round it, whether for
the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still more (as appeared to
this critic) disproportionate shock. It might, the monster, Kate
conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less developed and
therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides be a strange and
dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to abase the proud,
to scandalise the good; but if one had to live with it one must, not to
be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually in short to-night
what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.

She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster Gate and everything
it contained; she gave away, hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued to
note, Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt Maud's complacencies;
she gave herself away most of all, and it was naturally what most
contributed to her candour. She didn't speak to her friend once more, in
Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale the skies; she spoke, by her
bright perverse preference on this occasion, of the need, in the first
place, of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might have been a lesson,
for our young American, in the art of seeing things as they were--a
lesson so various and so sustained that the pupil had, as we have shown,
but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore was that it could
serve its purpose while explicitly disavowing every personal bias. It
wasn't that she disliked Aunt Maud, who was everything she had on other
occasions declared; but the dear woman, ineffaceably stamped by
inscrutable nature and a dreadful art, wasn't--how COULD she be?--what
she wasn't. She wasn't any one. She wasn't anything. She wasn't
anywhere. Milly mustn't think it--one couldn't, as a good friend, let
her. Those hours at Matcham were inesperees, were pure manna from
heaven; or if not wholly that perhaps, with humbugging old Lord Mark as
a backer, were vain as a ground for hopes and calculations. Lord Mark
was very well, but he wasn't THE cleverest creature in England, and even
if he had been he still wouldn't have been the most obliging. He weighed
it out in ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting for
what the other would put down.

"She has put down YOU," said Milly, attached to the subject still; "and
I think what you mean is that, on the counter, she still keeps hold of
you."

"Lest"--Kate took it up--"he should suddenly grab me and run? Oh as he
isn't ready to run he's much less ready, naturally, to grab. I
AM--you're so far right as that--on the counter, when I'm not in the
shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially
whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as
properly, of my aunt's protection." Lord Mark was substantially what she
had begun with as soon as they were alone; the impression was even yet
with Milly of her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as a
topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left
in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at
first for her companion. The immediate strange effect had been that of
her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi--which, successfully, she
so found. She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the
course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to
speak, broken it in. "The bore is that if she wants him so much--wants
him, heaven forgive her! for ME--he has put us all out, since your
arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean somebody else than you."

Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head. "Then I
haven't made out who it is. If I'm any part of his alternative he had
better stop where he is."

"Truly, truly?--always, always?"

Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety. "Would you like me to
swear?"

Kate appeared for a moment--though that was doubtless but gaiety too--to
think. "Haven't we been swearing enough?"

"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the
equivalent. At any rate there it is. 'Truly, truly' as you say--'always,
always.' So I'm not in the way."

"Thanks," said Kate--"but that doesn't help me."

"Oh it's as simplifying for HIM that I speak of it."

"The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that
it's particularly hard to simplify for him. That's exactly of course
what Aunt Maud has been trying. He won't," Kate firmly continued, "make
up his mind about me."

"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."

Her friend met it in perfection. "One's DOING that--one IS. But one
remains all the same but one of his ideas."

"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if you come out in the end
as the best of them. What's a man," she pursued, "especially an
ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?"

"No doubt. The more the merrier." And Kate looked at her grandly. "One
can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it."

All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the alibi.
The splendour, the grandeur were for Milly the bold ironic spirit behind
it, so interesting too in itself. What, further, was not less
interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate
confined her point to the difficulties, so far as SHE was concerned,
raised only by Lord Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste
might present; which circumstance again played its little part. She was
doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no way
committed to the other person, and her moreover talking of Lord Mark as
not young and not true were only the signs of her clear
self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard but scarce
the less graceful extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much her
consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not
wishing sufficiently to give it. There was something on it all, as well,
that Milly still found occasion to say. "If your aunt has been, as you
tell me, put out by me, I feel she has remained remarkably kind."

"Oh but she has--whatever might have happened in that respect--plenty of
use for you! You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You
don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat. You can do
anything--you can do, I mean, lots that WE can't. You're an outsider,
independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to
tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in that direction, went
further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary
words. "We're of no use to you--it's decent to tell you. You'd be of use
to us, but that's a different matter. My honest advice to you would
be--" she went indeed all lengths--"to drop us while you can. It would
be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully better you can do. We've not
really done for you the least thing worth speaking of--nothing you
mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore you're under no
obligation. You won't want us next year; we shall only continue to want
YOU. But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay too dreadfully
for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let you in. She has the best conscience
in the world; she's enchanted with what she has done; but you shouldn't
take your people from HER. It has been quite awful to see you do it."

Milly tried to be amused, so as not--it was too absurd--to be fairly
frightened. Strange enough indeed--if not natural enough--that, late at
night thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away, a want of
confidence should possess her. She recalled, with all the rest of it,
the next day, piecing things together in the dawn, that she had felt
herself alone with a creature who paced like a panther. That was a
violent image, but it made her a little less ashamed of having been
scared. For all her scare, none the less, she had now the sense to find
words. "And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had YOU."

It had been at this point, however, that Kate flickered highest. "Oh you
may very well loathe me yet!"

Really at last, thus, it had been too much; as, with her own least
feeble flare, after a wondering watch, Milly had shown. She hadn't
cared; she had too much wanted to know; and, though a small solemnity of
remonstrance, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to
figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say
such things to me?"

This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a
happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before
her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly
hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often
touched by her. "Because you're a dove." With which she felt herself
ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or
as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an
accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one
were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came
to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that this form, this
cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said. It
was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she found herself
accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the
name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met
revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had
walked. THAT was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh WASN'T
she?--it echoed within her as she became aware of the sound, outside, of
the return of their friends. There was, the next thing, little enough
doubt about it after Aunt Maud had been two minutes in the room. She had
come up, Mrs. Lowder, with Susan--which she needn't have done, at that
hour, instead of letting Kate come down to her; so that Milly could be
quite sure it was to catch hold, in some way, of the loose end they had
left. Well, the way she did catch was simply to make the point that it
didn't now in the least matter. She had mounted the stairs for this, and
she had her moment again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the
spot, as the latter at the time noted, gave Susan Shepherd unwonted
opportunities. Kate was in other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend,
listening with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's impression of
the scene they had just quitted. It was in the tone of the fondest
indulgence--almost, really, that of dove cooing to dove--that Mrs.
Lowder expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone beautifully. Her
"all" had an ample benevolence; it soothed and simplified; she spoke as
if it were the two young women, not she and her comrade, who had been
facing the town together. But Milly's answer had prepared itself while
Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the reasons that
would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while she was about
it, as earnest, as candid. "I don't THINK, dear lady, he's here."

It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a
dove: that was recorded in the long look of deep criticism, a look
without a word, that Mrs. Lowder poured forth. And the word, presently,
bettered it still. "Oh you exquisite thing!" The luscious innuendo of
it, almost startling, lingered in the room, after the visitors had gone,
like an oversweet fragrance. But left alone with Mrs. Stringham Milly
continued to breathe it: she studied again the dovelike and so set her
companion to mere rich reporting that she averted all enquiry into her
own case.

That, with the new day, was once more her law--though she saw before
her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to
decide. She should have to be clear as to how a dove WOULD act. She
settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting
her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to
reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at
it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at her
feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving her to
make the best of it. "Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to see me
at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told, please,
deceptively, that I'm at home, and you, as my representative, when he
comes up, are to see him instead. He'll like that, this time, better. So
do be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more explanation, and the
mention, above all, of the fact that the visitor was the greatest of
doctors; yet when once the key had been offered Susie slipped it on her
bunch, and her young friend could again feel her lovely imagination
operate. It operated in truth very much as Mrs. Lowder's, at the last,
had done the night before: it made the air heavy once more with the
extravagance of assent. It might, afresh, almost have frightened our
young woman to see how people rushed to meet her: HAD she then so little
time to live that the road must always be spared her? It was as if they
were helping her to take it out on the spot. Susie--she couldn't deny,
and didn't pretend to--might, of a truth, on HER side, have treated such
news as a flash merely lurid; as to which, to do Susie justice, the pain
of it was all there. But, none the less, the margin always allowed her
young friend was all there as well; and the proposal now made her--what
was it in short but Byzantine? The vision of Milly's perception of the
propriety of the matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far as
her attitude was concerned, any surprise and any shock; so that she only
desired, the next thing, perfectly to possess the facts. Milly could
easily speak, on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing of
such another as that she had felt herself menaced. The great fact, in
fine, was that she KNEW him to desire just now, more than anything else,
to meet, quite apart, some one interested in her. Who therefore so
interested as her faithful Susan? The only other circumstance that, by
the time she had quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning
was the circumstance of her having at first intended to keep quiet. She
had originally best seen herself as sweetly secretive. As to that she
had changed, and her present request was the result. She didn't say why
she had changed, but she trusted her faithful Susan. Their visitor would
trust her not less, and she herself would adore their visitor. Moreover
he wouldn't--the girl felt sure--tell her anything dreadful. The worst
would be that he was in love and that he needed a confidant to work it.
And now she was going to the National Gallery.



Book Fifth, Chapter 7


The idea of the National Gallery had been with her from the moment of
her hearing from Sir Luke Strett about his hour of coming. It had been
in her mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the places that
had seemed at home one of the attractions of Europe and one of its
highest aids to culture, but that--the old story--the typical frivolous
always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had had perfectly,
at those whimsical moments on the Brunig, the half-shamed sense of
turning her back on such opportunities for real improvement as had
figured to her, from of old, in connexion with the continental tour,
under the general head of "pictures and things"; and at last she knew
for what she had done so. The plea had been explicit--she had done so
for life as opposed to learning; the upshot of which had been that life
was now beautifully provided for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
into the many-coloured stream of history for which of late Kate Croy had
helped her to find time, there were possible great chances she had
neglected, possible great moments she should, save for to-day, have all
but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake one or two of them
among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the
hour, and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith knew itself
justified. It was the air she wanted and the world she would now
exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but
slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say "If I
could lose myself HERE!" There were people, people in plenty, but,
admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal
question; but she had blissfully left it outside, and the nearest it
came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into view was when
she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists.
Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at once
impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to stick and
stick.

Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched the
lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be thought by
others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should appear to regard
them as the pride of the place. She would have liked to talk to them, to
get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and was deterred but by the
fact that she didn't quite see herself as purchasing imitations and yet
feared she might excite the expectation of purchase. She really knew
before long that what held her was the mere refuge, that something
within her was after all too weak for the Turners and Titians. They
joined hands about her in a circle too vast, though a circle that a year
before she would only have desired to trace. They were truly for the
larger, not for the smaller life, the life of which the actual pitch,
for example, was an interest, the interest of compassion, in misguided
efforts. She marked absurdly her little stations, blinking, in her
shrinkage of curiosity, at the glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on
vistas and approaches, so that she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The
vistas and approaches drew her in this way from room to room, and she
had been through many parts of the show, as she supposed, when she sat
down to rest. There were chairs in scant clusters, places from which one
could gaze. Milly indeed at present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere
on the appearance, first, that she couldn't quite, after all, have
accounted to an examiner for the order of her "schools," and then on
that of her being more tired than she had meant, in spite of her having
been so much less intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added,
other occupation as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested
largely, in her vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they
attached themselves in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising
stream of her compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the
great museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also
with that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and
all, and recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakeable, of her
country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or know
her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her, the
sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough." It
came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she didn't
seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of London,
who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She could wonder
if they would be different should she go back with this glamour
attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that, whether she
should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any rate, in all the
vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even at last the sense
of taking a mean advantage.

There was a finer instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a
mother and daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a
comment apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some
object on the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object,
but her face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken
and in whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition.
Recognition, for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she KNEW
the three, generically, as easily as a school-boy with a crib in his lap
would know the answer in class; she felt, like the school-boy, guilty
enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
been able to say where they lived, and also how, had the place and the
way been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in
imagination, over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home,
eternally named, with all the honours and placidities, but eternally
unseen and existing only as some one who could be financially heard
from. The mother, the puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no
relation to her apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically
clean and dry; her companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised
by fatigue; and the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of
coloured cloth surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were
doubtless conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only
thinkable as one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the
mother who had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which
Milly took the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The
three pair of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an
instant rested, with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of the
daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to them
while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought to
have known her, that there was something between them they might have
beautifully put together. But she had lost THEM also--they were cold;
they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking at.
The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in fact
among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.

This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as she
could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead with
his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to give
Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that his
face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only have
been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified; and indeed
"the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant contrast to the
American--was what had had the arresting power. This arresting power, at
the same time--and that was the marvel--had already sharpened almost to
pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head with detachment she
felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it. It was Merton Densher's own,
and he was standing there, standing long enough unconscious for her to
fix him and then hesitate. These successions were swift, so that she
could still ask herself in freedom if she had best let him see her. She
could still reply to this that she shouldn't like him to catch her in
the effort to prevent it; and she might further have decided that he was
too preoccupied to see anything had not a perception intervened that
surpassed the first in violence. She was unable to think afterwards how
long she had looked at him before knowing herself as otherwise looked
at; all she was coherently to put together was that she had had a second
recognition without his having noticed her. The source of this latter
shock was nobody less than Kate Croy--Kate Croy who was suddenly also in
the line of vision and whose eyes met her eyes at their next movement.
Kate was but two yards off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone. Kate's face
specifically said so, for after a stare as blank at first as Milly's it
broke into a far smile. That was what, wonderfully--in addition to the
marvel of their meeting--passed from her for Milly; the instant
reduction to easy terms of the fact of their being there, the two young
women, together. It was perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully felt
the connexion between this touch and her already established conviction
that Kate was a prodigious person; yet on the spot she none the less, in
a degree, knew herself handled and again, as she had been the night
before, dealt with--absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure.
A minute in fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made her
provisionally take everything as natural. The provisional was just the
charm--acquiring that character from one moment to the other; it
represented happily so much that Kate would explain on the very first
chance. This left moreover--and that was the greatest wonder--all due
margin for amusement at the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of
their turning up in such a place on the very heels of their having
separated without allusion to it. The handsome girl was thus literally
in control of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim
with a high flush or a vivid blush--one didn't distinguish the
embarrassment from the joy--"Why Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why Miss
Theale: what luck!"

Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him too, on Kate's part,
something wonderful and unspoken was determinant; and this although,
distinctly, his companion had no more looked at him with a hint than he
had looked at her with a question. He had looked and was looking only at
Milly herself, ever so pleasantly and considerately--she scarce knew
what to call it; but without prejudice to her consciousness, all the
same, that women got out of predicaments better than men. The
predicament of course wasn't definite nor phraseable--and the way they
let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to our young woman as a
characteristic triumph of the civilised state; but she took it for
granted, insistently, with a small private flare of passion, because the
one thing she could think of to do for him was to show him how she eased
him off. She would really, tired and nervous, have been much
disconcerted if the opportunity in question hadn't saved her. It was
what had saved her most, what had made her, after the first few seconds,
almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had made her only ask
herself what their friend would like of her. That he was at the end of
three minutes, without the least complicated reference, so smoothly
"their" friend was just the effect of their all being sublimely
civilised. The flash in which he saw this was, for Milly, fairly
inspiring--to that degree in fact that she was even now, on such a
plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt, a big dose of
inspiration to treat as not funny--or at least as not unpleasant--the
anomaly, for Kate, that SHE knew their gentleman, and for herself, that
Kate was spending the morning with him; but everything continued to make
for this after Milly had tasted of her draught. She was to wonder in
subsequent reflexion what in the world they had actually said, since
they had made such a success of what they didn't say; the sweetness of
the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success assured. What
depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity to her, and she
perhaps but invented the image of his need as a short cut to
accommodation. Whatever the facts, their perfect manners, all round, saw
them through. The finest part of Milly's own inspiration, it may further
be mentioned, was the quick perception that what would be of most
service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She had long been
conscious with shame for her thin blood, or at least for her poor
economy, of her unused margin as an American girl--closely indeed as in
English air the text might appear to cover the page. She still had
reserves of spontaneity, if not of comicality; so that all this cash in
hand could now find employment. She became as spontaneous as possible
and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr. Densher, after
his travels, to find her. She said things in the air, and yet flattered
herself that she struck him as saying them not in the tone of agitation
but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was
beautifully discounted, and she had now a sufficient view of how much it
might accordingly help her.

The help was fairly rendered before they left the place; when her
friends presently accepted her invitation to adjourn with her to
luncheon at her hotel it was in Fifth Avenue that the meal might have
waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but Milly was at present
taking her; and if Mr. Densher had been he had at least never had to
come so fast. She proposed it as the natural thing--proposed it as the
American girl; and she saw herself quickly justified by the pace at
which she was followed. The beauty of the case was that to do it all she
had only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said in its fine first
smile "Oh yes, our look's queer--but give me time"; and the American
girl could give time as nobody else could. What Milly thus gave she
therefore made them take--even if, as they might surmise, it was rather
more than they wanted. In the porch of the museum she expressed her
preference for a four-wheeler; they would take their course in that
guise precisely to multiply the minutes. She was more than ever
justified by the positive charm that her spirit imparted even to their
use of this conveyance; and she touched her highest point--that is
certainly for herself--as she ushered her companions into the presence
of Susie. Susie was there with luncheon as well as with her return in
prospect; and nothing could now have filled her own consciousness more
to the brim than to see this good friend take in how little she was
abjectly anxious. The cup itself actually offered to this good friend
might in truth well be startling, for it was composed beyond question of
ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly looking at her as if to
know whether she had brought in guests to hear Sir Luke Strett's report.
Well, it was better her companion should have too much than too little
to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as they said at home, for
the interest of the thing; and interest truly sat in her eyes. Milly was
none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a little sorry for her; she could
of necessity extract from the odd scene so comparatively little of a
soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher suddenly popping up, but she saw
nothing else that had happened. She saw in the same way her young friend
indifferent to her young friend's doom, and she lacked what would
explain it. The only thing to keep her in patience was the way, after
luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said, made up to her. This was
actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly herself in patience. It
had in fact for our young woman a positive beauty--was so marked as a
deviation from the handsome girl's previous courses. Susie had been a
bore to the handsome girl, and the change was now suggestive. The two
sat together, after they had risen from table, in the apartment in which
they had lunched, making it thus easy for the other guest and his
entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for the latter personage,
was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part, like a prayer to be
relieved. If she honestly liked better to be "thrown with" Susan
Shepherd than with their other friend, why that said practically
everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she had gone out with
him for the morning, but it said, as one thought, about as much as she
could say to his face.

Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love and
Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it as
a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the front,
the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it didn't, so
treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she could herself
supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her great question,
the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all that, as she
called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of him would be
different from the impression received in New York. That had held her
from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her company through
their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a quarter of an
hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at this crisis that
no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on this point, was to
reach her; she was to see her question itself simply go to pieces. She
couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she didn't know nor care
if SHE were: these things had ceased to matter in the light of the only
thing she did know. This was that she liked him, as she put it to
herself, as much as ever; and if that were to amount to liking a new
person the amusement would be but the greater. She had thought him at
first very quiet, in spite of his recovery from his original confusion;
though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet perceived, had not been
due to such vagueness on the subject of her reintensified identity as
the probable sight, over there, of many thousands of her kind would
sufficiently have justified. No, he was quiet, inevitably, for the first
half of the time, because Milly's own lively line--the line of
spontaneity--made everything else relative; and because too, so far as
Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely in the air among them that
the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards, when they had got a little
more used, as it were, to each other's separate felicity, he had begun
to talk more, clearly bethinking himself at a given moment of what HIS
natural lively line would be. It would be to take for granted she must
wish to hear of the States, and to give her in its order everything he
had seen and done there. He abounded, of a sudden--he almost insisted;
he returned, after breaks, to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the
more odd as he gave no clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went,
or to what he hadn't. He simply drenched her with his sociable
story--especially during the time they were away from the others. She
had stopped then being American--all to let him be English; a permission
of which he took, she could feel, both immense and unconscious
advantage. She had really never cared less for the States than at this
moment; but that had nothing to do with the matter. It would have been
the occasion of her life to learn about them, for nothing could put him
off, and he ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself.
It might have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all
these adventures was her doing just what she did then.

It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question
complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there
with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently
saw--that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular
desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like every
one else, simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on already as to
manner--fallen into line with every one else; and if his spirits verily
HAD gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself lighting on
the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he didn't Milly knew
she should still like him--there was no alternative to that; but her
heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how much his view of
her was destined to have in common with--as she now sighed over it--THE
view. She could have dreamed of his not having THE view, of his having
something or other, if need be quite viewless, of his own; but he might
have what he could with least trouble, and THE view wouldn't be after
all a positive bar to her seeing him. The defect of it in general--if
she might so ungraciously criticise--was that, by its sweet
universality, it made relations rather prosaically a matter of course.
It anticipated and superseded the--likewise sweet--operation of real
affinities. It was this that was doubtless marked in her power to keep
him now--this and her glassy lustre of attention to his pleasantness
about the scenery in the Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring
her success in detaining him by Kate's success in "standing" Susan. It
wouldn't be, if she could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break
down. Such at least was one of the forms of the girl's inward tension;
but beneath even this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had
left at home on going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still, was
more sharply and actively, there. What had been at the top of her mind
about it and then been violently pushed down--this quantity was again
working up. As soon as their friends should go Susie would break out,
and what she would break out upon wouldn't be--interested in that
gentleman as she had more than once shown herself--the personal fact of
Mr. Densher. Milly had found in her face at luncheon a feverish glitter,
and it told what she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's
personal facts. Mr. Densher had risen before her only to find his proper
place in her imagination already of a sudden occupied. His personal fact
failed, so far as she was concerned, to BE personal, and her companion
noticed the failure. This could only mean that she was full to the brim
of Sir Luke Strett and of what she had had from him. What HAD she had
from him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do
well to know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's
glitter. It was therefore on the whole because Densher's young hostess
was divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling
to the Rockies.

END OF VOLUME 1 of THE WINGS OF THE DOVE




VOLUME 2



Book Sixth, Chapter 1


"I say, you know, Kate--you DID stay!" had been Merton Densher's
punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out to
have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action. But
the amount of light men DID need!--Kate could have been eloquent at this
moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck him as most
distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his absence and
having been now half the morning together, it behooved them to face
without delay the question of handling their immediate future. That it
would require some handling, that they should still have to deal, deal
in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the great matter
he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed consciousness of
their personal need of each other. This need had had twenty minutes, the
afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and the time was fully
accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He had arrived at
Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the moment he landed,
and she had quickly decided to meet him at the station, whatever
publicity might attend such an act. When he had praised her for it on
alighting from his train she had answered frankly enough that such
things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care to-day who saw her,
and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow, inevitably, she should
have time to think and then, as inevitably, would become a baser
creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It was none the less for
to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed their next meeting,
keeping in mind for the present a particular obligation to show at
Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given, with imprecations, her
reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise to Aunt Maud; but she
had been liberal enough on the spot and had suggested the National
Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea that had ripened in
expectancy. They might be seen there too, but nobody would know them;
just as, for that matter, now, in the refreshment-room to which they had
adjourned, they would incur the notice but, at the worst, of the
unacquainted. They would "have something" there for the facility it
would give. Thus had it already come up for them again that they had no
place of convenience.

He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit, the
truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that once at
his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop there,
wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able
to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a deficiency of
what would be called, even at their advanced stage, respect for her:
that again was all that was clear except the further fact that it was
maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang
or two, but none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform
and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the
disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow--he
scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly
an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to
make happiness less. They had met again for happiness, and he distinctly
felt, during his most lucid moment or two, how he must keep watch on
anything that really menaced that boon. If Kate had consented to drive
away with him and alight at his house there would probably enough have
occurred for them, at the foot of his steps, one of those strange
instants between man and woman that blow upon the red spark, the spark
of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion. She would have shaken
her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of coming in; and he,
though doing all justice to her refusal, would have yet felt his eyes
reach further into her own than a possible word at such a time could
reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread of the shadow, of
an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case that the scant
minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she did in spite of
everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so well how she could
deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask him, to beseech him,
and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now and henceforth, to
treat them in her own way.

She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early convenience,
one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art that his fully
seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after he left her. His
absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that
his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his
ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had
felt all the force of his particular necessity. He hadn't in other words
at any point doubted he was on his way to say to her that really their
mistake must end. Their mistake was to have believed that they COULD
hold out--hold out, that is, not against Aunt Maud, but against an
impatience that, prolonged and exasperated, made a man ill. He had known
more than ever, on their separating in the court of the station, how ill
a man, and even a woman, could feel from such a cause; but he struck
himself as also knowing that he had already suffered Kate to begin
finely to apply antidotes and remedies and subtle sedatives. It had a
vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the names of things, the verbal
terms of intercourse, were, compared with love itself, horribly vulgar;
but it was as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself
"put off," though it would take him of course a day or two to see. His
letters from the States had pleased whom it concerned, though not so
much as he had meant they should; and he should be paid according to
agreement and would now take up his money. It wasn't in truth very much
to take up, so that he hadn't in the least come back flourishing a
chequebook; that new motive for bringing his mistress to terms he
couldn't therefore pretend to produce. The ideal certainty would have
been to be able to present a change of prospect as a warrant for the
change of philosophy, and without it he should have to make shift but
with the pretext of the lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many
weeks after all, she might always of course say--couldn't at any rate
have failed to do something for him; and that consideration it was that
had just now tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what
it had done personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a
splendour that almost scared him even in their small corner of the room
at Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden master
in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His final sense
was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one the
impossible.

She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as their
situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift for
closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of unrest
even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent interest in
the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims. They had met
there in order not to meet in the streets and not again, with an equal
want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not again, either,
in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and tacitly agree, would
have had too much of the taste of their old frustrations. The present
taste, the taste that morning in the pictured halls, had been a
variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of an hour fully
known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him for their
awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She might be as
nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to touch her in the
States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions as those she
herself BELIEVED it enough to appease him. She couldn't pretend she
believed he would believe it enough to render her a like service. It
wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him it wasn't.
That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have brought her
to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on the spot:
"NOW am I to understand you that you consider this sort of thing can go
on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply that to have him
with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so still, under her
grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning interval, was a
sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel about; but that
would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of her subtlety. She
knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of which indeed he scarce
could have said how beautifully he mightn't once more have named it and
urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment, blurred, as it were, the
accord. They had soon seated themselves for better talk, and so they had
remained a while, intimate and superficial. The immediate things to say
had been many, for they hadn't exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon
them freely now, and Kate appeared quite to forget--which was
prodigiously becoming to her--to look about for surprises. He was to try
afterwards, and try in vain, to remember what speech or what silence of
his own, what natural sign of the eyes or accidental touch of the hand,
had precipitated for her, in the midst of this, a sudden different
impulse. She had got up, with inconsequence, as if to break the charm,
though he wasn't aware of what he had done at the moment to make the
charm a danger. She had patched it up agreeably enough the next minute
by some odd remark about some picture, to which he hadn't so much as
replied; it being quite independently of this that he had himself
exclaimed on the dreadful closeness of the rooms. He had observed that
they must go out again to breathe; and it was as if their common
consciousness, while they passed into another part, was that of persons
who, infinitely engaged together, had been startled and were trying to
look natural. It was probably while they were so occupied--as the young
man subsequently reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New
York friend. He thought of her for some reason as little, though she was
of about Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in
his mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.

What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process by
which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was greater
than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a new and
amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over there, and
that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had answered that he
must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event, however, had not
returned to that, and he had of course, with so many things to find out
about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's individual history
was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which, moreover, he was seeing
but too many little Miss Theales. They even went so far as to impose
themselves as one of the groups of social phenomena that fell into the
scheme of his public letters. For this group in especial perhaps--the
irrepressible, the supereminent young persons--his best pen was ready.
Thus it was that there could come back to him in London, an hour or two
after their luncheon with the American pair, the sense of a situation
for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared him. Possibly indeed as marked as
this was his recovered perception that preparations, of more than one
kind, had been exactly what, both yesterday and to-day, he felt her as
having in hand. That appearance in fact, if he dwelt on it, so
ministered to apprehension as to require some brushing away. He shook
off the suspicion to some extent, on their separating first from their
hostesses and then from each other, by the aid of a long and rather
aimless walk. He was to go to the office later, but he had the next two
or three hours, and he gave himself as a pretext that he had eaten much
too much. After Kate had asked him to put her into a cab--which, as an
announced, a resumed policy on her part, he found himself
deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and looked vaguely forth at
his London. There was always doubtless a moment for the absentee
recaptured--THE moment, that of the reflux of the first emotion--at
which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His full parenthesis was
closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general
text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great
grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being
"fine." The grey, however, was more or less the blur of a point of view
not yet quite seized again; and there would be colour enough to come
out. He was back, flatly enough, but back to possibilities and
prospects, and the ground he now somewhat sightlessly covered was the
act of renewed possession.

He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly, from
the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it added--and he
might positively have occupied the same bench--various troubled fancies
folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he really wanted than
Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple
of days. He had practically not pressed her as to what most concerned
them; it had seemed so to concern them during these first hours but to
hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate was
palpable, that there were at present more things rather than fewer
between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be part of the
lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not meanwhile certainly
what most made him roam--the missing explanations weren't. That was what
she had so often said before, and always with the effect of suddenly
breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab." Their previous
encounters, the times when they had reached in their stroll the south
side of the park, had had a way of winding up with this special
irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them, for he would
generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in with her. What
did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question he had had
occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since, when it came
to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the sense of union:
its importance was less from the particular loss than as a kind of
irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under providence,
had been great from the first, so far as joining him was concerned; and
he was critical only because it had been still greater, even from the
first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the question to her
again that afternoon, on the repetition of her appeal--had asked her
once more what she supposed he wished to do. He recalled, on his bench
in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy, funny and pretty, with which
she had answered; recalled the moment itself, while the usual hansom
charged them, during which he felt himself, disappointed as he was,
grimacing back at the superiority of her very "humour," in its added
grace of gaiety, to the celebrated solemn American. Their fresh
appointment had been at all events by that time made, and he should see
what her choice in respect to it--a surprise as well as a relief--would
do toward really simplifying. It meant either new help or new hindrance,
though it took them at least out of the streets. And her naming this
privilege had naturally made him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.

"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And she
had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see HER, and she'll leave
you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of betrayed fear,
in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite the contrary,
and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it will be the
end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask to-night," Kate
had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my cleverness, I assure
you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."

He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
Milly, it was sensible, WAS somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate, scarce
enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at the
present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if not
the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she weren't
a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden, after he
had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had meant. The
charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out that--and
would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These might take
place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove them still
better from the streets. THAT was an explanation which did hang
together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that their
next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet this fact
in turn would be accounted for by the need of more preliminaries. One of
the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday at Lancaster Gate
would be a further view of that propriety.



Book Sixth, Chapter 2


It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of a
quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with the
general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd, they
fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One couldn't say
to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet, please, whenever
you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to help us to keep it
secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak to Aunt Maud--it
would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to: Kate had embraced
all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate embraced altogether
was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he perhaps struck
himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece than as receiving
it in a steady light. He had always felt, however, that the more he
asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he imaged it, to hand
out. He had said to her more than once even before his absence: "You
keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when we're married
you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied that she rejoiced
in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and the domestic
arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to prevail. The
supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a truth, not
altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his immediate
requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted questions the
questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her patience. And
they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for instance in his
taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He
frankly brought out what he had ventured to think possible. "If we can't
meet here and we've really exhausted the charms of the open air and the
crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity
like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better
than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of
course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in
the coffin of our odious delay." He was but too glad without more ado to
point the moral. "Now I hope you see we can't work it anyhow."

If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was
because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown himself
as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you hadn't a
word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully good-humoured. "You
might of course get used to her--you WILL. You're quite right--so long
as they're with us or near us." And she put it, lucidly, that the dear
things couldn't HELP, simply as charming friends, giving them a lift.
"They'll speak to Aunt Maud. but they won't shut their doors to us: that
would be another matter. A friend always helps--and she's a friend." She
had left Mrs. Stringham by this time out of the question; she had
reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she particularly likes us. She
particularly likes YOU. I say, old boy, make something of that." He felt
her dodging the ultimatum he had just made sharp, his definite reminder
of how little, at the best, they could work it; but there were certain
of his remarks--those mostly of the sharper penetration--that it had
been quite her practice from the first not formally, not reverently to
notice. She showed the effect of them in ways less trite. This was what
happened now: he didn't think in truth that she wasn't really minding.
She took him up, none the less, on a minor question. "You say we can't
meet here, but you see it's just what we do. What could be more lovely
than this?"

It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at her
calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming back
into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he knew in
his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster Gate could
ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one of the
smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but visibly
unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of blues. He
had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and Kate had
met his interest with the assurance that it was all right, that Aunt
Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular time was
concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear. But the
fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him now more
directly, brought him closer still to the question. They WERE alone--it
WAS all right: he took in anew the shut doors and the permitted privacy,
the solid stillness of the great house. They connected themselves on the
spot with something made doubly vivid in him by the whole present play
of her charming strong will. What it amounted to was that he couldn't
have her--hanged if he could!--evasive. He couldn't and he
wouldn't--wouldn't have her inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her
deeper than himself, fine as it might be as wit or as character; he
wanted to keep her where their communications would be straight and easy
and their intercourse independent. The effect of this was to make him
say in a moment: "Will you take me just as I am?"

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

He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to say,
almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she closed her
eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she could
gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response her
surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by
these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It