 Preface of The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. 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 assassins, 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 enamored 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 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 around and round it. It had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike, that attention not being somehow what one thought of as Frank's 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 shelling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light a person in firm and ill, a case sure to prove difficult and to require much handling, though given 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 reflection that fortunately grew and grew, however in proportion as I focus my image, round about which, as it persisted, I repeat, the interesting possibilities and the attaching wonderments not to say the insoluble mysteries thickened a pace. 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 recognized 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 connection. 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 Toucheet 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 mortality afflicted suffer on the whole more overtly and more grossly than women and resist with a rudder and 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 and adversary so subtle couldn't but be felt worthy under whatever weaknesses of the foreground and the limelight. She would meanwhile wish more over 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 rest 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, appeal 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 might not, 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 connection 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, livable, and that if the great pain 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 recognize 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 there 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, bulked 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 the child perched for its first writing 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, giving 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 share 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 neighboring object makes immersion inevitable. 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 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 imbred to, 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 reflection I found, bit times 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 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 Millie Field, 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 effected 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 finally 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 metal 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 nonetheless visibly my key, as I have said, that though my regenerate young New Yorker, and what might depend on her, should form my center, my circumference was every wit 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 center, thus by narrowing, circumvalations, 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 metal 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 Millie 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 connection 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 serialized. This failure had repeatedly waited for me upon shorter fictions, but the considerable production we here discuss was, as the golden bull 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 aerate shed by the cold editorial shoulder, sour grapes may at moments fairly intoxicate and the storyteller, worth his salt, rejoice to feel again how many accommodations he can practice. 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 properties. 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 centers 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 fullness and roundness, their power to resolve 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 characterized by the happy features that were under my first and most blessed illusion to have contributed to it. I meet them all. As I renew acquaintance, I mourn for them 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 connections, and with what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe that of his prime object to be 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 peers 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 an apparently complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of the original design. They were an illusion for the 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 ruleful 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 emphasized word of honor 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 honor has had to pass muster for the show. Everyone in short was to have enjoyed so much better a chance that, like stars of the theater 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 invetracy of which picture at most 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 one done in my way. The residuum of comfort for the witness of these broils is, of course, meanwhile, in the convenient reflection 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 wither of Merton Densher, these no less were quantities and attributes that should have danced about him with the antique grace of nymphs and fawns circling round a bland Hermes and crowning him with flowers. One's main anxiety for each one's agents is that the heir 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. Louder by the same token saturated with her presence, her personality, and felt all her weight in the scale. We were to have reveled in Mrs. Stringham, my heroine's attendant friend, her fairly coral Bostonian, a subject for innumerable touches, and in an extended and above all an animated reflection of Millie Field'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 draft, out of a larger cup, and just as the pattern of Densher's final position and fullness, 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 real. 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, might and 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 let go its scheme of clearness. Applications of this theme 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 contributative pattern through the associated consciousness of my two prime young persons for whom I early recognized 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 center for another after the former has been postulated? From the moment we proceed by centers and I have never I confessed embrace 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 and 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 to 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 centers to intensity in the disclosure of Millie'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. Louder'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 an arranged alternation so that in the second connection I hear 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 an altogether exquisite as they remain are treated almost wholly through her vision of them and dentures 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 Millie's hired palace. She takes the measure of her friend's festival evening squares itself to the same synthetic firmness as the compact constructional block inserted by the scene at Lancaster gate. Millie's situation ceases at a giving moment to be renderable in terms closer than those supplied by Kate's intelligence or in a richer degree by dentures or for one fond hour by poor Mrs. Stringham's since to that sole brief utility it is this last participant crowned by my original plan with the quaintest functions in fact reduced just as Kate's relation with denture and dentures with Kate have ceased previously and are then to cease again to be projected for us so far as Millie is concerned with them on any more reasonable 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 denture darkly pieces together or than what Kate Croy pays heroically it must be owned at the hour of her visit alone to dentures 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 recognize intentions and properties 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 dissimilated despair at the invetret displacement of his general center. 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 to with more than its usual craft. Nowhere I seem to recall had the need of dissimilation 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 themes 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 single 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 recognize and denounce for disguising the reduced scale of the exhibition for shortening 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 of otherwise trifling with our blessed 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 recognize 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 elusive 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 ardor. 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 Denscher and Kate Croy, as befits the remarkable fashion in which fortune was to waylay, the 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 a 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 mille-feel. Infinitely interesting to have prepared and organized 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 Dentcher's interview with Mrs. Louder 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, Dentcher'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 reason and determinants? No, distinctly not, for I had definitely opened the door as a tension 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, it 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 connection. 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 skaters pond bare without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognize but never surely to call it a luxury. That I had scarce availed myself of the privilege of seeing with dentures 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 of all the squarist 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 center. Here again I make prudent provision to be sure to keep my center strong. It dwells mainly we at one see in the depths of Millie Field'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 forever 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 blessed 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 economized 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 re-adopt for their order of the previous center millies 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 some times 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 center 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 for shortening. 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 Millie. It resorts for relief this process whenever it can to some kinder some merciful in direction all as if to approach her circuitously deal with her at second hand as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with. The pressure all around 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 may talk of princesses do the balconies opposite the palace's gates do the coigins 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 and extravagance by itself and as to what there may be to note of this and other super subtleties other arts 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. End of preface. This has been a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Book 1. Chapter 1 of The Wings of the Dove This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Elizabeth Klett The Wings of the Dove by Henry James Book 1. 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 it once, she had tried it, the sense of the slippery end of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazines, a year old, that combined with a small lamp and colored glass and a knitted white centerpiece 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 might not 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 tablecloth and the centerpiece 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 there was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalkmarked 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 sisters, 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 Cherk Street, but the questions themselves bristled there, and the girls repeated pause before the mirror and the chimney-piece 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 times 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 not 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 chalkmarked 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 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 which 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 tabla dot, he suggested but one thing—in what perfection England produces them. He had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its clean fullness, told the quiet tale of its having never had once to raise itself. Life had met him so, half-way, 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 assorted 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 patronized lexim 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 chemists, that beastly fellow at the corner. So Mr. Croix 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, non-pardon 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, recognizing, 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 Marion 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 am turning it over, said Lionel Croy. You may imagine if I am 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 herself, that it might, on some sides, prove no light thing for her to leave uncompagnioned 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 recognized 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 your mind up 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, unto Mama'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 Marion, and two for me, but I give up a hundred to Marion. 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 costar-monger, which came in with the mild March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room, and with the small, homely hum of Church Street. Presently he moved near, 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 Maude 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 Croix'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. Croix 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 conditions, 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 a 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. You 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 flair 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 a 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, he said, 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 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 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 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 vulgarized, brutalized 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. Crowe wound up. A coach and four to be got out of me. His laps, 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 Marion collar it. They stood there face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could only go on. You've view of three hundred a year for her in addition to what her husband left her with. Is that—the remote progenitor of such wantoness 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 a 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 anyone 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 reflection 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 a face 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, moals the pity. If there had been many of us, and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we might have done. But it doesn't matter now. Goodbye, 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 forebore, in fact, for a moment longer to clear it up. I wish there was someone 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 it 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 stair 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 to 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 had last brought himself round. Do you know, my 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— Strangest 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 has 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 you're 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 her 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, at 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 draft. She's not the person I pity most, for deluded in many ways though she 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. Louder and somebody else. She took her head with detachment. I've no intention of that sort with respect to any one now, to Mrs. Louder, at 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 blaggard 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 the 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 or 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 judgment for them, and you may take it from me once and for all that I won't hear of any one of them 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 unmistakably, it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the torturous 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 Marion to be consoled. What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marion, her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with him. CHAPTER II She had gone to Mrs. Louder 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 be 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 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 Marion 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 Maude's sharp intervention. Aunt Maude'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 in 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 rigor 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. Lauder 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 Maude 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. Lauder 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. Croys, the girl knew, had always judged her resentfully, and had brought them up, Mary and the boys and herself, to the idea of particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to Aunt Maude 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. A 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 it 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 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 may seem, keep your heart in your mouth. The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for Mrs. Ladder 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 morning explained assured her a measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her neighbor's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maude 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 middle sex spread beneath her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her discoveries half-way, 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 conformation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty in a special of her having to recognize that she should 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 Maude's looming personality. It was by her personality that Aunt Maude was prodigious, and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the fog-like 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 Maude's own room, her office, her counting-house, her battlefield, her a special scene in fine, of action, situated on the ground floor, opening from the main hall and figuring, rather, to our young woman on accident entrance, as a guard-house or toll-gate. The lioness waited—the kid had at least that consciousness—was aware of the neighborhood 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-colored, all-brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles and flashing gems, with a luster 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 marketplace—Britannia unmistakable, 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 floored Philistineism, 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 ridicule 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 and short, behind her aggressive and defensive front, operations determined by her wisdom. It was, in fact, as a procedure, 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, in a youthful offhand 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. Louder 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 Maude was afraid of nothing, not even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, nonetheless, Kate kept so much to herself, that she scarce shared them with poor Marion, 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 Maude, was that she might be the more free to commit herself to this so much near, and so much less fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maude 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 cord of natural piety super-abundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself, but more especially in respect to Marion, was that she saw what she 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 Marion, 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, demoralized, quarellous, 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 marveled at the serenity, it was the poor woman's only one, of what Marion 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 Marion see what she was, Marion 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 Maude 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 Marion should profit, and Marion'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. Louder'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 new, 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 Maude'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 Marion before at a liberal check. 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 Marion'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 Marion's marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that committed them as sisters, who in almost equal fellowship and objection. 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, Marion on this occasion said to her, how you can think of anything else in the world but the horrid way was situated. And pray, how do you know? Kate inquired 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 have to do with. Marion's retort on this was a stroke as to which she had supplied herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was nonetheless 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 of 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 tablecloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering odor 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 inquiries 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 uncrowed 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 cry, particularly a cry 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 tradesman'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 reflection on them as a reflection 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 up a woman. She could see how the con drip pair pressed their brother's widow on the subject, and Aunt Maude, 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 Marion didn't love them. But they were con drips—they had grown near the rose—they were almost like Bertie and Maude, 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 Marion'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—Marion brought it all out—that you'd like to marry Merton Densher. Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. 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 Marion 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—Marion 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? Marion 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 the kind she loathed, but if Marion 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 and apprehension. I'm not talking of any man but Aunt Maude's man, nor of any money even if you like, but Aunt Maude's money. I'm not talking of anything but you're 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 Marion's tone struck her companion as of the lowest. If I don't believe in Merton Denture, I do at least in Mrs. Louder. 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. Marion clearly was interested to know. He has been to see you. No, I went to him. Really, Marion wondered, for what purpose? To tell him I'm ready to go to him. Marion stared. To leave Aunt Maude? 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? Marion gasped in her distress. What in the world is he to us? You bring out such a thing. Is that this way? They faced each other. The tears were in Marion'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. You 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. Marion 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 of self-masterful for making. But if he won't take you, she continued. He shows at least his sharpness. Marion 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 Maude. 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. Marion seemed to see that personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of kinder irony. Poor old Papa. She sighed it with as many condemnations as her sister's ear had more than once caught in her. Dear old Aunt Maude! 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 Marion had been discussing still, and there was something that at the last Kate had to take up. Whom do you mean by Aunt Maude'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 whole get to you? She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the grace to which she had sacrificed. Marion 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 connection 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 whole, 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 miscondrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marion, but they kept their ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marion, in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger, never prowled. There were times when Kate wondered if the miscondrips 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 at particularly war. She was not only to quarrel with Merton Densher for the pleasure of her five spectators, with the miscondrips there were five. She was to set forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the premium attached to success. Mrs. Louder'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 tricked 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 aide. Marion always spoke of marriages as matches, but that was again a detail. Mrs. Louder's aide, meanwhile, awaited them, if not to light the way to Lord Mark, than to somebody better. Marion 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 had made it good that she wasn't underhand about anyone else. She had denied everything and everyone. 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.