 Book 8, Chapter 3 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. Coming by Jennifer Stearns. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James Book 8, Chapter 3 She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening, and with further ground for it the next sharpest question that had been on his lips in the morning which his other preoccupation had then to his consciousness crowded out. This opportunity was again made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving as usual, with the close of day at the palace, that Millie must fail them again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down later? He had found Susan Shepard alone in the great saloon, were even more candles than their friend's large common allowance, she grew daily more splendid. They were all struck with it and shafted her about it, lighted up the pervasive mystery of style. He had thus five minutes with the good lady before Mrs. Lauder and Kate appeared, minutes illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Millie's candles. May she come down, ought she if she isn't really up to it? He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by glimpses, rare as were these, of the inner truth about the girl. There was of course a question of health, it was in the air, it was in the ground he trod, in the foot he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was everywhere. But it was everywhere when the effect of a request to him, to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others, as well as his own, that no allusion to it should be made. There had practically been none, that morning, on her explained non-appearance. The absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and awkward, and this passage with Mrs. Stringham, offered him his first license to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed, all the more that his doing, so performed for his own spirit, a useful function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose against Millie's fax, what better proof could he have that his conduct was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for himself, was perhaps even ridiculous. But he hadn't even the amount of curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency to have it, but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what, therefore, was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings, it being so established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate, not by the deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not interested. For had he been interested, he would have cared, and had he cared, he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know, he wouldn't have been purely passive. And it was his pure passivity that had to represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at the same time, let us add, fortunately, fell short tonight of spoiling his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse it was as if she had wished to give him that, and it was as if, for himself on current terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she fairly invited him to open his eyes. I'm so glad you're here. It was no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve, and the rest was fully to come. He smiled at her, and presently found himself as a kind of consequence of communion with her, talking her own language. It's a very wonderful experience. Well, and her raised face, shown up at him, that's all I want you to feel about it. If I weren't afraid, she added, there are things I should like to say to you, and what are you afraid of, please? He encouragingly asked. Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know, seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, with her. He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile, which was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always with her. Ah, he nonetheless smiled. I'm not with her now. You know, and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much better. Better? Then she has been worse. Mrs. Stringham waited. She has been marvelous. That's what she has been. She is marvelous. But she's really better. Oh, then, if she's really better. But he checked himself, wanting only to be easy about it, and above all not to appear engaged to the point of mystification. We shall miss her the more at dinner. Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. She's keeping herself, you'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a little party. Ah, I do see, by this aggravated grandeur. Well, it is lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged for the first time as she ought, from her type to be, and doing it. I mean, bringing out all the glory of the place makes her really happy. It's a very nice picture, as near as can be, with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small Blackamore, put into a corner of the foreground for effect, if I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort, I should do this scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the evening. These explanations and sundry others Mrs. Drayum gave, though not all were the result of making him feel that the picture closed him in. What part was there for him, with his attitude that lacked the highest style, and a composition in which everything else would have it? They won't, however, be at dinner. The few people she expects, they come round afterwards, from their respective hotels, and Sir Luke Stret and his niece, the principal ones, will have arrived from London about an hour or two ago. It's for him she has wanted to do something, to let it begin at once. We shall see more of him, because she likes him, and I'm so glad, she'll be glad too, that you're to see him. The good lady, in connection with it, was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. So I greatly hope, but our hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer. He considered a little disappearance, whilst she let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than she uttered. What is it you hope? Well, that you'll stay on. Do you mean after dinner? She meant he seemed to feel, so much, that he could scarce tell where it ended or begin. Oh, that, of course! Why, where to have music, beautiful instruments and songs, and not Tazza declaimed, as in the guidebooks, either. She has arranged it, or at least I have, that as Eugenio has. Besides, you're in the picture. Oh, I, said Densher, almost with the gravity of a real protest. You'll be the grand, young man who surpasses the others, and holds up his head in the one cup. What we hope, Mrs. Stringham pursued, is that you'll be faithful to us, that you'll not come for a mere foolish few days. Densher's more private and particular, shabby reality is turned. Without comfort, he was conscious at this touch. In the artificial repose he had in his anxiety about them, but half managed to induce. The way smooth ladies, traveling for their pleasures and housed in Varoneese pictures, talked to plain and embarrassed working men engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity from modest acquisition. The things they took for granted and the general misery of explaining. He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile, because that would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would operate indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance, which these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance, the thing was done, and there was no use talking, again, again the cold breath of it was in the air. So there he was, and at best he floundered. I'm afraid you won't understand, when I say very tiresome things to consider, botherations, necessities at home, the pinch, the pressure in London. But she understood imperfection. She rose to the pinch, and the pressure, and showed how they had been her own very element. O, the daily task and the daily wage, the golden girden or reward, no one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren't they just where I myself have given up? I have given up all to follow her. I wish you could feel as I do, and can't you, she asked, right about Venice? He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did, and he smiled for her kindly. Do you read about Venice? No, but I would, or wouldn't I, if I hadn't so completely given up? She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess. One makes the whole sacrifice? Precisely, there you are. It pressed on him with this, that never had a man been in so many places at once. I quite understand that she's yours, only you see she's not mine. He felt he could, somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the moral certainty, he wouldn't repeat it, and lest of all, to Mrs. Lauder, who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he liked in the Good Lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was, in itself, a hint of possibilities between them. Of a relation, beneficent and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could see. Yet, even as he afresh made this out, he felt how strange it all was. She wanted, Susan Shepard then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a way, and from a motive so different, even though scarce lest deep. Then Mrs. Lauder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what each of the others did. And he was between them all. He was in the mist. Such perceptions made occasions. Well, occasions for fairly wondering if it might be best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two things, the more asinine. He was glad there was no male witness. It was a circle of petticoats. He shouldn't have liked a man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Stret, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of, really as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a vision of great London surgeons, if this one was a surgeon, as incisive all round, so that he should perhaps, after all, not wholly escape the ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was not to care, while he was trying not to, he could take that in. It was a terrain, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord Mark had caught him twice in the fact, the fact of his absurd posture, and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark. His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm her discretion on the matter of Millie's not being his princess. Of course she's not, you must do something first. Densher gave it his thought. Wouldn't it be rather she who must? It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. I see no doubt, if one takes it so. Her chair was for the time, in eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of what Millie could do, and yet she has wanted to be kind. It made him on the spot feel a brute. Of course she has. No one could be more charming. She's treated me as if I were somebody. You're my hostess, as I've never had, nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you all together. Of course, he added in the right spirit for her. I do see that it's quite court life. She promptly showed this was almost all she wanted of him. That's all I mean if you understand it as such a court as never was, one of the courts of heaven. The court of a reigning serif, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly. Oh, well, then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing you know, he observed, isn't supposed to pay. Yes, one has read, but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty here. It's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her court, said Mrs. Stringham, it does pay. Then as if she had quite settled it for him, you'll see for yourself. He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. I think you were right just now. One must do something first. Well, you've done something. No, I don't see that. I can do more. Oh, well, she seemed to say. If he would have it so, you can do everything, you know. Everything was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he modestly led it alone, speaking the next moment to avert fatuity of a different but related matter. Why has she sent for Sir Luke's strip if, as you tell me, she's so much better? She hasn't sent. He has come of himself, Mrs. Stringham explained. He has wanted to come. Isn't that rather worse than, if it means he may be easy? He was coming from the first, for his holiday. She has known that these several weeks, after which Mrs. Stringham added, you can make him easy. I can, you can't really wonder. It was truly the circle of petticoats. What can I to do with it for a man like that? How do you know, said his friend, what he's like? He's not like anyone you've ever seen. He's a great, beneficent being. Ah, then, he can do without me. I have no call as an outsider to meddle. Tell him all the same, Mrs. Stringham urged. What you think? What I think of Mrs. Theo? It was, as they said, a large order. But he found the right note. It's none of his business. It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham to the right note. She fixed him, at least, with an expression still bright, but searching, that showed almost to excess what she saw in it. Though what this might be, he was not to make out till afterwards. Say that to him then. Nothing will do for him as a means of getting at you. And why should he get at me? Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you, and then you'll see. All of which, a Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm, a sense that was more over, during the next two or three hours, to be fed to satiate tea, by several other impressions. They came down after dinner, half a dozen friends, objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of Lancaster Gate, having by that time arrived, and with his call on her attention, the further call of her musicians, ushered by Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed. And the supreme opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last of all. He felt her diffuse in wide warm waves, the spell of a general, a eutrophic mildness. There was a deeper death of it, doubtless, for some then for others. What he in particular knew of it was that he seemed to stand in it, up to his neck. He moved about in it, and it made no plush. He floated, he noticed a slam in it, and they were all together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it. The golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham had said, staying for the week or two at the inn's. People who during the day had fingered their bedeckers, gait at their frescoes, and differed over fractions of fronks, with their gondoliers. But Millie, let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with something that made them more finely genial, so that if the Varanese pitcher of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the traces of insensibility, qualified by beating down, were at last almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the accident of his seeing her for the first time in white. She hadn't yet had occasion, circulating with a clearness intensified, to strike him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with a color of her braided hair, more than ever a not altogether lucky challenge to retention. Yet he was woth holy to explain it by her having quitted this once, for some obscure, yet doubtless charming reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as a change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all was said, made it for him. And he was not to fail of the further amusement of judging her, determined in the matter by Sir Luke Streth's visit. If he could, in this connection, have felt jealous of Sir Luke Streth, whose strong face and type less assimilated by the scene perhaps then of any others, he was anond to study from the other side of the saloon. What would doubtless have been more, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide. He called himself too much in it. As he might have said, a moment's reflection cares while Kate and Mrs. Latter, a moment's reflection put him more in than anyone. The way Millie neglected him for other cares while Kate and Mrs. Latter, without so much as the attenuation of a joke, introduced him to English ladies. That was itself a proof. For nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed between them as a single bright look in the three gay words, all ostensibly of the last lightness, with which her confessed consciousness brushed by him. She was acquitting herself tonight as hostess he could see under some supreme idea, as an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an inevitable harmony. But what he especially recognized was a character that had already several times broken out in her, and that she was so oddly appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display. She was the American girl as he had originally found her. Found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York. More than at certain others, she was the American girl as, still more than then, he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London, and in Kate's company. It affected him as a large, though queer social resource in her, such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the world be able to command. And he wouldn't have known whether to see it in an extension or a contraction of personality, taking it as he did most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly, too, it was the right thing this evening all around, that came out for him in a word from Kate as she approached him to wreck on him a second introduction. He had undercover of the music melted away from the lady, toward whom she had first pushed him, and there was something in her to affect him as telling evasively a tale of her talk in the piazza. To what did she want to coerce him, as a form of penalty, for what he had done to her there? It was thus in contact, utmost, for him that he had done something, not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her unable to get away by any mere of private effort, from his inattachable logic. With him thus in presence, and near him, and it had been as unmistakable, through dinner, there was no getting away for her at all. There was less of it than ever. So she could only either deal with a question straight, either frankly yield, or ineffectually struggle, or insincerely argue, or else merely express herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of that advantage for the hour, a brief, fallacious make-wait to his pressure, that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel her will. They only told him these indications of how she was. In such close quarters, feelingless, and it was enough for him again, that her very aspect, as great a variation, in its way, as merely his own, gave him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted him to know, almost materially, to taste, as he could do in these minutes the state of what was overly called conquest. He lived long enough to have been on occasion liked, but it never began to be allowed him to be liked at any such tune in any such quarter. It was a liking greater than Millie's, for what would be, he felt it in him to answer for that. So at all events, he read the case, while he noted that Kate was somehow, for Kate, wanting and luster. As a striking young presence, she was practically superseded of the mildness that Millie diffused, she had assimilated all her share. She might fairly have been dressed tonight in a little black frock, superficially indistinguishable, that Millie had laid aside. This represented, he perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her wonderful entrance. Under her aunt's eyes, he had never forgotten it. The day of the younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She wasn't her accepted effacement, it was actually her acceptance, that made the beauty and repaired the damage under her aunt's eyes now. But whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? The struck him nonetheless, certainly, that almost the first thing she said to him showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed. Don't you think her a good enough now? Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms, she eyed Millie from where they stood. Noted her in renewed chalk over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of difference, and livened by native humours, things quite in the line of old Venetian comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy, a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic, thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy to gather barbarians that reflected the good manners of its interpreters. Representatives, though these might be, but of the order in which taste was natural in Melody Rank. It was easy at all events to answer Kate. Ah, my dear, you know how good I think her. But she's too nice, Kate returned with appreciation. Everything suits her so, especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll trouble you really to look at them. Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not really looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the embodied poetry. His mind, for Melody's aspects, kept coming back to that, which owed them part of its style. Kate's face had perhaps not really looked at them, and had thus not done justice to embodied poetry. His mind, for Melody's aspects, kept coming back to that, which owed them part of its style. Densher's face, as she considered them, struck him. The long priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the wearer's breast, so far down, that Melody's trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering, and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably to convenience. She's a dove, Kate went on, and once somehow doesn't think of doves as bejeweled. Yet they suit her down to the ground. Yes, down to the ground is the word. Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion's feelings about them. Melody was indeed a dove, this was the figure, though at most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew at a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth, in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-leg, only so far as one remembered, that doves have wings and wondrous flights. Have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings, could in a given case, had, truly, in the case with which he was concerned, spread themselves for protection. Yet they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lauder, weren't Susan Sheppard and he, wasn't he in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease. All this was the brightest blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on. Pearls have such a magic that they suit everyone. They would, uncommonly, suit you, he frankly returned. Yes, I see myself. As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her. She would have been splendid, and with it, he felt more what she was thinking of. Million's Royal Orderment had, under pressure, not now wholly occult, taken on the character of a symbol of differences. Differences of which the vision was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face, too, well, as she certainly would look in Pearls. Pearls were exactly what Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't that the great difference that Millie, tonight, symbolized? She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every poor, that there was nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl, married to a man, unable to make her on any such lines, as that the least little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. She could come back to his friend's question over a minute ago. She's certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, wasn't great feather to me about it. She evidently believes her better. Well, if they choose to call it so. And what do you call it, as against them? I don't call it anything to anyone but you. I'm not against them, Kate added, as with just a fresh breath of invasions for all he had to be taught. That's what I'm talking about, he said. What do you call it to me? It made her wait a little. She isn't better. She's worse. But that has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do, he wondered. But she was clear. Nothing to do with us, except, of course, that we're doing our best for her, for making her want to live. And Kate again wants her. Tonight she does want to live. She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of Stringham as a consequence. So much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the heart. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. It's beautiful indeed. He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note. But she had given it no heed. She's doing it for him. And she nodded in the direction of Millie's medical visitor. She wants to be for him at her best. But she can't deceive him. Ascensure had been looking too, which made him say in a moment, and do you think you can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, how about your sentiments? If Aunt Maude so thick with him, Aunt Maude now occupied, in fact, a place at his side, and was visibly doing her best to entertain him, though this fails to prevent such a discretion of his own eyes, determined in the way such things happen, precisely by the attention of the others, as Densher became aware of, and as Kate properly marked. He's looking at you, and wants to speak to you. So Mrs. Stringham, the young man left, advised me he would. Then let him, be right with him, I don't need. Kate went on in answer to the previous question, to deceive him. Aunt Maude, if it's necessary, will do that. I mean that, no one nothing about me. He can see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to do with me. Except to reprimand you, Densher suggested. For not caring for you, perfectly, as a brilliant young man driven by it into your relation with Millie, as all that I leave you to him. Well, said Densher, sincerely enough, I think I can thank you for leaving me to someone easier perhaps with me than yourself. She had been looking about, again, meanwhile, the lady having changed her place for the friend of Mrs. Lauders, to whom she had spoken of introducing him. All the more reason why I should commit you, then, to Lady Wells. Oh, but wait. It was only that he distinguished Lady Wells from afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness. And that somewhere, at the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of whether this was a kind of person he should be involved with when they were married. It was furthermore, that the consciousness of something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments. To say nothing of the consciousness that, with the general smallness of opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maude over there, with Sir Luke, noted him as a little attentive, that might pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to confess to having not very gracefully changed his mind. Besides, just now, he didn't care for Aunt Maude, except in so far as he was immediately to show. How can Mrs. Lauder think me disposed of with any finality if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs. Lauder's being squared. If Millie, as you say, illusively pursued, came to see if a great surgeon, or whatever, a great surgeon would deceive other people, not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He won't, at any rate, deceive Mrs. Stringham, whose Millie's greatest friend, and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maude, who's her own. Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth his having kept her for. Why will it be odd? I'm marveled at your seeing your way so little. Mere curiosity, even, about his companion, had now for him its quick, its slightly quicking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to a new book, an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality, and his emotion, to justify that, was again and again like the thrill of turning the page. Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way you see it. It doesn't in the least follow, Kate went on, that anything in the nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth? Mrs. Louder, denture stared, why should she? To please you. And how in the world can it please me? Kate turned her head away, as if really, at last, almost tired of his density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. Well then, to please Millie. Before he could answer, don't you feel by this time that there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you? He had, verily, after an instant, to take it in, so sharply it corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him. But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights let him on and on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. She's ever so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours. How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you? Densure for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. All of the difficulty is that I don't, upon my honor, even yet quite make out how yours does serve me. It helps you, put it then, said Kate very simply, to serve me. It gains you time. Time for what? For everything, she spoke at first, once more within patience. Then, as usual, she qualified for anything that may happen. Densure had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. Your cryptic love had made her keep her eyes on him. And you could thus see that, by one of those incalculable emotions in her, without which she wouldn't have been a quarter so interesting. They have filled with tears from some source he had too roughly touched. I'm taking your trouble for you. I never dreamed I should take for any human creature. Oh, it went home, making him flesh for it. Yet he soon enough felt his reply on his lips. Well, is it my whole insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble away? And he let it, his insistence, come out again. It had so constantly had, all the week, but it's step or two to make. There need be none, whatever, between us. There need be nothing but our sense of each other. It had only the effect at first, that her eyes grew dry, while she took up, again, one of the so numerous lengths in her close chain. You can tell her anything you like, anything whatever. Mrs. Stringham, I have nothing to tell her. You can tell her about us, I mean, she wonderfully pursued, that you do still like me. It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. Only not that you still like me. She let his amusement pass. I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat it. I see, to ought not. You don't quite see. Neither to ought not, nor to anyone else. Kate then, he saw, was always seeing really much more, after all, than he was. And she showed it again as she went on. There, accordingly, is your time. She did it last make him think, and was fairly as if late broke, but not quite all at once. You must let me say I do see, time for something particular, that I understand you regard as possible. Time to that, I further understand, is time for you as well. Time indeed for me as well. And encouraged visibly by his glow of concentration. She looked at him as through the air she had painfully made clear. Yet she was still in her guard. Don't you think, however, I'll do all the work for you? If he want things named, you must name them. He had quite within the minute been turning names over. And there was only one which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted. Since she's to die I'm to marry her. It struck him even at the moment as fine in her, that she met it with no wensing nor mincing. She might, for the grace of silence, for favour to their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes, but her lips bravely moved, to marry her. So that when her death has taken place, I shall in actual course have money. It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask. He had only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold, with a thought that all along, to his stupidity, his timidity, it had been only what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover, she couldn't forbear, usually enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't pronounced. They broke through her controlled and callous voice, as if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. You'll, in the natural course, have money. We shall, in the natural course, be free. Oh, oh, oh. Then she was softly murmured. Yes, yes, yes. But she broke off. Come to Lady Wells. He never budged. There was too much else. I'm to propose it, then, marriage, on the spot. There was no ironic sound he needed to give it. The more simply he spoke, the more it seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof. Oh, I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash your hands of me, I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act, as you like, and as you can. He thought again, I'm far, as I sufficiently showed you this morning, from washing my hands of you. Then said Kate, it's all right. All right, he's eager as flamed. You'll come? But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant. You'll have a free hand, a clear feel, a chance, well, quite ideal. Your descriptions, her ideal, were such a touch, are prodigious. And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it. I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like? It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled her own incapacity for action. But he saw indeed, even at the time, the greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time, too, moreover, he next reflected that he, after all, knew what he did, but something else on his lips was uppermost. What I don't make out, then, is how you can even bear it. Well, when you know me better, you'll find out how much I can bear. And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many implications. But it was left to him to know her, spiritually, better, after his long sacrifice to knowledge. This, for instance, was a truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own generosity than by hers. And what with it, did she seem to suggest she might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions, she was carrying him on. All you'll have to do will be to stay, and proceed to my business under your eyes. Oh, dear, no, we shall go. Go, he wondered, go win, go where, in a day or two, straight home, Aunt Ma wishes it now. It gave him all he could take in to think of, then what becomes of Miss Thiel? What I tell you, she stays on and you stay with her. He stared, all alone. She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. You're old enough, with plenty of Mrs. Stringham. Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it, as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these successive cues, that he was essentially, seeing what she would say, an instinct compatible for him, therefore, with an absence of a need to know her better, to which she had a moment before done injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams, that she was somewhere a breakdown, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she wasn't breaking down, there was nothing for him but to continue. Is your going with his lotter's idea? Very much indeed. Of course, again, you see what it does for us, and I don't, she added, refer only to our going, but to Aunt Ma's view of the general propriety of it. I see again, as you say, denture said, after a moment, it makes everything fit. Everything. The word, for a little, held the air, and you might have seen the wild to be looking by no means dimly now, at all it stood for, but he had, in fact, been looking at something else. You leave her here, then, to die? Ah, she believes she won't die. But if you stay, I mean, you can explain, Aunt Ma believes, and that's all that's necessary? Still indeed, she didn't break down. Didn't we long ago agree that what she believes is a principal thing for us? He recalled it under his eyes, but it came as from long ago. Oh yes, I can't deny it, then he added, so that if I stay, it won't, she was prompt, be our fault. If Mrs. Louder is still, you mean, suspicious? If she still suspects us, but she won't. Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing more, and he might, in fact, well have found nothing. If he hadn't presently found, what if she doesn't accept me? It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patrons of her tone the next moment touch him. You can but try. Naturally, I can but try. Only you see, one has to try a little hard to propose to a dying girl. She isn't for you as if she's dying. It had determined in Kate the flash of justice he could perhaps most on consideration have admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the fact of how Millie tonight impressed him, and his companion with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the dips of them, literally, now perched on the fact and triumph. She turned her head to where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so that they watched her minute in concert. Millie, on the other side, had been at the moment to notice them, and she sent a cross toward them in response all the candor of her smile, the bluster of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth. They brought them together again, with faces made fair the grave, by the reality she put into their plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When denture at last spoke, it was under cover. I might stay, you know, without trying. Oh, to stay is to try. To have for yourself you mean the appearance of it? I don't see how you can have the appearance more. Denture waited. You think it then possible she may offer marriage? I can't think, if you really want to know, what she may not offer. In the manner of princesses who do such things. In any manner you like, so be prepared. While he looked as if he almost were. It will be for me then to accept, but that's the way it must come. Kate's silence so far let it pass. But presently said, you will on your honor stay then? His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. Without you you mean? Without us. And you yourselves go at latest? Not later than Thursday. It made three days. Well he said, I'll stay on my honor, if you'll come to me, on your honor. Again as before this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigor out of which at a loss she vaguely cast about her. Her rigor was more to him, nevertheless, than all her readiness, for her readiness was the woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stopgap, and a dodge. She cast about however, has happened, and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes turned over the room, caught at a pretext. Lady Welles is tired of waiting, she's coming, see, to us. Denture saw in fact, but there was a distance for the visitor to cross, and he still had time. If you'll decline to understand me, I wholly decline to understand you, I'll do nothing. Nothing? It was as if she tried for the minute to plead. I'll do nothing, I'll go off before you, I'll go tomorrow. He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase was, and for the vulgar triumphs too, seen he meant it. She looked again at Lady Welles, who was nearer, but she quickly came back, and if I do understand, I'll do everything. She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend. He was fairly playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, and all his relation with her, have anything so sharp, too sharp for mere sweetness, as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the conflict. Well, I understand. On your honor? On my honor. You'll come? I'll come. I'll come. End of Book Eighth, Chapter 3. Reading by Jennifer Stearns, Concord, New Hampshire. It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was most to be felt more over in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation, within sight as it was of the Rialto Bridge, on the hitherside of that arch of associations, and the left going up the canal. He had seen it in a particular light, to which more and more his mind and his hands adjusted it, but the interest the place now wore for him had risen at a bound, becoming a force that on the spot completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which, if relief was the name, he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession, importunate to all his senses. It lived again as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object, it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous. It had come to him. It was only once, and this not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking. Yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it, and what survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified a consequence of his act, it had simply worked, his idea, the idea he had made her accept, and all erect before him, really covering the ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that this represented. It was otherwise, but the fact of the idea as directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an historic truth. He had known it before, but as desired and urged, as convincingly insisted on for the help it would render, so that at present, with the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office, and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had, in fine, judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value, and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the value to the full, wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that possessed him, kept him thinking of it, and waiting on it, turning round and round it, and making sure of it again from this side and that. It played for him, certainly in this prime afterglow, the part of a treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again, and for it to be all there, so intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could be or ever would. It was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the play on the stage is in view, night after night for the fiddlers. He remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single-person perpetual orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed run, playing low and slow, moreover in the regular way for the situations of most importance. No other visitor was to come to him. He met, he bumped occasionally in the piazza or in his walks, against claimants to acquaintance, lowered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive, sometimes even inquisitive, but he gave no address and encouraged no approach. He couldn't for his life he felt have opened his door to a third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have profaned his secret, or perhaps have guessed it, would at any rate have broken the spell of what he conceived himself in the absence of anything to show, to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself up, that was quite enough, to the general feeling of his renewed engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect. Such items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and fastened down over what filled it, which is precisely what we have spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat chilled state tending to the solitary of supreme recognition. If it was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath him, it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of which the other name was careful action. Everything he perfectly knew was less like careful action than the immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be faithful to Kate, he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips, straight off her, he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was time to go to the palace, which in truth was a mercy, since the check was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he always shut her in, shut her out, it came to that rather, than once he had got a little away, and before he reached the palace, much more after hearing at his heels the bang of the Great Portaigne, he felt free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was all in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander, it was only on reflection that the falseness came out. So long as he left it to the mercy of beneficent chance, it offered him no face, and made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror, yet what, in Milly's presence each day, was horror doing with him but virtually letting him off. He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end, there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce. Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any case, to know why things were as he felt them, and he knew it pretty well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He then fairly perceived that, even putting their purity of motive at its highest, it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to Milly, who made her own so far as it might be innocent, it was neither of them who practically purged it, if practically purged it was. Milly herself did everything, so far at least as he was concerned, Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality, and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and perhaps still more than anything else, Milly's imagination. His stringum and Sir Luke indeed a little aiding, whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for them, for him and Kate, something outside, beyond, above themselves, and doubtless ever so much better than they, which wasn't a reason, however, it's being so much better, for them not to profit by it. Not to profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go directly against it, and the spirit of generosity at present engendered in denture could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go directly against Milly. To go with her was the thing, so far as she could go herself, which from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on was possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was, of course, on the face of it the most marked of demonstrations, which was exactly why Kate had required it. It was so marked that on the very evening of the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach out to him with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be almost alone together. They could, for their further ease, know it and call it by, it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence, of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing, couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe it, that would quite do for her. It even would have done for her, he could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that, but he had none the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving them alone, Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious. His acquaintance with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had supposed himself beforehand on the question of what he was doing or pretending in possession of some tone that he would serve, but there were three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken for him, or rather not so much in some way, as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her at the last what she might, in the connection, have said, nothing would have induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him. His lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed in respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the palace an hour afterwards, it was with a sense of having breathed there, in the very air, the truth he had been guessing. Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this creature, to be awkward. It was odious to be seeking excuses for the relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had to take medicine as a source. What Kate would have said in one of the young women's last talks was that, if Millie absolutely must have the truth about it, Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her, or didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so, and when she kept him from following her Mrs. Louder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub him as she might. She did nothing in fact but snub him, wouldn't that have been part of the story? The aunt Maude's suspicions were of the sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same token, reasonable enough, as he now, for that matter, well might, he had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from London was to exist away from Kate Croy, which was again much appreciated to the latter's comfort. There was a minute at this hour out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Millie's uttering some such illusion to their friend's explanation as he must meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What had implied for one thing was that tonight in the great saloon, noble in its half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her mercy, what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single thing of all things that could save him from it would be Millie's letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost. These were transcendent motions, not the less blessed for being obscure, whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with Kate's version as a version to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie. He felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking a little for nervousness, the leg he had crossed over the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more to subscribe to, to purger himself about, than the three or four inanities he had on his own side feebly prepared for the crisis. He scrambled a little higher than the reference to money in clothes, letters and directions from his manager, but he brought out the beauty of the chance for him, there before him like a temptress painted by Titian to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the difficulty of writing quietly in London, and he was precipitate, almost explosive, on his idea long cherished of a book. The explosion lighted her face. You'll do your book here. I hope to begin it. It's something you haven't begun. Well, only just. And since you came? She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too easily let off. I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken ground. Scarcely anything it was indeed clear could have let him in deeper. I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time. Of course you have, but what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to repair that ravage. Then you mustn't mind me, you know. You'll see, he tried to stay with ease, how little I shall mind anything. You'll want—Milly had thrown herself into it—the best part of your days. He thought a moment. He did what he could to read it in smiles. Oh, I shall make shift with the worst part, the best will be for you. And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and also the hard law she had now laid on him under a high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion, that Millie was so interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he found his room's propitious, while he felt that, in just decently answering her, he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea with him, an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. We depend on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming. The extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact. Having their visit itself, to that, no matter what he might have to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed, and this even though it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the top of Kate's list of his priorities. He could wonder freely enough, deep within, if Kate's view of that special propriety had not been modified by a subsequent occurrence, but his deciding that it was quite likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact. It pleased him to think of tact, as his present prop in doubt, had glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine so long as it would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not sweeten Millie's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less wanted them to flower again in the particular connection, so that casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put his foot with unhappy effect just in the wrong place. Will it be safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house? Safe. He had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh! But he didn't need it. By that time to wince, he had winced for himself as soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what so unforgettably she had asked him in London not to do. He had touched, all alone with her here, the super-sensitive nerve of which he had warned him. He had not, since the occasion in London, touched it again until now, but he saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile, too, she had narrowed his choice. You suppose me so awfully bad? He turned in his pain within himself, but by the time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. I'll believe whatever you tell me. Well then I'm splendid. Oh! I don't need you to tell me that. I mean I'm capable of life. I've never doubted it. I mean, she went on, that I want so to live. Well, he asked while she paused with the intensity of it. Well, that I know I can. Whatever you do, he shrank from solemnity about it. Whatever I do, if I want to. If you want to do it? If I want to live, I can, Millie repeated. He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the pity of it. Ah! Then that, I believe. I will, I will, she declared, yet with the weight of it somehow turned for him to me a light and sound. He felt himself smiling through a mist. You simply must. It brought her straight again to the fact. Well then, if you say it, why may it we pay you our visit? Will it help you to live? Every little helps she laughed, and it's very little for me in general to stay at home, only I shan't want to miss it. Yes? She had dropped again. Well, on the day you give us a chance. It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. Great scruples suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. You can come, he said, when you like. What had taken place for him, however, the drop almost with violence of everything but a sense of her own reality, apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even say vividly that she could take it for something else. I see how you feel, that I am an awful bore about it, and that sooner than have any such upset you'll go, so it's no matter. No matter—oh!—he quite protested now. If it drives you away to escape us, we want you not to go. It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham, whatever it was at any rate he shook his head. I won't go. Then I won't go, she brightly declared. You mean you won't come to me? No, never now, it's over. But it's all right, I mean, apart from that, she went on, that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm not forced to. Oh! Who can ever force you, he asked, with his hand to mouth way at all times of speaking for her encouragement, you're the least coercible of creatures. Because you think I'm so free. The freest person probably now in the world, you've got everything. Well, she smiled, call it so, I don't complain. On which again, in spite of himself, it lets him in. No, I know you don't complain. As soon as he had said it, he had himself heard the pity in it, his telling her she had everything was extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind gravity. Millie felt he could see the difference. He might as well have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the way she just looked him again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more gently than ever. It isn't a merit when one sees one's way. To peace and plenty, well, I dare say not. I mean to keeping what one has. Oh! That's success, if what one has is good, Densher said at random. It's enough to try for. Well, it's my limit, I'm not trying for more. To which then she added with a change, and now about your book. My book? He had got in a moment so far from it, the one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling. He cast about, but he made up his mind. I'm not doing a book. Not what you said, she asked in a wonder. You're not writing. He already felt relieved. I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm doing. It made her visibly grave, so that disconcerted in another way he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, might complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture, and he could see her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test. Then, if it's not for your book. What am I staying for? I mean with your London work, with all you have to do, isn't it rather empty for you? Empty for me. He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally begin it. It would leave him such an incident he already felt at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the vagueness of his reply. Oh! well! I asked too many questions. She settled it for herself before he could protest. You stay because you've got to. He grasped at it. I stay because I've got to. And he couldn't have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner away, it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet Millie took it he perceived but as a plain statement of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of—the permission from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer—to remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this denture read in the girl's sense of the spirit of his reply, so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he thought of was, in an instant, isn't it enough, whatever may be one's other complications, to stay after all for you? Oh! you must judge. He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate, that was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the uncanded profession of a motive, he was staying so little for Millie that he was staying positively against her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or worse. Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all as judging. CHAPTER II. 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 Christine Blashford. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Book IX. CHAPTER II. He didn't go home on leaving her, he didn't want to. He walked, instead, through his narrow ways and his campy with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively sequestered café, where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions. It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there tonight, while he leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror, and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen his way to. It was simply because the acceptance of his position took sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with. When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to milley on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot, and under her eyes he had acted by the sudden force of his seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry, when people were at her pass everything was allowed, and her pass was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own, to the extent as he felt of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do, or shouldn't, would have close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands, and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on the cards for him that he might kill her, that was the way he read the cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made him let everything go, kept him there actually all motionless, for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption, and smoked more cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him had come out with this first intensity as a terror, so that action itself of any sort, the right as well as the wrong, if the difference even survived, had heard in it a vivid hush, the injunction to keep from that moment intensely still. He thought, in fact, while his vigil lasted of several different ways of his doing so, and the hour might have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe. What he finally took home when he ventured to leave the place was the perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his really bringing to a point, on Millie's side, anything whatever. Nothing so broad, he easily argued, but must be in one way or another a catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should be better, was mixed up in him, so that a single false motion might either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without the girl's leave, not oddly enough at the last, to move without it, whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to this his wisdom reduced itself, to the need again simply to be kind. That was the same as being still, as studying to create the minimum of vibration. He felt himself, as he smoked, shut up to a room on the wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware, when he walked away again, that even Fleet Street wouldn't at this juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the idle life might be none too much. Happily, however, Venice was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that Millie, in a manner, supported him. The greatest of his expenses, really, was to walk to the palace to dinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath in his hand. He should be able to be still enough through everything. He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not having failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't trying, quite the contrary, to be either distant or dull. That would not have been being nice, which in its own form was the real law. That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert, so that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as it were, to let himself go, go in the direction that is to say of staying. It depended on where he went, which was what he meant by taking care. When one went on tiptoe, one could turn off for retreat without betraying the manoeuvre. That intact, the necessity for which he had from the first, as we know, happily recognized, was to keep all intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus, for instance, that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as well that her being the American girl was just in time, and for the relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If, at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of dentures keeping her, with his idea well up to it, wouldn't have been in fine for want of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't, perhaps, in so many words, speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to intimate, but he talked of it freely in what he flattered himself was an impersonal way, and this held it there before her, since he was careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything, and yet not stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within bounds. And he had, meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted, even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once in saying, oh yes, you like us to be as we are, because it's a kind of facilitation to you that we don't quite measure. I think one would have to be English to measure it. And that, too, strangely enough, without prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as doing, that is, of being, what he liked, in order, perhaps, only to judge where it would take them. They really, as it went on, saw each other at the game, she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception, and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have been felicity, certainly too little of the right lubricant, had not the national characters so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely, in Millie's chords. It made up her unity, and was the one thing he could unlimitedly take for granted. He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his nervousness that he was living at best from day to day, and from hand to mouth, yet he had succeeded he believed in avoiding a mistake. All women had alternatives, and Millie's would doubtless be shaky too, but the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her practically, by this time, or but as a part, the national character that, in a woman still so young, made of the air-breathed a virtual non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the information that the Signora Padrona was not receiving. The announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the gondoliers. Met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the knowledge of his freedoms of access hitherto conspicuously shown could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he recognized after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of the two ladies it appeared received, and yet Pasquale was not prepared to say that either was Pocobene. He was yet not prepared to say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses, not a vain surface, but a place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention any cognition of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be taken for one was another matter of which he grew fully aware on carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio, whom he immediately sent for, with whom for three rich minutes protected from the weather he was confronted in the gallery that led from the water steps to the court, and whom he always called in meditation his friend, seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for each, an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from a cult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again, it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the court. The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first sea storm of the autumn, and Dencher had almost invidiously brought him down the outer staircase, the massive ascent, the great feature of the court, to Millie's piano-nobile. This was to pay him, it was the one chance for all imputations, the imputation in particular that clever, tanto bello, and not rich, the young man from London was, by the obvious way, pressing Miss Thiel's fortune-heart. It was to pay him for the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young lady's most devoted servant, interested scarcely less in the high attraction, for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a connection on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious to Dencher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly, had kept him from writing himself. One of these was that his critics sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of politeness. The second was that refinements of expression in a friend's servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on, and the third was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him, after all, know wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that came to. If, therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as my friend, because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever so much more. Dencher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as insisting by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the pursuit taken for granted in him, and yet felt it only in the augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established between them. Eugenio had, of course, reflected that a word to mistheal from such a pair of lips would cost him his place, but he could also rethink himself that, so long as the word never came, and it was, on the basis he had arranged impossible, he enjoyed the imagination of mounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Dencher could see, as during these minutes in the damp logger where the storm gusts were strong, and there came, in fact, for our young man, as a result of his presence, a sudden, sharp sense that everything had turned to the dismal. Something had happened, he didn't know what, and it wasn't Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought the ladies, as if their liability had been equal, were a little fatigued, just a little lethal, and without any cause named for it. It was one of the signs of what Dencher felt in him that, by a profundity, a true devil-tree of resource, he always met the latter's Italian with English, and his English with Italian. He now, as usual, slightly smiled at him in the process, but ever so slightly this time, his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing, whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace. This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other, overall they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Dencher's protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for them alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they really could have met on it. A Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges. Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such a depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equally weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash of mutual suspicion, and in presence of which, as a possibility, they were more united than disjoint. But it was to have been a moment for Dencher that nothing could ease off. Not even the formal propriety with which his interlocutor finally attended him to the portone, and bowed upon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the air had made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Dencher knew, of course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to return was not what he missed, yet he knew at the same time that what had happened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square, beyond the fondamenta that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be his consciousness, unseen enough by others, the base predicament of having, by a concatenation, just to take such things, such things as the fact that one very acute person in the world whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no disproving, no what was worst of all, even noticing. One had come to a queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable, accordingly, that the vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low. Such it was at any rate, Dencher shook it off with the more impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite of weather, and he took his course through crooked ways to the piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here in the high arcade half-Venice was crowded close, while on the mollo at the limit of the expanse the old columns of the St. Theodore and of the lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference if the difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of a welcome. There was more, but it came from that. That gave the harsh note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with, and it was to Dencher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration at a stroke of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The margin had been his name for it, for the thing that, though it had held out, could bear no shock. The shock in some form had come, and he wandered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy now with the salt spray, and the whole place in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with brown men whose hats are skew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendant jackets made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs that overflowed from the cafes were gathered, still with a pretence of service, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacle German, with his coat collar up, are took publicly of food and philosophy. These were impressions for Dentscher, too, but he had made the whole circuit thrice before he stopped short in front of Florians, with the force of his sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the cafe, he had spotted an acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused long enough to look at twice was seated well within range at a small table on which a tumbler, half emptied and evidently neglected, still remained. And though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of a French newspaper, the heading of The Figaro was visible, he stared straight before him at the little opposite Rococo wall. Dentscher had him for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity produced, however quickly all the effect of establishing connections startling and direct, and then as if it were the one thing more needed seized the look determined by a turn of the head that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being noticed. This wide of view showed him all Lord Mark. Lord Mark has encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out on that occasion as he came in, he had felt it in the hall at the time, and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognize in a few seconds as renewed meeting brought it to the surface the same potential quantity. It was a matter, the whole passage, it could only be, but of a few seconds, for as he might neither stand there to stare, nor on the other hand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, this time to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause, as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had simply faced him, as he had faced him, not placed by him, not at first, as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging fire, had then clearly come, yet no light of salutation had been struck from these certaincies. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for neither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what now mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the place at all. He couldn't have been in it long, denture as inevitably a haunter of the great meeting-ground would in that case have seen him before. He paid short visits, he was on the wing, the question for him even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come back for something, as a sequel to his earlier visit, and whatever he had come back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived but last night, or that morning, he had already made the difference. It was a great thing for denture to get this answer. He held it close, he hugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept him going and going, it made him no less restless. But it explained, and that was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in the air otherwise was too much like the breath of fate. The weather had changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible, because of Lord Mark. It was because of him, a fortiori, that the palace was closed. Denture went round again twice. He found the visitor each time as he had found him first. Once that is, he was staring before him, the next time he was looking over his Figaro, which he had opened out. Denture didn't again stop, but left him apparently unconscious of his passage, on another repetition of which Lord Mark had disappeared. He had spent but the day, he would be off that night, he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were as plain to Denture as if he had had them in words. The obscure had cleared for him, if cleared it was, there was something he didn't see, the great thing, but he saw so round it, and so close to it, that this was almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what he had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was the reason why he himself had found her door shut. He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled, as we know, was to keep thoroughly still, and he asked himself why it should prevent this, that he could feel, in connection with the crisis, so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all the benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to a crew, he shouldn't feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability so to think about it amounted for Denture during several hours to a kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides by the visible conditions sharp striking ugly to him of Lord Mark's return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there were many, was as a demonstration on the face of its sinister even to his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing it as to a certainty in a high degree nasty, to know more about it than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a visit was a dissent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to spare her. Denture had indeed drifted by the next morning to the reflection which he positively, with occasion, might have brought straight out that the only delicate and honorable way of treating a person in such a state was to treat her as he, Merton Denture, did. With time, actually, for the impression but deepened, this sense of the contrast to the advantage of Merton Denture became a sense of relief and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world, and he drew a long breath on it, as if a special danger for him had passed. Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it straight out of the way. It was he, the brute, who had stumbled into just the wrong inspiration, and who had therefore produced, for the very person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative innocence that was almost like purification. The person he had wished to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To keep still, meanwhile, was for this person more comprehensively to keep it all up, and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on consideration best, not for the day or two to go back to the palace. The day or two passed, stretched to three days, and with the effect extraordinarily that Denture felt himself in the course of them washed but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the better effect, and he was at all events in absence without the particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either of the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was impossible, the being again denied, for it made him practically answerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglect either in absence, in as much as from the moment he didn't get in, the one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health. Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him, he had only to wait, which he was actually helped to do by his feeling with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in themselves were anything but sweet. The wind and the weather lasted, the fireless cold hinted at worse, the broken charm of the world about was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and listened to the wind, listened also to the tinkles of bells, and watched for some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never came. There were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he wasn't at home he was in circulation again, as he had been at the hour of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the square with the herd of refugees, he raked the approaches in the cafes on the chance the brute, as he now regularly imagined him, might be still there. He could only be there, he knew, to be received afresh, and that, one had but to think of it, would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however, it was proved, though Dentcher's care for the question either way only added to what was most accurate in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came round to what he was doing for Millie, spending days that neither relief nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible meeting would produce? There occurred moments when, in spite of everything, he felt no straighter than another man, and yet even on the third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he wouldn't have budged for the world. He thought of the two women in their silence at last, he had all events thought of Millie, as probably for her reasons now intensely wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was with everything else in the air, but he didn't care for them any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be for the pain of it all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof, a proof of his not having stayed for the thing, the agreeable, as it were, that Cate had named. The thing Cate had named was not to have been the odium of staying in spite of hints, it was part of the odium as actual too that Cate was for her comfort just now well aloof. These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such things so soon, but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as he was in it. And this difference grew positively as his own intensity increased. She had said in the last sharp snatch of talk, sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken. Letters, never, now, think of it, impossible, so that as he had sufficiently caught her sense, into which he read all the same a strange inconsequence, they had practically wrapped their understanding in the breach of their correspondence. He had moreover on losing her done justice to her law of silence, for there was doubtless a finer delicacy in his not writing to her, than in his writing as he must have written had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and her idea had been to be noble, which in a degree was a manner. Only it left her for the pinch comparatively at ease, and it left him in the conditions peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till on the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain, with his shabby rooms looking doubtless in their confirmed dreariness, for the mere eyes of others at their worst, the grinning padrona threw open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without consciousness or care, and that her face and her veil, richly rosy with the driving wind, was, and the veil, too, as splashed as if the rain were her tears. End of book ninth, chapter two.