 Book 4 Chapter 2 of The Wings of a Dove This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, reading by Ken Campbell. That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was really no doubt what most prevailed at first for a slightly gasping American pair. It found utterance for them and their frequent remark to each other that they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped familely more than once that if she had ever known it was so easy, though her exclamation mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however, was a trifle to Miss Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that in this case she would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner, and she perhaps was on the contrary meant, for it would have been, like her, that she wouldn't have come at all. Why, it was so easy, being at any rate, a matter as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick up views. Susie kept some of these lights for the present to herself. Since freely communicated, they might have been a little disturbing, with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding the two ladies were in many cases quantities of things and of other things to talk about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was that they just had been caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave that was actually holding them aloft, and that would naturally dash them whenever it liked. They, meanwhile, we hasten to add, made the best of their precarious position, and, if Millie had no other help, for it she would have found not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd State, the girl had nothing to say to her for three days about the successes announced by Lord Mark, which they saw, besides otherwise established, she was too taken up, too touched by Susie's own exultation. Susie glowed in the light of her justified faith. Everything had happened, that she had been acute enough to think at least probable. She had appealed to the possible delicacy in Maud Manningham, a delicacy, mind you, but barely possible, and her appeal had been met in a way that was an honored human nature. This proved sensibility of the Lady of Lancaster Gate performed verily for both our friends during these first days the office of a fine floating gold dust, something that threw over the prospect of harmonizing blur. The forms, the colors behind it, were strong and deep. We have seen how they already stood out for Millie, but nothing comparatively had had so much of the dignity of truth as a fact of Maud's fidelity to a sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much more than her great place in the world, which she was more of a conscious of not as yet holy measuring. That was what the more vivid, even than her being, incenses more worldly, and in fact almost in the degree of a revelation, English and distinct and positive, with almost no inward but with the finest outward resonance. Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was large, yet it was not exactly a case as to the soul of echoing chambers. She might have been likened rather to a capricious receptacle, originally perhaps loose, but now drawn tightly as possible over its accumulated contents, a packed mass, for her American admirer of curious detail. When the latter good lady at home had handsomely figured her friends as not small, which was the way she mostly figured them, there was a certain implication that they were spacious because they were empty. Miss Louder, by a different law, was spacious because she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose with a projectile of great size loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their renewal, a charm as of sitting in springtime during a long piece on the daisy, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her psychological instinct, certainly, Miss Stringham had noted that the sentiment she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a matter of action and movement, was not, say, for the interweaving of a more frequent plumped dearest than she would herself perhaps have used, a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded with interest on this further mark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy. The joy for her was to know why she acted. The reason was half the business, whereas with Miss Louder there might have been no reason why this trivial seasoning substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg, omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Miss Louder's desire was clearly sharp that their young companion should also prosper together, and Miss Stringham's account of it all to Millie, during the first days, was that when at Lancaster Gate she was not occupied in telling as it were about her. She was occupied in hearing much of the history of her hostess's brilliant niece. They had plenty on these lines, the two elder women, to give and take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of immorality, in having to recognize that she was, as she said, carried away. She laughed to Billy when she also said that she didn't know where it would end, and the principles of her uneasiness was at Miss Louder's life bristled for her with elements that she was really having to look at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the world, the world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to it by the pilgrim fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston. It would surely have sunk the stoutest cunadar, and she couldn't pretend that she faced the prospect simply because Millie had had a caprice. She was in the act herself of having one directed precisely to their present spectacle. She could but seek strength in the thought that she had never had one, or had never yielded to one, which came to the same thing before. The sustaining sense of it all more over as a literary material that quite dropped from her. She must wait at any rate, she should see, it struck her, so far as she had got a vast obscure lurid. She reflected in the watches of the night that she was probably just going to love it for itself. That is, for itself and Millie. The odd thing is that she could think of Millie's loving it without dread, or with dread at least not on the score of conscience, only on the score of peace. It was a mercy at all events, for the hour that their two spirits jumped together. While for the first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep at Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily appeared to be indeed on the whole quite as romantically provided for. The handsome English girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a picture, stepping by magic out of its frame. It was a case in truth for which Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary of that other conceit and virtue of which Millie was the wandering princess. So what could be more in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon at the city gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the Burgesses? It was the real again evidently the amusement of the meeting for the princesses, too. Princesses living for the most part in such an appeased way on the plain of mere elegant representation. That was why they pounced at the city gates on deputed, flower-struing damsels. That was why after effigies, processions and other stately games, Frank Human Company was pleasant to them. Kate Croy really presented herself to Millie. The latter abounded for Mrs. Stringham in the counts of it as the wondrous London girl in person, by which he had conceived from far back of the London girl, conceived from the tales of travelers and the anecdotes of New York, from old pourings over punch and a liberal acquaintance with the fiction of the day. The only thing was that she was nicer, since the creature in question had rather been to our young woman an image of dread. She had thought of her at her best as handsome just as Kate was, with turns of head and tones of voice, felicities of stature and attitude things put on and, for that matter, put off all the marks of the product of a packed society, who should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story? She placed a striking young person from the first in a story, saw her by a necessity of the imagination, for a heroine felt it was the only character in which she wouldn't be wasted, and this in spite of the heroine's pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and jackets and shoes, as these things sketched themselves to Millie, and something rather of a breezy boy in the carriage of her arms and the occasional freedom of her slang. When Millie had settled that the extent of her good will itself made her shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the happiest hour they were to know, attacking and friendly independence their great London. The London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly interesting to Millie, as well as of museums, monuments, sight oddly unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course, these two rejoicing, not less in their intimacy, and each thinking the other's young woman a great acquisition for her own. Millie expressed to Susan Shepard more than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides all the rest of her history, and that if she had so good-naturely helped Miss Louder to meet them, this was exactly to create a diversion, to give herself something else to think about. But on the case thus postulated our young American had as yet had no light. She only felt that when the light should come it would greatly deepen the color, and she liked to think that she was preparing for anything. What she already knew more over was full to her vision of English, of eccentric, of Thacklerian character. Kate Croy, having gradually become not a little explicit on the subject of her situation, her past, her present, her general predicament, her small success up to the present hour, in contenting at the same time her father, her sister, her aunt, and herself. It was Millie's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that the girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, too content. It being manifest to such a creature couldn't help having. A creature, not perhaps, if one would exactly form to inspire passions, since that always implied a certain silliness, but essentially seen by the admiring eye of friendship under the clear shadow of some probably eminent male interest. The clear shadow, from whatever source projected, hung at any rate over Millie's companion the whole week, and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights in the presence alike of old masters passive in their glory, and of thoroughly new ones, the newest who bristled relentlessly with pins and brandish snipping shears. It was meanwhile a pretty part of the inner course of these young ladies, that each thought the other more remarkable than herself, than each thought of herself, or assured that the other she did, a comparatively dusty object, and the other a favorite of nature and of fortune, and covered thereby with the freshness of the morning. Kate was amused, amazed at the way her friend insisted on taking her, and Millie wondered if Kate were sincere in finding her the most extraordinary, quite a part, from her being the most charming person she had come across. They had talked in long drives and quantities of history have not been wanting, in the light of which Miss Louder's niece might superficially seem to have had the best of the argument. Her visitors' American references with their bewildering immensities, their confounding moneyed New York, their excitement of high pressure, their opportunities of wild freedom, their record of used up relatives' parents' clever, eager, fair, slim brothers, these the most loved, all engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians in the high extravagance of speculation and dissipation that had left this exquisite being her black dress, her white face, and her vivid hair as the mere last broken link. Such a picture quite threw into the shade of the brief biography, however sketchily amplified of a mere middle class nobody in Baywater. And though that indeed might be but a Baywater way of putting it, in addition to which Millie was in the stage of interest in Baywater ways, this critic so far prevailed that, like Miss Stringham herself, she fairly got her companion to accept from her that she was quite the nearest approach to a practical princess Baywater could ever hope to know. It was a fact it became one at the end of three days that Millie actually began to borrow from the handsome girl, a sort of view of her state. The handsome girl's impression of it was clearly so sincere. This impression was a tribute, a tribute positively to the power, power to the source of which was the last thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages under all their skylights, the succession of their shops being large, in which the latter easy yet the least bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that if she had had so deep a pocket, it was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of expenditure that she appeared to charge your friend, but with not having the imagination of terror of thrift, the imagination or in any degree the habit of conscious dependence on others, such moments when all Wingmore Street for instance seemed to rustle about and the pale girl herself to be facing the different rustlers, unusually so undiscriminated as individual Britons too, Britain's personnel, parties to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically remarkable, such moments in a special determined for Kate a perception of high happiness of her companion's liberty. Millie's range was thus immense. She had asked nobody for anything to referring nothing to any one. Her freedom, her fortune, and her fancy were her law, an obsequious world surrounded her. She could sniff up at every step its fumes, and Kate these days was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss in the phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on together, she would abide in that generosity. She had at such a point as this is no suspicion of a rift within the loot, by which we mean not only none of any things coming between them, but none of any definite flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet all the same if Millie and Mrs. Lauder's banquet had described herself to Lord Mark as kindly used by the young women on the other side, because of some faintly felt special propriety in it. So there really did match with this privately on the young woman's part, a feeling not analyzed but divided, a latent impression that Mildred Theel was not, after all, a person to change places, to change even chances with. Kate Verily would perhaps not quite have known what she meant by this discrimination, and she came near naming it only when she said to herself that rich as Millie was one probably wouldn't, which was singular, ever hate her for it. The handsome girl had with herself these felicities and crudities. It wasn't obscure to her that without some very particular reason to help it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who as a girl so easily might have been like herself, only vague and cruelly female. She was by no means sure of liking Aunt Maude as much as she deserved, and Aunt Maude's command of funds was obviously inferior to Millie's. There was thus clearly, as pleading for the latter, some influence that would later on become distinct, and meanwhile decidingly, it was enough that she was as charming as she was queer, and as queer as she was charming, all of which was a rare amusement as well, for that matter, as further sufficient that there were objects of value that she had already pressed on Kate's acceptance. A week of her society and these conditions, conditions that Millie chose to sum up as ministering immensely for a blind vague pilgrim to aid and comfort, announce itself from an early hour as likely to become a week of presence, acknowledgments, mementos, pledges of gratitude and admiration that were all on one side. Kate has promptly embraced the propriety of making it clear that she must forceware shops till she should receive some guarantee that the contents of each one she entered as a humble companion shouldn't be placed at her feet. Yet that was in truth not before she had found herself in possession under whatever protests of several precious ornaments and other minor conveniences. Great was the absurdity to that there should have come a day by the end of the week when it appeared that all Millie would have asked in definite return, as might be said, was to be told little about Lord Mark and to be promised the privilege of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far other amusements had been offered her, but her eagerness was shamelessly human, and she seemed really to count more on the revelation of the anxious lady at Chelsea than on the best nights of the opera. Kate admired and it showed such an absence of fear. To the fear of being bored in such a connection she would have been so obviously entitled. Millie's answer to this was the plea of her curiosities, which left her friend wondering as to their odd direction. Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young lady's account of him at the same time professed itself frankly imperfect, for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had to show, something that either for them or against could be touched or named or proved, and she could think of no other case of a value taken as so great and yet flourishing untested. His value was his future, which had somehow got itself as accepted by Aunt Baud as if it had been his good cook or his steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she thought him a humbug. He might do great things, but they were as yet, so to speak, all he had done. On the other hand it was of course something of an achievement, and not open to everyone to have got oneself taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best thing about him, doubtless on the whole, was that Aunt Maud believed in him. She was often fantastic, but she knew a humbug, and no, Lord Mark wasn't that. He had been a short time in the house on the Tory side, but had lost his seat on the first opportunity, and this was all he had to point to. However, he pointed to nothing which was very possibly just a sign of his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common with the really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted that there was a good deal for her view of him to bring up the rear, and he wasn't meanwhile himself indifferent. Indifferent to himself, for he was working Lancaster Gate for all it was worth, just as it was, no doubt, working him, and just as the working and the worked were in London, as one might explain, the parties to every relation. Kate did explain, for her listening friend, every one who had anything to give. It was true they were the fewest, made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at last its value in return. The strangest thing furthermore was that this might be in cases a happy understanding. The worker in one connection was the worked in another, and it was as broad as it was long, with the wheels of the system, as might be seen wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite like Lord Mark and as Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, like Miss Louder, since if he didn't he was a greater brute than one could believe. She, Kate, hadn't yet, it was true, made out what he was doing for her, besides which the dear woman needed him, even at the most he could do, much less what she imagined. So far as all of which went, moreover, there were plenty of things on every side she hadn't yet made out. She believed on the whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up, and she gave it to Millie, as we're thinking of that, whatever wonderful people this young lady might meet in the land, she would meet no more extraordinary women. There were greater celebrities by the million and of course greater swells, but a higher person, by Kate's view, and a larger natural handful every way, would really be far to seek. When Millie inquired with interest if Kate's belief in her was primarily on the lines of what Miss Louder took up, her interlocutress could handsomely say yes, since by the same principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt Maud's niece preeminently had Aunt Maud taken up, and who was thus more in the current with her of working and of being worked? You may ask Kate said, what in the world I have to give? And that indeed is just what I'm trying to learn. There must be something for her to think she can get it out of me. She will get it, trust her, and then I shall see what it is. Which I beg you to believe I should never have found out for myself. She declined to treat any question of Millie's own paying power, as discussable, that Millie would pay a hundred percent, and even to the end doubtless, through the nose was just a beautiful basis on which they found themselves. These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries of gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became quickly, between the pair, the common form of talk. Millie, professing herself delighted to know that something was to be done with her, if the most remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better, and if the most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand together, why what could be jollier for each? When she reflected indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting to at once, Kate had made the natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She invariably gave way to feeling and feeling had distinctly popped up in her on the advent of her girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump was always in the presence of anything that moved her. Interesting to see, visibly enough, moreover, it hadn't for a long time jumped anything like so far. This in fact, as we already know, remained a marvel for Millie Thiel, who, on sight of Miss Louder, had found fifty links in respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different, a failure of which endlessly mystified her. But in her mystification was the cause for her of another fine impression, in as much as when she went so far as to observe to Kate that Susan Shepard, and especially Susan Shepard emerging so uninvited from the irrelevant past, ought by all the propriety simply to have bored Aunt Maude. Her confidant agreed to this without a protest and abounded in a sense of her wonder. Susan Shepard at least bore the niece. That was plain. This young woman saw nothing in her, nothing to account for anything, not even for Millie's own indulgence, which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind of fact of significance. It was the light on the handsome girl representing more than merely showed that poor Susie was simply as not to her. This was in a manner, too, a general adomination to poor Susie's companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she had best most look out. It just faintly rattled her, and that a person who was good enough to spare for Millie Theel shouldn't be good enough for another girl. Though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Miss Louder herself the impatience. Mrs. Louder didn't feel it, and Kate Croy felt it with ease, yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason that the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least bit brutal, too? And didn't she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal, which Millie and Hither, too, benightingly supposed the only way. She wasn't even aggressively so, but rather indifferently, defensively, and as might be said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they say in New York, going to like. In that way, at least, people were clearly quicker in England than at home, and Millie could quite see after a little how such instincts might become usual in a world in which dangers abounded. There were clearly more dangers round about Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream of in Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there were more precautions, and was a remarkable world altogether in which there could be precautions on whatever ground against Susie. Reading by Loche Rolander The Wings of the Dub by Henry James Book Fourth, Chapter Three She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance she might have had privately to extend the tepid appreciation, since the late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four o'clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to anyone about anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepard at midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have been mentioned, she hadn't yet, hadn't, that is, at the end of six days produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Loder for a change in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had sociably revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies in the admirable equipache appointed to Millie at the hotel, a heavier, more emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever with stables notoriously mismanaged, known at home, whereby in the course of the circuit, more than once repeated. It had come out, as Mrs. Stringham said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were of all people acquainted with Mildred's other English friend, the gentleman the one connected with the English newspaper. Susie hung fire a little over his name, who had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present adventures. He had been named, of course, in Battersea Park, else he couldn't have been identified, and Susie had naturally, before she could produce her own share in the matter as a kind of confession to make it plain that her illusion was to Mr. Merton Denture. This was because Millie had at first a little air of not knowing whom she meant, and the girl really kept as well a certain control of herself while she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance won in a thousand. They knew him, both Morden and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered to rather well, though indeed it wasn't on any show of intimacy that he had happened to be mentioned. It hadn't been, Susie made the point, she herself who brought him in. He had in fact not been brought in at all, but only referred to as a young journalist known to Mrs. Loder and who had lately gone to their wonderful country. Mrs. Loder always said, your wonderful country, on behalf of his journal. But Mrs. Stringham had taken it up with the tips of her fingers indeed, and that was the confession. She had without meaning any harm recognized Mr. Denture as an acquaintance of Millie's, though she had also pulled herself up before getting in too far. Mrs. Loder had been struck clearly, it wasn't too much to say, then she also, it had rather seemed, had pulled herself up, and there had been a little moment during which each might have been keeping something from the other. Only, said Millie's informant, I luckily remembered in time that I had nothing whatever to keep, which was much simpler and nicer. I don't know what Maude has, but there it is. She was interested distinctly in your knowing him, in his having met you over there, with so little loss of time. But I venture to tell her it hadn't been so long as to make you as yet great friends. I don't know if I was right. Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there had been moments enough in the matter now, before the elder woman's conscience had done itself justice, to enable Millie to reply that although the fact in question doubtless had its importance, she imagined they wouldn't find the importance overwhelming. It was odd that their one Englishman should so instantly fit. It wasn't, however, miraculous. They surely all had often seen how extraordinarily small, as everyone said, was the world. Undoubtedly also Susie had done just the plain thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the world should there be a mystery, and what an immense one they would appear to have made if he should come back and find they had concealed their knowledge of him? I don't know, Susie dear, the girl observed, what you think I have to conceal. It doesn't matter at a given moment, Mrs. Stringham returned, what you know or don't know as to what I think, for you always find out the very next minute, and when you do find out, dearest, you never really care. Only, she presently asked, have you heard of him from Miss Croy? Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven't mentioned him. Why should we? That you haven't, I understand, but that your friend hasn't, Susie opined, may mean something. May mean what? Well, Mrs. Stringham presently brought up, I tell you all when I tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be better for the present not to speak of him, not to speak of him to her niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first, but Maud thinks she won't. Millie was ready to engage for anything, but in respect to the facts, as they so far possessed them, it all sounded a little complicated. Is it because there's anything between them? No, I gather not, but Maud's state of mind is precautionary. She's afraid of something, or perhaps it would be more correct to say she's afraid of everything. She's afraid, you mean? Millie asked, of their liking each other? Susie had an intense thought, and then an effusion. My dear child, we move in a labyrinth. Of course we do. That's just the fun of it, said Millie, with a strange gait. Then she added, Don't tell me that. In this, for instance, there are not abysses. I want abysses. Her friend looked at her. It was not unfrequently the case. A little harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require, and another person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much her disposition, no doubt to treat her young companion's words as symptoms of an imputed malady. It was nonetheless, however, her highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be quaint, with a new quaintness, the great Boston gift. It had been happily her note in the magazines, and Maud Loder, to whom it was new indeed, and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite cherished her as a social resource, by reason of it. It shouldn't therefore fail her now, with it, in fact, one might face most things. And then let us hope we shall sound the depth. I'm prepared for the worst of sorrow and sin, but she would like her niece. We're not ignorant of that. Are we? To marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so? Hasn't Mrs. Loder told me? No, hasn't Kate. It isn't you know that she doesn't know it. Mealy had under her comrades' eyes a minute of mute detachment. She had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy, as deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly in talk in many directions proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her as, in a clear cold wave, that there was a possible account of their relations, in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have figured a small, a smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She couldn't say at any rate whether or no Kate had made the point that her aunt assigned her for Lord Mark. It had only sufficiently come out, which had been moreover eminently guessable, that she was involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Mealy, brush it over nervously as she might, and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt extrusion of Mr. Dencher altered all the proportions, had an effect on all values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she couldn't in the least have defined, and she was at least, even during these instances, rather proud of being able to hide on the spot the difference it did make. Yet all the same the effect for her was, almost violently, of that gentleman's having been there, having been where she had stood till now in her simplicity before her. It would have taken but another free moment to make her see the abysses, since abysses were what she wanted in the mere circumstance of his own silence in New York about his English friends. There had really been in New York little time for anything, but had she liked, Mealy could have made it out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been elaborate, which was absurd in view of all the other things too he couldn't possibly have spoken of, this was exactly what must suit her, since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie. These things however came and went, and it set itself up between the companions for the occasion in the oddest way, both that they're happening all to know Mr. Denture, except indeed that Susie didn't, but probably would, was a fact attached in a world of rushing about to one of the common orders of chance, and yet further that it was amusing, oh awfully amusing, to be able fondly to hope that there was something in its having been left to crop up with such suddenness. There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the air might in a manner have undergone some pleasing preparation, though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have taken some threshing out. The truth moreover, and there they were already, our pair talking about it, the truth hadn't in fact quite cropped out, this obviously in view of Mrs. Loader's request to her old friend. It was accordingly on Mrs. Loader's recommendation that nothing should be said to Kate. It was on all this might cover in Aunt Maude that the idea of an interesting complication could best hope to perch, and when in fact, after the colloquy we have reported, Millie saw Kate again without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the newer by its containing measurably a small element of anxiety, when she had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more free, yet it was nonetheless rather exciting to be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate continued even now pre-eminently to remain for her, and a reason this was the great point of which the young woman herself could have no suspicion. Twice over thus for two or three hours together, Millie found herself seeing Kate quite fixing her in the light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Dentious Eyes had more or less familiarly rested, and which by the same token had looked rather more beautiful than less into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with a thought that it had inevitably looked as beautifully as one would into a thousands of faces, in which one might oneself never trace it, but just the odd result of the thought was to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as the other, the not fully calculable. It was fantastic, and Millie was aware of this, but the other side was what had of a sudden been turned straight toward her by the show of Mr. Dentious propinquity. She hadn't the excuse of knowing it for Kate's own, since nothing whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind, it was with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went, kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked as usual of everything but, as it had so abruptly become for Millie, the thing. Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply a difference in this pair of occasions, hadn't she been tasting so peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter hadn't mainly been that she herself was so other, so taken up with the unspoken. The strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it, she became conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Millie Thiel should give her to feel. Kate would never, and not from ill will nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common terms, reduce it to such a one's comprehension or put it within her convenience. It was a such a one, therefore, that for three or four days more, Millie watched Kate as judge such another, and it was presently as such a one that she threw herself into their promised visit at last achieved to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlisle, the field of exercise of his ghost, his votaries and the residence of poor Marianne, so often referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our young woman's first view of poor Marianne, everything gave way but the sense of how in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters could be opposed. How common ground for a place in the world could quite fail them. A state of things sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical and aristocratic order. Just aware about seeing the order, Mrs. Loder had established her niece was a question not fully void as yet, no doubt of ambiguity. Though Millie was with all sure Lord Mark could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same time for Aunt Maude herself, but it was clear Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been said, in quite another geography. She wouldn't have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if her visitor had turned over page after page together before the final relief of their benevolent hair. The interval was bridged, of course, but the bridge barely was needed, and the impression left Millie to wonder if, in the general connection, it were of bridges or of intervals that the spirit, not locally disciplined, would find itself most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast there were neither, neither the difference itself from position to position, nor on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the conscious sinking of a consciousness that made up for it. The conscious sinking at all events, and the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas, these, it was to be confessed, had a little for our young lady, in default to stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary legend, a mixed wondering echo of Trollop of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens, under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening, that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear that the adored author of the new comes, in fine, had been on the whole the note, the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of Pequician outline. She explained how she meant by this, that Mrs. Condrip hadn't altogether proved another Mrs. Nicolby, nor even, for she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate had spoken, a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Mia Corber. Mrs. Stringham in the Midnight Conference intimated rather journeingly, that, however the event might have turned, the sight of English life such experiences opened to Milly's, for just those she herself seen booked, as they were all round about her now, always saying to miss, she had begun to have a little for her fellow observer, these moments of fanciful reaction, reaction in which she was once more all Susan Shepherd, against the high swear of colder conventions, into which her overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had wrapped her. Milly never lost sight for long of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always there to meet it when it came up, and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently, to pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for it. They had, however, tonight another matter in hand, which proved to be presently, on the girl's part in respect to her hour of Chelsea, the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small complaint, had suddenly, without its being in the least led up to, broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with impatience as a person in love with her sister. She wished me if I cared for Kate to know, Milly said, for it would be quite too dreadful, and one might do something. Susie wondered, prevent anything coming of it? That's easily said, do what? Milly had a dim smile. I think that what she would like is that I should come a good deal to see her about it. And doesn't she suppose you have anything else to do? The girl had by this time clearly made it out, nothing but to admire and make much of her sister, whom she doesn't however herself in the least understand, and give up once time and everything else to it? He struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented approach to sharpness, as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather indescribably disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham seen her companion exalted, and by the very play of something within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was the great thing with Milly. It was her characteristic poetry, or at least it was Susan Shepards. But she made a point, the former continued, am I keeping what she says from Kate? I'm not to mention that she has spoken. And why, Mrs. Stringham presently asked, is Mr. Dencher so dreadful? Milly had she thought a delay to answer something that suggested a fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip, then she inclined perhaps to report. It isn't so much he himself. Then the girl spoke a little as for the romance of it. One could never tell with her where romance would come in. It's the state of his fortunes. And is that very bad? He has no private means, and no prospect of any. He has no income, and no ability according to Mrs. Condrip to make one. He is as poor she calls it as poverty, and she says she knows what that is. Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something. But is antique brilliantly clever? Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. I haven't the least idea. To which for the time Susie only replied, oh, though by the end of a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing, I see, and that in turn with, it's quite what Mod Loder thinks, that he'll never do anything. No, quite the contrary, that he's exceptionally able. Oh, yes, I know. Milly had again in reference to what her friend had already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. But Mrs. Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any such person. Mr. Denscher, she holds, that's the way, at any rate, it was explained to me, won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he were public, she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him. If he were rich, without being anything else, she'd do her best to swallow him. As it is, she taboos him. In short, said Mrs. Stringham, as with a private purpose, she told you the sister all about it, but Mrs. Loder likes him, she added. Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that. Well, she does all the same, my dear, extremely. Then there it is, on which with a drop and one of those sudden, slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux of a general fatigue that had recently more than once marked themselves for a companion, Milly turned away. Yet the matter wasn't left, so that night between them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said, which had first come back to it, Milly's own nearest approach, at least, for a little to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all, everyone they saw, to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh, not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came as a subject for indifference. Money did easier to some people than to others. She made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have told by any too crude transparency of air what place it held for Maude Manningham. She did her wordliness with grand proper silences, if it mightn't better be put perhaps, that she did her detachment with grand occasional pushes. However, Susie put it in truth, she was really, injustice to herself, thinking of the difference as favourites of fortune between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maude sat somehow in the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if with a masterful high manner about it, her manner of looking hard and bright as if it weren't there. Milly about hers had no manner at all, which was possibly from a point of view a fault. She was at any rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in order to get at her nature, to traverse by whatever avenue any piece of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Loder was keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions that would figure as large, as honourably unselfish on the day they should take effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a person or two shouldn't lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn't be imputed. There was nobody she was supposable as interested for. It was too soon, since she wasn't interested for herself. Even the richest woman at her age lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple, sublime without it, whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it or not, and with it, for that matter, in the event would really be these things just as much. Only then she might very well have liked Aunt Maude a manner. Such were the connections at all events, in which the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flicked up, in which it came round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself in the afternoon named Mr. Dencher as an acquaintance. Oh, no! I said nothing of having seen him, I remembered, the girl explained. Mrs. Loader's wish. But that her friend observed after a moment was for silence to Kate. Yes, but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate. Why so, since she must dislike to talk about him? Mrs. Condrip must, Milly thought. What she would like most is that her sister should be brought to think ill of him, and if anything she can tell her will help that. But the girl dropped suddenly here as if her companion would see. Her companion's interest, however, was all for what she herself saw. You mean she'll immediately speak? Mrs. Stringham gathered that this was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. How will it be against him that you know him? Oh, how can I say? It won't be so much once knowing him as once having kept it out of sight. Ah, said Mrs. Stringham, as for comfort, you haven't kept it out of sight. Isn't it much rather me scrawl herself, who has? It isn't my acquaintance with him, Milly smiled, that she has disemulated. She has disemulated only her own? Well, then the responsibility serves. Ah, but said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence. She has a right to do as she likes. Then, so my dear, have you, smiled Susan Shepherd. Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. We're not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, yet. I only meant, Mrs. Stringham explained, that I don't see what Mrs. Condrip would gain. By her being able to tell Kate, Milly thought, I only meant that I don't see what I myself should gain. But it will have to come out, that he knows you both, sometimes. Milly scarce assented. Do you mean when he comes back? He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to. I take it to cut either of you for the sake of the other. This placed the question at last, on a basis more distinctly cheerful. I might get at him somehow beforehand, the girl suggested. I might give him what they call here the tip, that he's not to know me when we meet, or better still, I mightn't be here at all. Do you want to run away from him? It was oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. I don't know what I want to run away from. It is spelled on the spot something to the elder woman's ear, in the sad sweet sound of it, any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her, that the relation might have been a flow, like some island on the south, in a great warm sea, that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer swear of general emotion, and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular, was to make the sea submerge the island. The margin flood the text, the great wave now for a moment swept over. I'll go anywhere else in the world you like, but Milly came up through it. Dear old Susie, how I do work you. Oh, this is nothing yet. No, indeed, to what it will be. You are not, and it's vain to pretend, said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, as sound and strong as I insist on having you. Insist, insist the more the better, but the day I look as sound and strong as that, you know, Milly went on. On that day I shall be just sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly forever. That's where one is, she continued, thus agreeably, to embroider, when even one's most poor moments aren't such as to qualify, so far as appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die no doubt as if I were alive, which will happen to be as you want me, so you see, she wound up. You'll never really know where I am, except indeed when I'm gone, and then you'll only know where I'm not. I die for you, said Susan Shepherd after a moment. Thanks awfully, then stay here for me. But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next weeks. Then we'll go back, Susie blenched, back to America. No, abroad, to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean, by your staying here for me, Milly pursued. You're staying with me wherever I may be, even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No, she insisted. I don't know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn't matter, and I daresay it's quite true. She broke off, that everything will have to come out. Her friend would have felt over that she joked about it now. Hadn't her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such unnameable shades that her contrasts were never sharp? She made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth. If she hadn't, that is, been at times as earnest as might have been like, so she was certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. I must face the music. It isn't at any rate it's coming out, she added. It's that Mrs. Condrick would put the fact before her to his injury. Her companion wondered, but how to his? Why, if he pretends to love her? And does he only pretend? I mean, if trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far as to make up to other people. The amendment, however, brought Soothe in, as with Gayety, for a comfortable end. Did he make up the false creature to you? No, but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to believe. That, given the fact of his having evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been already if you had a little bit led him on. Millie neither accepted nor qualified this. She only said after a moment, as with the conscious excess of the pensive. No, I don't think she'd quite wish to suggest that I made up to him. For that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. She added, and now at last as with the supreme impatience, that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him to do him in her sister's mind a useful ill turn. Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for her motive as would have set gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners, but that was what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment to make out how many her young friend had actually undertaken to see round. Finally, too, weren't they braving the deeps? They got their amusement where they could. Isn't it only, she asked, rather probable, she'd see that Kate's knowing him as, what's the pretty old word, Boulage? Well, she hadn't filled out her idea, but neither it seemed could merely. Well, might but do what that often does, by all our blessed little laws and arrangements at least, excite Kate's own sentiment instead of depressing it. The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. Kate's own sentiment? Oh, she didn't speak of that, I don't think, she added, as if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression. I don't think Mrs. Condropimadian's she's in love. It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. Then what's her fear? Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly himself keeping it up, the fear of some final result from that. Oh, said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted, she looks far ahead. At this, however, merely threw off another of her sudden vague sports. No, it's only we who do. Well, don't let us be more interested for them than they are for themselves. Certainly not, the girl promptly assented. A certain interest nevertheless remained. She appeared to wish to be clear. It wasn't of anything of Kate's own part, she spoke. You mean she thinks her sister distinctly doesn't care for him? It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she meant, but there it presently was. If she did care, Mrs. Condrop would have told me. What Susan Shepard seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then they had been talking so. But did you ask her? Ah, no. Oh, said Susan Shepard. Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't have asked her for the world. End of book 4, chapter 3, read by Lars Rolander. Book 5, chapter 1 of The Wings of the Dub. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Lars Rolander. The Wings of the Dub by Henry James, section 10. Book 5, chapter 1. Lord Mark looked at her today in particular as if to ring from her a confession that she had originally done him injustice, and he was entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage of merit, that his intention really in a manner took effect. He cared about something, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she were confessing. All the while it was quite the case that neither justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He had presented himself at the hotel, and had found her, and had found Susan Shepard at home. Had been civil to Susan, it was just that shade, and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it, and then had come again and missed them, and then had come and found them once more, besides letting them easily see that if it hadn't, by this time been the end of everything, which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the season at its last gasp, the places they might have liked to go to were such as they would have had only to mention. Their feelings was, or at any rate their modest general plea, that there was no place they would have liked to go to, there was only the sense of finding they liked, wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was highly the case as to their current consciousness, which could be indeed in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course, impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering they had been led up to it, and if it had been still, their habit to look at each other across distances for increase of unanimity, his hand could have been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He had administered the touch, that under light analysis made the difference, the difference of their not having lost, as Suzy on the spot and at the hour, phrased it again and again, both for herself and for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and interesting an experience. The difference also, in fact, for Mrs. Loader's not having lost it either, though it was superficially with Mrs. Loader they had come, and though it was further with that lady, that our young woman was directly engaged during the half hour or so of her most agreeable inward response to the scene. The great historic house had for mealy beyond terrace and garden, as the center of an almost extravagantly grand vator composition, a tone as of old gold kept down by the quality of the air, summer full flushed but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much by her measure for the previous hour, appeared in connection with this revelation of it, to have happened to her a quantity expressed in introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armor, of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea tables, in an assault of reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of a pointed felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy murmurous welcome, the honored age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned the draft, the essence of which might have struck the girl as distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted from somebody. While a fuller flood somehow kept bearing her up, all the freshness of response of her young life, the freshness of the first and only crime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax was the fact of her appearing to make out through Aunt Maud what was really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor, shaky maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the matter, for that was positively what, on Missy's loader's part, it came to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life, since the brilliant life as one had faintly figured it, just was humanly led, that all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy. Still, letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal, for one to be able to take in so comfortably one's companions broad blandness. You must stay among us, you must stay, anything else is impossible and ridiculous, you don't know yet, no doubt, you can't, but you will soon enough, you can stay in any position. It had been as the murmur's consecration to follow the murmur's welcome, and even if it were but part of Aunt Maude's own spiritual ebriety, for the dear woman one could see was spiritually keeping the day. It served to Millie then and afterwards as a high-water mark of the imagination. It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the other day, at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was a success. The key thus again struck, and though no distinct, no numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as much, and all gratuitous and genial, if in portions, not exactly hitherto three revelation, as three unprepared weeks could have been expected to produce. Mrs. Loder had improvised a rush for them, but out of elements, as Millie was now a little more freely aware, somewhat roughly combined. Therefore, if at this very instant she had her reasons for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close reasons completely personal, she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the admirable picture still would show Aunt Maude as not absolutely sure either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was doing, Millie might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Millie. It was fine, the girl fully felt the way she did talk her. Little as, at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful absorption of iced coffee, qualified by a sharp doubt of her wisdom, that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her feel that this relation was charming. It might once more simply have been that everything, anything was charming when one was so justly and completely charmed, but frankly she hadn't supposed anything so serenely sociable could settle itself between them as the friendly understanding that was at present somehow in the air. There were many of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on the stretcher's ward as a temple of refreshment, and that had happened to have the property which was all to the good of making Millie think of a durbar. Her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, through which further the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of native princes, familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious term. And Lord Mark would have done for one of these, even though for choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family. The Lancaster Gate family he clearly intended, in which he included its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy, a young person blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her, and she was the handsomest thing there. This lost a declaration made by Millie, in a sort of soft midsummer madness, a straight skylock flight of charity to Aunt Maud. Kate had for her new friend's eyes the extraordinary and attaching property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the imagination for the time make what it would of them, make her merely a person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but to us above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given her as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this sense, which sprang up at its own hours, a once being as curious about her as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon as Millie had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her knowledge of Merton Densher. She had looked then other, and as Millie knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective, and our young woman had foreseen it of her on the spot that she would often look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon, and Millie, who had amusement so thought that were like the secreces of a little girl playing with dolls, when conventionally too big, could almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus intermittently a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named, and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably ways enough on these lines for such a consciousness. Another of them would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses. Millie wasn't fully sure she herself knew what great social uses might be, unless, as a good example, to exert just that sort of glamour in just that sort of frame where one of them she would have fallen back on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend. It imputed a primeness all round to be reduced but to saying by way of a translation of one's amusement that she was always so right, since that too often was what the insupportables themselves were. Yet it was in overflow to aunt Maude what she had to content herself with all, save for the lame enhancement of saying she was lovely. It served, despite everything, the purpose, strengthen the bond that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its drop of rose color from Mrs. Loader's own view. That was really the view Millie had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself to immediately taking in, but it didn't prevent the continued play of those swift crosslights, odd beguilments of the mind at which we have already glanced. Mrs. Loader herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world. She expressed no more surprise than that at her rightness today. Didn't it by this time sufficiently shine out that it was precisely as the very luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, being appraised and waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the circumstance nonetheless made clear that they were all swimming together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again as he seemed slowly to pass and repass, and conveniently to linger before them. He was personally the note of the blue, like a suspended skein of silk within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maude's free-moving shuttle took a length of him at rhythmic intervals, and one of the accessory truths that flickered across to Millie was that he ever so consentingly knew that he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with her at Mrs. Loader's expense, which she would have none of. She wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he wouldn't have launched them at match them, or whatever it was he had done, only for Aunt Maude's bore you. What he had done, it would have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in vain to do, and what they were all now profiting by was a change comparative with sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused the cessation easily showed itself as none of Millie's business, and she was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation that he might absolutely have been saying to her, Yes, let the dear woman take her own tone. Since she is here, she may stay. He might have been adding, for whatever she can make of it, but you and I are different. Millie knew she was different in truth. His own difference was his own affair, but also she knew that after all, even at their distinctest Lord Mark's tips in this line would be tacit. He practically placed her. It came round again to that, under no obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease. Moreover, her letting Mrs. Loader take a tone. She might have taken twenty. They would have spoiled nothing. You must stay on with us. You can, you know, in any position you lie. Any, any, any, my dear child. And her emphasis went deep. You must make your home with us, and it's really open to you to make the most beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake, under any of any sort, and you must let us all think for you a little. Take care of you and watch over you. Above all, you must help me with Kate, and you must stay a little for her. Nothing for a long time has happened to me so good, as that you and she should have become friends. It's beautiful. It's great. It's everything. What makes it perfect is that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie restored to me after so many years by such a miracle. No, that's more charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been good to one, positively, for I couldn't at my age have made a new friend, undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's like changing one's bankers after fifty one doesn't do that. That's why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper, coming back at last as straight as out of a fairy tale, and with you as an attending fairy. Millie hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender it's trimming, but Aunt Maude wasn't to be deterred by a weak joke from keeping it up. The young person under her protection could feel besides that she kept it up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her affections and her views were moving as never before in concert. Unquestionably, she loved Susie, but she also loved Kate and loved Lord Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved everyone within range, down to the very servant who came to receive Millie's empty ice plate, down for that matter to Millie herself, who was while she talked really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle, a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet for wishing purposes of one's own was a thing to be on rather than under. Still, however, if the girl should fail of breath, it wouldn't be. She could feel by Mrs. Loader's fault. One of the last things she was afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maude's going on to say that she and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything. It was for Kate, of course, she was essentially planning, but the plan enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Millie's prosperity too for its full operation. Just as Millie's prosperity at the same time involved Kate's, it was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it was comprehensive and genial, and it made our young woman understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities, as well as characterizations that had fallen from Susan Shepard. One of the most frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maude was a grand natural force. End of book fifth, chapter one, read by Lars Rolander. Book fifth, chapter two of The Wings of the Dub. This is a LibriVox recording. Only LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Lars Rolander. The Wings of the Dub by Henry James. Book fifth, chapter two. A prime reason we must add why sundry impressions were not to be fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this stage with an effect of sharp suppression to a detached quarter of an hour, her only one with Lord Mark. Have you seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one that's so like you? He was asking that as he stood before her, having come up at last with his smooth intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her of wasn't quite a reason for his having no joy at all. I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures, but if I'm like anything so beautiful as most of them seem to me, it needed in short for Millie some evidence which she only wanted to supply. She was the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away, the more easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round her its mystic circle. Their progress meanwhile was not of the straightest, it was an advance without haste through innumerable natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly in couples in clusters who brought them to stand with an inveterate. I say, Mark, what they said she never quite made out. It was there also domestically knowing him, and is knowing them that mainly struck her. While her impression for the rest was but a fell of strollers, more vaguely afloat than themselves, super-numeraries mostly a little battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for continuance as long again, and they gave her in special, collectively, a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of friendly, empty words and kind lingering eyes, that took somehow pardonable liberties. The lingering eyes looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed simplicity, with a pointless I say, Mark, and what was really most flagrant of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't mind, he seemed to suggest there letting people, poor dear things, have the benefit of her. The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in the benefit measured by him in mere manner, for wonderful of a truth, was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis, that her present good nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild common carnival of good nature, a mass of London people together, of sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other, and who, in their way, did no doubt confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was there, questions about her would be passing, the easiest thing was to run the gauntlet with him, just as the easiest thing was in fact to trust him generally. Couldn't she know for herself passively how little harm they meant her, to that extent that it made no difference whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Millie was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference, with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilization at its highest. It was so little her fault, this oddity of what had gone round about her, that to accept it without question might be as good a way as another of feeling like. It was inevitable to supply the probable description that of the awfully rich young American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all accounts, to know. And she had really but one instant of speculation as to fables or fantasies perhaps originally launched. She asked herself once only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her, for the question on the spot was really blown away forever. She had from the first hour the conviction of her being precisely the person in the world, least possibly a trumpeter. So it wasn't their fault, it wasn't their fault, and anything might happen that would and everything now again melted together, and kind eyes were always kind eyes, if it were never to be worse than that. She got with her companion into the house. They brushed beneficently past all their accidents. The broncina was it appeared deep within, and the long afternoon light lingered for them on patches of old color and waylade them, as they went in nooks and opening vistas. It was all the while for Millie as if Lord Mark had really had something other than this spoken pretext in view, as if there was something he wanted to say to her and were only, consciously, yet not awkwardly, just delicately hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture, since what it appeared to mount to was, Do let a fellow who isn't a fool take care of you a little. The thing has somehow with the aid of the broncino was done. It hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were a fool or no. But now, just where they were, she liked his not being, and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of the same sound as Mrs. Loader's so recent reminder. She too wished to take care of her, and wasn't it a peu près what all the people with the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together, the beauty, and the history, and the facility, and the splendid Midsommar Glow. It was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis, coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was, as she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in particular. It wasn't she herself who said all. She couldn't help that. It came, and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair, as wonderful as he had said, the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn down to the hands, and splendidly dressed, her face almost livid in you, yet handsome in sadness, and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must be for fading with time have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events with her slightly Michelangelo-square-ness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage, only unaccompanied by a joy, and she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. I shall never be better than this. He smiled for her at the portrait. Then she? You'd scarce need to be better, for surely that's well enough. But you are, one feels, as it happens, better, because splendid as she is, one doubts if she was good. He hadn't understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to him, and she didn't care if for the minute he noticed her tears. It was probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was perhaps as good a moment as she should have with anyone, or have in any connection whatever. I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it. Though he still didn't understand her, he was as nice as if he had. He didn't ask for instance, and that was just a part of his looking after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a world of practice in it. Oh, we must talk about these things. As they had already done that, she knew as much as she ever would, and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a world on her side of slowness. I wish I could see the resemblance. Of course, her complexion's green, she laughed, but mine several shades greener. It's down to the very hands, said Lord Mark. Her hands are large, Millie went on, but mine are larger, mine are huge. Oh, you go her all round one better, which is just what I said, but you repair. You must surely catch it, he added as if it were important to his character, as a serious man not to appear to have invented his plea. I don't know. One never knows oneself. It's a funny fancy, and I don't imagine it would have occurred. I see it has occurred. He had already taken her up. She had her back as she faced the picture to one of the doors of the room, which was open. And on her turning, as she spoke, she saw that they were in the presence of three other persons also, as appeared interested in choirs. Kate Croy was one of these. Lord Mark had just become aware of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen and made the best of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was showing Millie, and he took her straight away as a reinforcement. Kate herself had spoken, however, before he had a time to tell her so. You had noticed, too? She smiled at him without looking at Millie. Then I'm not original, which one always hopes one has been, but the likeness is so great. And now she looked at Millie, for whom again it was all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. Yes, there you are, my dear, if you want to know, and you're superb. She took now but a glance at the picture, though it was enough to make a question to her friend not too straight. Isn't she superb? I brought me steel, Lord Mark explained to the latter, quite of my own bad. I wanted Lady Old Shaw, Kate continued to Millie, to see for herself. Le grand esprit c'est recontrente, laughed her attendant gentleman, a high but slightly stooping, shambling, and wavering person who represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front teeth, and whom Millie vaguely took for some sort of great man. Lady Old Shaw meanwhile looked at Millie quite as if Millie had been the Broncino and the Broncini only Millie. Still far above the course I had noticed you. It is wonderful. She went on with her back to the picture, but with some other eagerness which Millie felt gathering, felt directing her motions now. It was enough, they were introduced, and she was saying, I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming. She wasn't fresh, for she wasn't young, even though she denied at every poor that she was old, but she was vivid and much bedualled for the mid-summer daylight, and she was all in the palest pinks and blues. She didn't think at this pass that she could come anywhere. Millie didn't, and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from the question. He had interposed taking the words out of the Lady's mouth and not caring at all if the Lady minded. That was clearly the right way to treat her, at least for him, as she had only dropped smiling and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with. It would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood a little helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity, as if it were a large loud whistle. He had been sighing sympathy in his way, while the Lady made her overture, and Millie had, in this light, soon arrived at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershow, and the wife was the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate. She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now, if Susie could be found. But she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it. The prospect, through open doors, stretched before her into other rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady Aldershow, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershow, for his part, had been left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was all for her. She had the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there. He shambled a little. Then he bethought himself of the broncino, before which, with his eyeglass, he hooured. It drew from him an odd vague sound, not fully distinct from a grunt and a herm most remarkable, which lighted Kate's face with amusement. The next moment he had creaked away over polished floors after the others, and Millie was feeling as if she had been rude. But Lord Aldershow was in every way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't ill. Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the while seemed engaged with her own. She found herself suddenly sunk in something quite intimate and humble, and to which these granders were strange enough witnesses. It had come up in the form in which she had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it at the same time was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape from something else. Something else from her first vision of her friend's appearance three minutes before had been present to her even through the call made by the others on her attention. Something that was perversely there. She was more and more uncomfortable, finding at least for the first moments, and by some spring of its own, with every renewal of their meeting. Is it the way she looks to him? She asked herself, the perversity being how she kept in remembrance that Kate was known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate, nor in him assuredly, and she had a horror being generous and tender of treating either of them as if it had been. To denge himself she couldn't make it up. He was too far away, but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She did so now with a strange soft energy, the impulse immediately acting. Will you render me tomorrow a great service? Any service, dear child, in the world. But it's a secret one. Nobody must know. I must be wicked and false about it. Then I am your woman, Kate smiled, for that's the kind of thing I love. Do let us do something bad. You're impossibly without sin, you know? Millie's eyes on this remained a little with their companions. Ah, I shan't perhaps come up to your idea. It's only to deceive Susan Shepard. Oh, said Kate, as if this were indeed mild. But thoroughly, as thoroughly as I can. And for cheating, Kate asked, my powers will contribute? Well, I'll do my best for you. In accordance with which it was presently settled between them, that Millie should have the aid and comfort of her presence for a visit to Sir Luke Street, Kate had needed a minute for enlightenment. And it was quite grand for her comrade that this name should have said nothing to her. To Millie herself it had for some days been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she explained, the greatest of medical lights, if she had got hold as she believed, and she had used to descend the wisdom of the serpent of the right, the special man. She had written to him three days before, and he had named her an hour, 1120. Only it had come to her on the eve that she couldn't go alone. Her maid, on the other hand, wasn't good enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened above all with high indulgence. And I am betwixt and between happy thought too good for what. Millie thought, why to be worried if it's nothing, and to be still more worried, I mean before she need be if it isn't. Kate fixed her with deep eyes. What in the world is the matter with you? It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a challenge really to produce something, so that Millie felt her for the moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little, doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints of ignorant youth. It's someone checked her further that the matter with her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about, and she immediately declared for conciliation that if she were merely fanciful, Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered in return the hope that since she could come out and be so charming, could so universally dazzle an interest, she wasn't all the while in distress or in anxiety. Didn't believe herself to be in any degree seriously menaced. Well, I want to make out, to make out. That was all that this consistently produced, to which Kate made clear answer. Ah, then let us by all means. I thought, Millie said, you'd like to help me, but I must ask you, please, for the promise of absolute silence. And how if you are ill, can your friends remain in ignorance? Well, if I am, it must of course finally come out, but I can go for a long time. Millie spoke with her eyes again on her painted sisters, almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. That will be one of my advantages, I think I could die without its being noticed. You're an extraordinary young woman, her friend visibly held by her declared at last. What a remarkable time to talk of such things. Well, we won't talk precisely. Millie got herself together again. I only wanted to make sure of you. Here, in the midst of— But Kate could only sigh for wonder, almost visibly to for pity. It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word, partly as if from a journey, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just as Kate was struck by it, partly as if the hint of pity were already giving a sense of her whimsical shot will, Lord Mark, at Mrs. Loader's first dinner. Exactly this, the handsome girl's compassionate manner, her friendly descent from her own strength, was what she had then foretold. She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste of it. Here, in the midst of what? Of everything. There is nothing you can't have. There is nothing you can't do. So Mrs. Loader tells me. It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more of that. Then, however, without waiting, she went on. We all adore you. You're wonderful, you dear things, Millie laughed. No, it is you, and Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it. In three weeks, Millie kept it up. Never were people on such terms all the more reason, she added, that I shouldn't needlessly torment you. But me? What becomes of me? said Kate. Well, you, Millie thought, if there's anything to bear, you'll bear it. But I won't bear it, said Kate Croy. Oh yes, you will, all the same. You'll pity me awfully, but you'll help me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So, there we are. There they were, then, since Kate had sought to take it, but there Millie felt she herself in particular was, for it was just at the point at which she had wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself, that she didn't horribly blame her friend for any reserve, and what better proof could there be than this quite special confidence. If she decide to show Kate, that she really believed Kate liked her, how could she show it more than by asking her help? End of book fifth, chapter two, read by Lars Rolander.