 Book 7, Chapter 4 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 Book 7, Chapter 4 She couldn't have said what it was in the conditions that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm, or nothing rather but their excluded, disinherited state in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh of a mealy. Oh, the impossible romance! The romance for her yet once more would be to sit there forever through all her time as in a fortress, and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine, dustless air where she would hear but the splash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. Ah, not to go down! Never, never to go down! She strangely sighed to her friend. But why shouldn't you, he asked, with that tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought, of course, always to be people at top and bottom in Veronesa costume to watch you do it. She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough, that is not understanding. Not even for people in Veronesa costumes. I mean that the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move, in fact, she added. Now, I've not been out, you know, I stay up. That's how you happily found me. Ludmark wondered, he was, oh yes, adequately human. You don't go about? She looked over the place, the story about the apartments in which she had receded him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting the great canal with its Gothic arches. The casements between the arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the canal so overhung admirably and the flutter toward them of the loose white curtain in imitation to she scarce could have said what. But there was no mystery after a moment. She had never felt so invited to anything as to make that and that only just where she was her adventure. It would be to this it kept coming back, the adventure of not stirring. I go about just here. Do you mean, Ludmark presently asked, that you're really not well? They were at the window, pausing, lingering where the fine old faded palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath. But after a minute and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms which rested on the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the window place and she leaned there in a long silence with her forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an answer but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She would have made the question itself impossible to others. Impossible for example to such a man as Merton Densher and she could wonder even to the spot of what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really because she cared for him so little to let herself go with him. Thus suffer his touch to make her cup overflow would be the relief since it was actually for her nerves a question of relief that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with the intention she believed or even if this intention had been determined in him by the spell of the situation he mustn't be mistaken about her value. For what value did she now have? It throbbed within her as she knelt there that she had none at all though holding herself not yet speaking she tried even in the act to recover what might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light wouldn't her value for the man who should marry her be precisely in the ravage of her disease. She might not last but her money would for a man in whom the vision of her money should be intense in whom it should be most of the ground for making up to her any prospective failure on her part to belong for this world might easily count as a positive attraction. Such a man proposing to please persuade secure her appropriate her for such a time shorter or longer as nature and the doctors should allow would make the best of her ill damage disagreeable though she might be for the sake of eventual benefits. She being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the handsome thing by strickened and soaring husband. She had set herself be times in a general way that whatever happens her youth might form that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush should certainly never grow to be one of them. An attitude she had early judged as ignoble as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit the ugly motive in Lord Mark's cool English eyes. The darker side of it at any rate showed to her imagination but briefly. Suspicion moreover with this simplified itself. There was a beautiful reason indeed there were two why her companions motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he decide her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world. The other was that she felt him after all perceptively kindly very pleasantly and humanly concerned for her. They were also two things his wishings to be well to be very well with her and his beginning to feel her as threatened haunted blighted but they were melting together for him making him by their combination only the more sure that as he probably called it to himself he liked her. That was presently what remained with her is really doing it and with the natural and proper incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have had him she could ask herself that disconcerted or disgusted by it. If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred not to raise not to press any question he might render her a much better service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was strange but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe sympathizer. It would have made her worse to talk to others but she wasn't afraid with him of how he might win and look pale. She would keep him that is her one easy relation in the sense of easy for himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm. What surrounded them within and without did so much toward making appreciative stillness as natural as at the opera that she could consider. She hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last instead of saying if she were well or ill she repeated I go about here. I don't get tired of it. I never should it suits me so. I adore the place she went on and I don't want in the least to give it up. Neither should I if I had your luck. Still with that luck for once all should you positively like to live here. I think I should like said poor Millie after an instant to die here which made him precisely love. That was what she wanted when a person did care. It was the pleasant human way without depth of darkness. Oh, it's not good enough for that. That requires picking but can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you in. You carry out the note, fill it, people it quite by yourself and you might do much worse. I mean for your friends then show yourself here a while three or four month every year. But it's not my notion for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you. What sort of a use for me is it? She's smiling the inquired to kill me. Do you mean we should kill you in England? Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid you're too much for me too many. England bristles with questions. This is more as you say there my form. Oh, oh, oh, oh, he laughed again as if to humor her. Can't you then buy it for a price? Depend upon it, they'll treat for money. That is for money enough. I've exactly, she said, been wondering if they won't. I think I shall try, but if I get it, I should cling to it. They were talking sincerely. It will be my life paid for as that. It will become my great jilded shell so that those who wish to find me must come and hunt me up. And then you will be alive, said Lord Mark. Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, whistled, rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut. Oh, Lord Mark returned, we, much as you'd mistrust us, can do better for you than that. In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over. He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her of some duration, without his glasses, which always altered the expression of his eyes, he resettled the nippers on his nose and went back to the view. But the view in turn soon enough released him. Do you remember something I said to you that day at Machamp, or at least fully meant to? Oh, yes, I remember everything at Machamp, it's another life. Certainly it will be, I mean the kind of thing what I then wanted it to represent for you. Machamp, you know, he continued, is symbolic, I think I tried to rub that into you a little. She met him with a full memory of what he had tried, not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost to her. What I meant is that it seems a hundred years ago. Oh, for me it comes in better, perhaps a part of what makes me remember it, he pursued, is that I was quite aware of what might have been said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I should perhaps be able to look after you. Well, rather better. Rather better, of course, than certain other persons in particular. Precisely, than Mrs. Loder, than Mrs. Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham. Oh, Mrs. Stringham is all right, Lord Mark promptly amended. It amused her even with what she had else to think of, and she could show him at all events a little in spite of the hundred years she had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the tears it had started at the time. You could do so much for me, yes, I perfectly understood you. I wanted, you see, he despite this explained, to fix your confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place. Well, Lord Mark, you did. It's just exactly now my confidence where you put it then. The only difference, said Millie, is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides, she then went on. I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little. He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. Are you really in any trouble? To this on her side she gave no heed, making out his light was a little a light for herself. Don't say, don't try to say anything that's impossible. There are much better things you can do. He looked straight at it and then straight over it. It's too monstrous that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know. What is it you want to know? She spoke as by a sudden turn with a slight hardness. Do you want to know if I'm badly ill? The sound of it in truth, though from no racing of a voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and flushed clearly couldn't help it, but he kept his attitude together and spoke even with unwanted vivacity. Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word? You won't see me suffer. Don't be afraid. I shan't be a public nuisance. That's why I should have like this. It's so beautiful in itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about anything. She added and then as if to make with decision and end and you don't know not even you. He faced her through it with the remains of his expression and she saw him as clearly for him bewildered, which made her wish to be sure not to have been unkind. She would be kind once for all that would be the end. I'm very badly ill and you don't do anything. I do everything. Everything's this she smiled. I'm doing it now. One can't do more than live. Ah, then live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why haven't you advice? He had looked about at the Rokoko elegance as if there were fifty things it didn't give her so that he suggested with urgency the most absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. I've the best advice in the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live. Oh, live, Lord Mark ejaculated. Well, it's immense for me. She finally spoke as if for amusement now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself as no one had yet done. Her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There she was, but it was as if she would never speak again. I shan't, she added, have missed everything. Why should you have missed anything? She felt as she sounded this to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. You're the person in the world for whom that's least necessary, for whom one would call it, in fact, most impossible, for whom missing at all would surely require an extraordinary amount of misplaced goodwill. Since you believe in advice, for God's sake, take mine. I know what you want. Oh, she knew he would know it, but she had brought it on herself, or almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. I think I want not to be too much worried. You want to be adored. It came at last straight. Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do it. It is so, he firmly kept it up. You're not loved enough. Enough for what, Lord Mark? Why to get the full good of it? Well, she didn't after all mock him. I see what you mean. That full good of it which consists in finding oneself forced to love in return. She had grasped it, but she hesitated. Your idea is that I might find myself forced to love you. Oh, forced! He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion somehow so ill-consorted. He was so much all these things that he had absolutely to take account of them himself, and he did so in a single intonation beautifully. Millie liked him again, liked him for such shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. Is it inconceivable to you that you might try to be so favorably affected by you? To believe in me, to believe in me, Lord Mark repeated. Again she hesitated. To try in return for your trying? Oh, I shouldn't have to, he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent, however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed a real expression as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly, almost comically saw a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into which Millie was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a healing and uplifting passion, it was in truth deficient. It wouldn't do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away. And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion, of self-persuasion, could understand that and could thereby show but the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out of itself from services of danger. A thing that made a discrimination against him never yet made, made at least to any consciousness of his own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first encounter with a judgment formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The gathering dusk of her personal world presented itself to him. In her eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with dooms, with a chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to speak and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no decent substitute for a felt intensity. He had to take it from her that practically he was afraid, whether afraid to protest falsely enough or only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised alliance, being a minor question. She believed, she made out besides wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest about anything beyond his natural convenience, more, in fine, than his disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal moyens in short permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting, had he seen a most feeling spoken, at the propriety rather, in his interest of some cutting down, some dressing up of the offensive real. He would meet that half way, but the real must also meet him, merely sense of it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported, couldn't or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It had marked the one minute during which she could again be touching to her, by the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist he had quite ceased to be so. By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point a fresh or independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for one's own, and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter of an hour the perch she held out to him, grasped it with one hand, that is, while she felt him a touch to his own clue with the other. He was by no means either so sore or so stupid to do him all justice, as not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It was one of his merits, to which he did justice too, that both his native and his acquired notion of behavior rested on the general assumption that nothing, nothing to make a deadly difference for him, ever could happen. It was socially a working view like another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said, reappeared for her, breaking out moreover with an effect of strangeness in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. It's true, you know, all the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up, he seemed to show her poor man bravely how little he cared. Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference doesn't notice, and that's why I know that I notice. Are you sure you've got it right? The girl smiled. I thought rather that affection was supposed to be blind. Blind to false, not to beauties, Lord Mark promptly returned. And are my extremely prized worries my entirely domestic complications which I am ashamed to have given you a glimpse of? Are they beauties? Yes, for those who care for you, as everyone does, everything about you is a beauty. Besides, which I don't believe, he declared, in the seriousness of what you tell me, it's too absurd you should have any trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right thing, who can? In all the world I should like to know. You're the first young woman of your time. I mean what I say. He looked to do him justice quite as if he did, not ardent but clear, simply so competent in such a position to compare that his quiet assertion had the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. We're all in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim for my own, if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born simply to torment us. You were born to make us happy. Therefore you must listen to us. She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her mildness. No, I mustn't listen to you. That's just what I mustn't do. The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached to you as you will, since you give that lovely account to yourselves. I give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be. And she pulled up a little. I give and give and give. There you are. Stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't listen or receive or accept. I can't agree. I can't make a bargain. I can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I wanted to say to you. And why should it spoil anything? He let her question fall, though clearly it might have seemed because for reasons or for none, there was so much that was spoiled. You want somebody of your own. He came back whether in good faith or in bad to that, and it made her repeat her head shake. He kept it up as if his faith were of the best. You want somebody. You want somebody. She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the point of saying something emphatic and vulgar. Well, I don't at all events want you. What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it being greater than the irritation, the sadness to her vivid sense of his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was nothing to nourish him, was that his error amounted to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with the first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the illusion she had been wishing not to make. Do you know I don't think you're doing very right, and as I think quite a part I mean from my listening to you. That's not right either, except that I'm not listening. You oughtn't have come to Venice to see me, and in fact you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you come at all, you can only have come properly, and if I may say so honorably, for the best friend as I believe her to be that you have in the world. When once she had said it, he took it oddly enough as if he had been more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine coercion in the event that was the stronger. Miss Croy, Lord Mark asked. It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. Mrs. Loder, he did make out something and then fairly colored for its attestation of his comparative simplicity. I call her on the whole the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better. Still, with his eyes on her, he turned it over. Do you want me to marry Mrs. Loder? At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar, but she wouldn't in any way have that. You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There is no cold world for you at all, I think, she went on. Nothing but a very warm and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment you choose to take it up. He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete, and he had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. Do you want me to marry Kate Croy? Mrs. Loder wants it, I do no wrong, I think in saying that, and she understands moreover that you know she does. Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it, and it wasn't obscure to her on her side that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman. It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me, but what's the use of my tackling Mrs. Croy? Military joist on the spot to be so able to point out, because she's the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and because if I were a man I should simply adore her, in fact I do as it is, it was a luxury a response. Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her, but that can't further the case of all. Ah, she went on, I know about people, if the case of one's bad, the case of another's good, I don't see what you have to fear from anyone else. She said, save through your being foolish this way about me. So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making or what she didn't see. Is it your idea, since we're talking of these things in these ways, that the young lady you describe in such superlative terms is to be had for the asking? Well, Lord Mark, try, she is a great person, but don't be humble, she was almost gay. It was this apparently at last that was too much for him, but don't you really know? As a challenge practically to the commonest intelligence she could pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. I know, yes, that a particular person's very much in love with her. Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with a particular person. Ah, I beg your pardon, and meely quite flushed at having so crude a blunder imputed to her. You're fully mistaken. It's not true, it's not true. His stare became a smile. Are you very, very sure? Ah, sure as one can be, and meely's manner could match it, when one has every assurance, I speak of the best authority. He hesitated, Mrs. Loader's? No, I don't call Mrs. Loader's the best. Oh, I thought you were just now saying, he loved, that everything about her is so good. Good for you, she was perfectly clear, for you she went on, let her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and you must know yourself how little she makes of it, so you can take it from her, I take it. But meely with a positive tremor of her emphasis pulled up, you take it from Kate? From Kate herself. That she's thinking of no one at all? Of no one at all, then with her intensity she went on. She has given me her word for it. Oh, said Lord Mark, to which he next added, and what do you call her word? It made meely on her side stare, though perhaps partly, but with the instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a little further in, then she had designed. Why, Lord Mark, what should you call her word? Ah, I'm not obliged to say, I've not asked her, you apparently have. Well, it threw her on her defense, a defense that she felt, however, especially as of Kate. We are very intimate, she said in a moment, so that without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me things. Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. You mean, then, she made you of her own movement the declaration you quote? Meely thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her sense of the way their eyes now met, met as for their each seeing in the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to stand up for that. I mean what I say, that when she spoke of her having no private interest, she took her oath to you, Lord Mark interrupted. Meely didn't quite see why he should so catatize her, but she met it again for Kate. She left me no doubt whatever of her being free. At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. And thereby in no doubt of your being too, it was as if as soon as he had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him, she had instantly signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further. He fell back on the spot and with a light enough movement within its rights. That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should she be swearing to you? She had to take this dear lady as applying to herself, which disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the dispersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own part of the aspersion, because, as I've told you, we're such tremendous friends. Oh, said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as if he had, in a manner at the least, got more or less what he wanted. Millie felt, while he addressed his next few words to leap-taking, that she had given rather more than she intended, or then she should be able, when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend. Strange enough, in fact, that he had had from her about herself, and under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight, what no one else had had, neither Kate, nor Aunt Maude, nor Merton Densher, nor Susan Shepard. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take himself off, so that she might either recover it, or bear the loss better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time saw it was because of his watching the approach from the end of the Sala, or one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed for the party, were the attendants of the others, always, as the most decorative, most sashed and starched, remain at the palace on the fear that she might whimsically want him, which she never in her cage freedom had yet done. Brown Pascale, sleeping in white shoes of the marble, and suggesting to her perpetually chowned vision, she could scarce say what either a mild Hindu, too noiseless almost for her nurse, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a ship, Pascale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously held out to her with this burden of a visiting card. Lord Mark, and if he falls so for admiration of him, delayed his departure to let her receive it, on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone, that even for dealing with Pascale, she had to do her best to conceal its disappearance. The effort was made, nonetheless, by the time she had asked if the gentleman were below, and had taken in the fact that he had come up. He had followed the gondolier, and was waiting at the top of the staircase. I'll see him with pleasure, to which she added, for her companion, while Pascale went off, Mr. Merton Densher. Oh, said Lord Mark, in a manner that, making it sound through the great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear, as a judgment of his identity heard and noted once before. End of book seventh, chapter four, read by Losch Rolander. Book eight, chapter one of The Wings of the Dove. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Marion Slawson. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel, and all the more promptly, that he had had occasion of all to make the same discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the polyglot heard. Cockneys of all kinds, mainly German, mainly American, mainly English. It appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect he knew, yet it was pure attic beside some of the dialects at the Gussling Inn. He had made, abroad, both for his pleasure and his pain that he had had to feel at almost any point in how he had been through everything before. He had been three or four times in Venice, during other visits, through this pleasant irritation of paddling away, away from the concert of false notes in the vulgarized hall, away from the amiable American families and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with tenderness his shabby but friendly asylums, the windows at which he should easily know again in passing on canal or through camper. The shabby has now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the end of 48 hours, forming views in respect to a small independent courtyard far down the Grand Canal, which he had once occupied for a month in a sense of pomp and circumstance, and yet also with the growth of initiation into the homely of Venetian mysteries. The humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further befell in his interval to be brief was that emerging on a Turgetto in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of his old, of his young windows, the strips of white pasted paper that figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he responded in force. He had been almost without cessation since his arrival at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a museum, though without the fatigue of that, and it had also resembled something he was still with a stern imagination to find a name for. He had also been looking for the name while he gave himself up subsequently to the ramble, and he saw that even after years he couldn't lose his way, crowned with his stare across the water at the little white papers. He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched there at an early luncheon that morning. He had then been out with the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Laud and Mrs. Stringham and Kate, and had kept afloat with them under a sufficient Venetian spell, until Aunt Maude had directed him to lead them and return to Miss Teal. Of two circumstances connected with his disposition of his person, he was even now not unmindful, the first being that the lady of Lancaster gave had addressed him with high publicity, and as if expressing equally the sense of her companions who had not spoken, but who might have been taken. Yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate for inscrutable parties to her plan. What he could as little can try to forget was that he had before the two others as it struck him that was to say especially before Kate, done exactly as he was bitten, gathered himself up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of whether the openness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business of his leaving it, they could but make in submission for a landing place that was none of the best. He had furnished his friends with such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange intelligent smiles. He had found Millie Teal twenty minutes later alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily easy. He knew it was strange only when he was away from her, because when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that made it so. At the time in her presence it was as simple as sitting with his sister might have been, and not if the point were urged, very much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen her, that remained in a face of leave behind. Mrs. Lauda, Susan Shepherd, his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet complications to any point of discomfort. The princess, the angel, the star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, for the little American girl who had been kind to him in New York, and to him certainly, though without making too much of it for either of them, who was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming in on purpose, but there was nothing in that, for in the moment she was always at home, that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the least bit higher that had even yet sounded between them was the submission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her palace, in all its romance and art and history, had set up round her a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't therefore within such a world's confinement, it was the freedom of all the centuries, in respect to which Densha granted good, humbly, that they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked, through space. Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for his pains, and though he denied on the spot the board, he could so far see it as an impression that he might make that he wanted it the same image wouldn't have occurred. As soon as Kate appeared again the difference came up, the oddity as he then instantly felt it, of his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what Kate had conceived for him, it wasn't in the least doing, and that had been his notion of his life, anything he himself had conceived. The difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under which he had quitted the palace, and under which he was to make the best of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must make the best of everything, that was in his mind at the Tragethal, even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied across the canal the look of his armor abode. But had done for the past, would it do for the present, would it play in any manner into the general necessity which he was conscious? That necessity of making the best was the instinct, as he indeed himself knew of a man somehow aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together, the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute and emit the light. It was really a matter of nerves, it was exactly because he was nervous that he could go straight, yet if that condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in short on a high ridge, steeped down either side, with the proprieties, once he could face it all remaining there, reduced themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kay who had so perched him, and they came up for him at moments as he found himself planting one foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her management of it. It wasn't that she had put him in danger, to be in real danger with her would have had another quality. They glowed for him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having, an exasperation, a resentment forgotten truly by the very impatience of desire. In respect to his postponed and relegated, he so extremely manipulated state. It was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called it, one prince with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity, the contempt, in the matter of confidence, the small outlays and small savings that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There were things enough, goodness knew, for it was the moral of his fight that he couldn't afford, but what had had a charm for him if not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it in another way? I'm not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him was indeed actually as present as ever, how he had admired and envied what he called to himself a pure talent for life, as distinguished from his own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up and yet irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now ever so characteristically standing after him. It was thanks to her pure talent for life, thoroughly, that he was just where he was and that he was above all just how he was. The proof of a decent reaction in him against so much pursuit that he was was no great richness that he at least knew, knew that is, how he was and how little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was, for the moment, wistful, that above all described it. That was so large a part of the force as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him on his tritagetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered soreness, his sense almost of shame, and the soreness and the shame were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions of our him, regarded as serious. It was born for that matter, partly of the conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved, had been willing, without a pain, to see him ridiculously, ridiculously so far as just complacently exposed to. How little it could be complacently he was to feel with the last thorness before he had moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it, was the interesting question of whether he had really no will lift. How can you know that was the point about putting the matter to the test? It had been right to be bon prints, and the joy, something of the pride of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now compatible with the impulse to look into their account. But he held his breath a little as it came home to him, the supreme sharpness that, whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine at his idea of the test by which he must try that possibility, kept referring itself, in the warm early dusk, the approach of the southern night, conditions these, such as we just spoke of, to the glimmer more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch, he had been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and reflection, but by the time he walked away again, he had found his answer to the idea that he had grown too unfortunate. Since the proof of his will was wanted, it was indeed very exactly in wait for him. It lurked there on the other side of the canal. A fair amount of little pee had from time to time accosted him, but it was a part of the play of his nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he walked very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the realtor. The rooms in the event were unoccupied. The ancient padrona was there with her smile, all the radiance, but her recognition all the fable. The ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly voracious, so that before he took his way again, he had arranged to come in on the moan. He was amusing about it that evening at dinner, inspired when on first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, his propriety, he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving in the course of talk that the incident would minister to Innocent Gaiety. Such was quite its effect with the aid of his picture, an evocation of the quaint of the humblest rococo of Venetian interior in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own high chambers, though they were a thousand round things, weren't really this. Made it, in fact, with such success that she presently declared it his plain duty to invite her on some mere day to tea. She had expressed it yet he could feel it as felt among them all, no such clear wish to go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast or an autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase fortician or Gian Bellini. It was constantly Densha's view that, as between himself and Kate, things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her as she but too thoroughly put in him innumerable signs of the whole soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This view was so far justified tonight as that nearly as offered to him of her company was, to his sense, taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and foretold that she was, and this was what struck him, sufficiently gratified and blinded by it not to know from the false quality of his response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost shamelessly, in a mere time gaining sense. It gave him on the spot the failure of perception, almost the beginning of the advantage he had been planning for, that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest. She might, if he was not unaware, had made out from some deep part of her the bearing in respect to herself of the little fact he had announced, because she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing and yet simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up eternal too further, nonetheless, to impute to her now weakness a vision by which he put himself field is stronger. Whatever apprehension of his motive in shifting his abode might have crushed her with its wing, she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him, that had been in the prospect from the first, or definitely at particular point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name, would have to begin. Therefore, its hour had now charmingly sounded. Whatever in life he had recovered his old room spore, he had not recovered them to receive milly teal, which made no more difference in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been, just what he was trying not to be, fully hardened and fully base. So rapid, in fact, was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, positively scaring him. It gave him a measure of the intensity of the reality of his now matured mode. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but it made them as vivid as if they were already flushed with success. It was before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed, only that was in itself a symptom. That a visit from milly should, in this projection of necessities, strike him as of the least in congruity, quite as a hateful idea and above all a spoiling, should one put it grossly, his game. The adoption of such a view might, of course, have an identity with one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound before him. It would remain nonetheless the way to which he should be in advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken an imaginative possession of the face. That precisely was how he saw it seated there, already unpacked and settled for milly's innocence, for milly's beauty, no matter how short a time to be housed with. There were things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air, but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them would do nobody any good. The discrimination the scribble would be him. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed admirably the shown none of them. Of course, however, when hadn't it to be his last word, Kate was always the one. That came up in all connections during the rest of these first days. Came up in a special under pressure of the fact that each time our plaited pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an hour together. They were doomed. A denture felt it, as all by his act, to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and in study of its clear character. This was the case after he might be supposed to have got in a manner used to it. It was the case after the girl, ready always, as we say with the last word, had given him the benefit of her writing of every wrong appearance, a support familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she really insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what idea on Mrs. Laubers' part had determined it. Such as the idea was, and that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed, he had only to see how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Dentures replied to all this vividness, that of course Aunt Maude's intervention hadn't been occult, even for his vividness, from the moment she had written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage, he would find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maude really to do such things in such ways, just as it took him, who is ready to confess, to do such others as he must now strike them all, didn't he, as committed to. Mrs. Laubers' admonition had been, of course, a direct reference to what she had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure, the night nearly had failed them through illness, only had at least matched that remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation, which were confined to Kate, he had none without Maude herself, suffered a little, it may be defined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, his solitude, were apt to burn with the reflection that Mrs. Laubers had simply tested him, seen him as he was, and made out that what could be done with him. She had had but to whistle for him, and he had come. If she had taken for granted his good nature, she was as justified as Kate declared. His awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling, plasticity, within limits to be a mode of life like another, certainly better than some, and particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he had merely come for. His inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him well. In default of being right with himself, he had meanwhile, for one thing, the interest of seeing, and quite for the first time in his life, whether on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to happen as was commonly assumed, and as he had up to this moment never doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure, he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his hotel alone by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusty, labyrinthine alleys and empty camping, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstop on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dance in a banquet hall deserted. During these interludes he entertained cold views, even to the point at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are the best, of thinking of immediate departure is not only possible but is indicated. He had, however, only to cross again the threshold of Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business composed, as painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that departure wouldn't curtail, or would signally coarsen his folly, and that above all, as he hadn't really begun anything, had only committed, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the beginnings of others. He had no call to treat himself with stupid, stitious rigor. The single thing that was clear in complications was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman, to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by study of the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten to add, was not in the last resort dentures' greatest worry. Three women were looking to him at once, and though such a predicament could never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, he had had, thank goodness, its immediate worthable law. The law was not to be a brute, in return for any abilities. He hadn't come all the way out from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him to have a fortnight, or with a handicapped, with Kate and Venice, to be a brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Louder as if in responding to her suggestion he had understood her. He hadn't done that either, to be a brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anticlimax was the prompt and inevitable itchave surrender, as a gentleman owe that indubitably to the unexpected impression made by poor, pale, exquisite Milly as the mistress of the grand old powers, and the dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible thanks to all the conditions than any ever known to him. This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity, he scared me by what strange name to call it, for which he said to himself that he had not consciously bargained. The welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her in a manner for effect and harmony as much as it gave. Her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, near ghosts of sound of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it off on occasion Mrs. Lauder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't, that, well, that he'd been rather taken in by not having known in advance. There had been now five days of it all without his risking even to caterlone any hint of what he ought to have known, and of what in particular, therefore, had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that, really, when it came to any free-handling and naming of things, they were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly effect of bloating out might easily be produced. He came back with his friend on each occasion to the blessed miracle of Renewed Puprinputin, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed in spite of his privilege, without his quite committing himself for her ear. To any such comment on really his high style and status would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance, which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know her. This is what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that date this is loud as. And this was in a special work had made him feel its influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence had been all there, been in the high-hung rumbling carriage with them, from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if it had been a rug of softer silk. It had worked as a clear connection with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had more than once recalled how he had said to himself, even at that moment, at some point in the drive, that he was not there, not dust as he was in so doing it, through Cate and Cate's idea, but through a million nearly his own, and through himself and his own, unmistakably, as well as through the infacts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New York. 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 Jennifer Stearns. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Book 8, Chapter 2. There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when he got from Cate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect. His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs. Lodder's view of her prophet, a view so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony, that smote him rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note. It was the least Tika let her off with, for having made him visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. Meet, my dear man, she expressively echoed. Does it strike you that we get, after all, so very much out of our meetings? On the contrary, their starvation diet, all I mean is, and it's all I've meant from the day I came, that we at least get more than Aunt Maud. Ah, but you see, Cate replied, you don't understand what Aunt Maud gets. Exactly so, and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so fascinated with the question. She gives me no light. She's prodigious. She takes it as, of a natural, that at this rate I shall be making my reflections about you. There's every appearance for her, Cate went on, that what she had made her mind up to, as possible, is possible. That what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The very essence of her, as you surely, at this time, have made out for yourself, is that when she adopts a view, she, well, to her own sense, really brings the thing about. Fairly terrorizes with her view any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've often thought success comes to her. Cate continued to study the phenomenon. But the spirit in her, that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything, become the right one. Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response. Ah, my dear child, if you can explain, I, of course, need it not understand. I'm condemned to that. He, on his side presently, explained. Only when understanding fails. He took a moment that he pursued. Does she think she terrorizes us? To which he added, while, without immediate speech. Cate but looked over the place. Does she believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me? He knew now that he was probing the girl deep. Something told him so. But that was the reason the more. Has she got it into her head that you dislike me? To this, of a sudden, Cate's answer was strong. You could yourself easily put it there. He wondered. By telling her so? No, said Cate, as with amusement at his simplicity. I don't ask that of you. Oh, my dear. Densher laughed. When you ask, you know, so little. There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. I'm perfectly justified in what I've asked, she quietly returned. It's doing beautifully for you. The rise again intimately meant, and the effect was to make her proceed. You're not a bit unhappy. Oh, ain't I? He brought up very roundly. It doesn't practically show, which is enough for Aunt Mon. You're wonderful. You're beautiful, Cate said. And if you really want to know whether I believe you're doing it, you may take from me perfectly that I see it coming. With which, by a quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she asked him the hour. Oh, only twelve-ten. He had looked at his watch. We've taken about thirteen minutes. We've time yet. Then we must walk. We must go toward them. Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of the square. They're still in their shop. They're safe for half an hour. That shows them. That shows, said Cate. This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco, always as a great social saloon, a smooth floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity, favourable to talk, or rather, to be exact, not in the middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but a little way behind them. And they had in front the vast empty space enclosed by its arcades, to which, at that hour, movement and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the Visitor, in the possible acquaintance, and, except for the parties of improportionate pigeons, picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear, and they could see their companions hadn't yet been, and weren't for a while long were likely to be, discouraged by the lace shop, in one of the loggy, where, shortly before, they had left them for a look-in. The expression was artfully dentures, at St. Mark's. Their mourning had happened to take such a turn as brought this chance to the surface, yet his illusion, just made to Kate, hadn't been an overstatement at the general opportunity. The worst that could be said of the general opportunity was that it was essentially in presence, in presence of everyone, everyone consisting at this juncture in a peopled world of Susan Shepard, Aunt Maude, and Millie. But the proof now, even in presence, the opportunity could become special, was frightened precisely by this view of the compatibility of their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had assented to their not waiting in the shop. It was, of course, the least the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace, Millie had not. As before, but able to present herself. Custom in use had hitherto seemed fairly established. On his coming round, day after day, eight days had been now so conveniently marked, their friends, Millie's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her to luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which she had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out, so that certainly there was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He had, for Mrs. Louder, he couldn't help it while sitting there, the air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess each morning as little as she had failed him. It was only today that she hadn't been well enough to see him. That had made a mark all round. The mark was in the way in which, gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all bright and cool and be flowered, as always, to receive her dissent, they, the rest of them, simply looked at each other. It was lurid, lurid in all probability, for each of them privately, that they had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to that degree, the hush of gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the most of the case, that of the guests, could permit itself. The hush, for that matter, continued after the party of four, had gone down to the gondola and taken their places in it. Millie had sent them word that she hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had produced a second remarkable look. A look as of their knowing, one quite as well as the other, what such a message meant, as provision, for the alternative beguilement of denture. She wished not to have spoiled his morning, and he had, therefore, in civility, to take it as pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out. Mrs. Stringham, who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure. Approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at home. She had corrected the element of the perfunctory, which was the slight fault for all of them of the occasion. She had invented a preference for Mrs. Lauder and herself. She had remembered the fond dreams of the visitation of Lace that had hitherto always been brushed away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had, the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality and her own failure of real acquaintance with the inside of St. Mark's. Denture's sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had, by this time, the corner of his mind all to itself. Something that had begun for them at Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in the shape, her action, ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him, as for the most part subtly, even when not superficially in his own interest. They were not, as a pair, as a team, really united. There were too many persons, at least three, and too many things between them. But meanwhile, something was preparing that would drive them closer. He scarce knew what. Probably nothing but his finding, at some hour, when it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the understanding that everyone else would fail and the steep little persons alone survive. Such was today, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that hung about our young friends. These had been the small accidents and quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some sort enjoying. It seemed, in fact, fairly to deepen for them as they stayed their course again. The splendid square, which had so notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any equal area in Europe, furnished them in the remoteness from earshot with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession, they could say what they liked, and it was also as if, in consequence of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It was most for all of them, moreover, as if this very quantity seated on their lips in the bright, historic air, where the only sign for their cars was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each affair. There might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the silence resting on her last words. What did you mean just now that I can do to make Mrs. Lauder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you will, I don't see. For the moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but lying? Well, she could tell him. You can say something both handsome and sincere to her about Millie, whom you honestly like so much, that wouldn't be lying, and coming from you it would have an effect, and don't you know, say much about her. And Kate put before him the fruit of observation, you don't you know, speak of her at all. And has Aunt Maude, Densher asked, told you so? Then, as a girl, for answer, only seemed to be think herself, he must have extraordinary conversations, he explained. Yes, she had bethought herself. We have extraordinary conversations. His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed to hear more about them. But there was something in her own, apparently, that defeated the opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a different matter, which had been in his mind a week, yet in respect to which he had had no chance so good as this. Do you happen to know then, as such wonderful things pass between you, what she makes of the incident, the other day, of Lord Mark's so very superficial visit, his having spent here as a gather, but the two or three hours necessary, for seeing our friend, and yet taking no time at all, since he went off by the same night's train, for seeing anyone else? What can she make of his not having waited to see you, or to see herself, with all he owes her? Oh, of course, said Kate, she understands. He came to make Millie his offer of marriage. He came from nothing but that, as Millie wholly declined at his business, was for the time at an end. He couldn't quite on the spot turn around to make up to us. Kate, he looked surprised that, as a matter of taste, on such an adventurous part, Densher shouldn't see it. But Densher was lost in another thought. Do you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him leaving her? That was what had been taking place between them? Didn't you make it out, my dear? Kate inquired. What sort of plenary weathercock then is he? The young man went on in his wonder. Oh, don't make too little of him, Kate smiled. Do you pretend that Millie didn't tell you? How great an ass he had made of himself. Kate continued to smile. You are in love with her, you know. He gave her another long look. Why, since she has refused him, should my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think well of him for such treatment of the other persons I've mentioned, and I feel I don't understand, from you, why Mrs. Lauder should. She doesn't, but she doesn't care. Kate explained. You know perfectly the terms on which lots of Linden people live together even when they're supposed to live very well. He's not committed to us. He was having his try. May an unsatisfied man, she asked, always have his try? And come back afterwards, with confidence and a welcome, to the victim of his inconsistency? Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of as a victim. Oh, but he has had his try at me, so it's all right. Through your also having, you mean, refused him? She balanced an instant, during which denture might have just wondered if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped on the right side. I haven't let it come to that. I've been too discouraging. Aunt Maude, she went on. Now, as lucid as ever, considers no doubt that she has a pledge from him in respect to me. A pledge that would have been broken if Millie had accepted him. As the case stands, that makes no difference. Denture laughed out. It isn't his merit that he has failed. It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark. He's just what he was, and what he knew he was. It's not for me, either, to reflect on him after I've so treated him. Oh, said Denture impatiently, you've treated him beautifully. I'm glad, she smiled, that you can still be jealous. But before he could take it up, she had more to say. I don't see why it need puzzle you that Millie's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maude more than anything else can displease her. What does she see but that Millie herself recognizes her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree your own recognition. Out of which she, therefore, gets it that the more you have for Millie, the less you have for me. There are moments again, we know that from the first, they had been numerous, when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at once to conviction and to reaction, and this effect, however, it be named, now broke into his tone. Oh, if she began to know what I have for you. It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. Luckily for us, we may really consider she doesn't, so successful have we been. Well, you presently said, I take from you what you give me and I suppose that, to be consistent, to stand on my feet where I do stand at all, I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It seems to me, more than anything else, what you expect of me. It never seems to me, somehow, what I may expect of you. There's so much you don't give me. She appeared to wonder, and pray, what is it I don't? I give you proof, said Densher, you give me none. What then do you call proof? She, after a moment, led you to ask, you're doing something for me. She considered with surprise, am I not doing this for you? Do you call this nothing? Nothing at all. Ah, I risk my dear everything for it. They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. I thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing. It was the first time, since the launching of her wonderful idea, that he had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant, moreover, that she didn't like it. Either the being so, or the being seen. For she soon spoke with impatience, that showed her as moondid. An appearance that produced it himself, he no less quickly felt a sharp pang of indulgence. What then do you wish me to risk? The appeal from Densher touched him. The appeal from Densher touched him. The appeal from Densher touched him. But all to make him, as he would have said, worse. What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this rate that I am? Oh, she understood him. For all she might so bravely disguise it. And that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't. Deep always was a sense of life with her. Deep as it had been, for the moment of those signs of life, London of two winters ago, they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for unguarded, ignorant, weak. And if you put to her a claim for some intense faith between them, this because he believed it could reach her and she could meet it. I can go on perhaps, he said, with help, but I can't go on without. She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. We ought to be there, I mean, to come out. They won't come out, not yet, and I don't care if they do. To which he straightway added, as if to deal with a charge of selfishness that his words standing for himself struck him as enabling her to make. Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are? It broke from him in perfect sincerity. Good God, if you'd only take me! It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her an instant. We've gone too far. She nonetheless pulled us off together to reply, Do you want to kill her? He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. Kill, you mean, Aunt Maude? You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies. Oh, at this his head went up. I, my dear, have told none. He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had, naturally, nonetheless, to take the look it made her give him. Thank you very much. His expression, however, failed to check the words that had already risen to his lips. Rather than lay myself open to least appearance of it, I'll go this very night. Then go, said Kate Croy. He knew after a little while they walked on again together that what was in the air for him and disconcertingly was not the violence, but rather the cold quietness of the way this had come from her. They walked on together and it was for a minute as if their difference had become of a sudden in all truth a split, as if the basis of his departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly, recklessly, moreover, since they now might easily from under the arcades be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that produced for them another pause. I'll tell any lie you want any your idea requires if you'll only come to me. Come to you? Come to me. How? Where? She spoke low but there was somehow for his uncertainty a wonder in her being so equal to him to my rooms which are perfectly possible and in taking which the other day I had you as you must have felt in view. We can arrange it with two grains of courage people in our case always arrange it. She listened for the good information when there was support for him since it was a question of his going step by step in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth not expectant of her that particular vulgarity but the absence of it only out of the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to see her now incapable of refuge. Stand there for him in all the light of the day of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet done. Idea for idea his own was less already and in the germ beautiful. There is nothing for me possible but the feel that I'm not a fool. It's all I have to say but you must know what it means with you I can do it. I'll go as far as you demand well yourself without you I'll be hanged and I must be sure. She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased to speak. He had kept his grasp of her drawing her close and though they had again for the time stopped walking his talk for others at a distance might have been in the mattress place that of any impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. While possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn so that they faced a fresh to St. Mark's over the great presence of which his eyes moved while he twiddled her parasol. She now however made a motion that confronted them finally with the opposite end then only she spoke please take your hand out of my arm. He understood at once she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others when they're placed at purchase so they went to them side by side and it was alright the others had seen them as well and waited for them complacent enough under one of the arches they themselves too he argued that Kate would argue looked perfectly ready decently patient properly accommodating they themselves suggested nothing worse always by Kate's system than a pair of the children of a super civilized age making the best of an awkwardness they didn't nevertheless hurry that would overdo it so he had time to feel as it were what he felt he felt ever so distinctly it was with this he faced Mrs. Lauder that he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted there was more to come everything he had by no means with his companion had it all out yet what he was possessed of was real the fact that she hadn't thrown over the rigidity the horrid shadow of cheap reparation of this he had had so sore of fear that it's being dispelled within itself of the nature of bliss the danger had dropped it was behind him there in the great sunny space so far she was good for what he wanted end of book 8th, chapter 2 recording by Jennifer Stearns Concord, New Hampshire