THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (Complete Edition). Henry Foss James

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

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

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

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

      “Ah then I’ll put it otherwise and say ‘How much you care for me!’ “

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

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

      “If she consents to your coming why isn’t that everything?”

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

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

      “I think you’ll make no mistake,” said Densher, “in letting it go as deep as it will.”

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

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