or than he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of complicated brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any definite sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained, "of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as there is going—remember that she can play with us quite as much as we play with her."
"She doesn't want to play with me, my dear," Kate lucidly replied; "she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value. This has a value—her being as she has been about us to-day. I believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'—not a bit."
"What is it then," the young man returned—"from the moment it isn't her blessing and a cheque?"
Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is something in her above trifles. She generally trusts us; she doesn't propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a thing—why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really but one fault—she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in detail we fight her."
"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this, "that it's in detail we deceive her"—a speech that, as soon as he had uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion, to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate, whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she explained, "meet here."
Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come back at all?"
"Certainly—to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's in love with you."
But it made him—a trifle more grave—look at her a moment. "Don't make out, you know, that every one's in love with me."
She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
"You said just now Miss Theale."
"I said she liked you—yes."
"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued: "Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for this—as from myself."
"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"
Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well tell her all."
It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her; make her see how clever you are—only without letting her see that you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."
But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I see, only by letting her suppose I give you up—which I'll be hanged if I do! It is," he said with feeling, "a game."
"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up—or I give you—if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."
"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked, "what good does it do?"
Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what—?"
"Does my pleasing her—does anything. I can't," he impatiently declared, "please her."
Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency; but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere complaint. "Then I can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met it, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified all things so to possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these terms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments to one of her previous—and as positively seemed—her most precious ideas. "You accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That's the good she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you—so that she'll help us to go on."
Densher stared—she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basis does it make for my seeing her?"
"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
"Don't mind my leading her on?"
She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading you."
"Well, she won't—so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that 'help,'" he pursued, "with what she knows?"
"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
"Prevent her helping you. She's like that," Kate Croy explained.
It took indeed some understanding. "Making nothing of the fact that I love another?"
"Making everything," said Kate. "To console you."
"But for what?"
"For not getting your other."
He continued to stare. "But how does she know—?"
"That you won't get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud's stand. That"—Kate was lucid—"gives her the chance to be nice to you."
"And what does it give me," the young man none the less rationally asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"
Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his violence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there are reasons. I mean others."
"What others?"
"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you," the girl added, "are enough to go on with."
"To go on to what?"
"Why, to seeing her again—say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on all grounds, is no more than decent of you."
He of course took in her reference, and he had
