— you all,” he went on, “have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real physical toil. Your rest is something you’ve earned and you need. My labour’s comparatively light.”
“Very true,” she smiled; “but all the same I like mine.”
“It doesn’t leave you ‘done’?”
“Not a bit. I don’t get tired when I’m interested. Oh I could go far.”
He bethought himself. “Then why don’t you?— since you’ve got here, as I learn, the whole place in your pocket.”
“Well, it’s a kind of economy — I’m saving things up. I’ve enjoyed so what you speak of — though your account of it’s fantastic — that I’m watching over its future, that I can’t help being anxious and careful. I want — in the interest itself of what I’ve had and may still have — not to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,” she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her statement —“I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return.”
“Ah then you will return? Can you promise one that?”
Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if bargaining a little. “Isn’t London rather awful in winter?”
He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to social life. “No — I like it, with one thing and another; it’s less of a mob than later on; and it would have for us the merit — should you come here then — that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear for us — if it isn’t a question of climate.”
She looked at that a little graver. “If what isn’t a question —?”
“Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going somewhere for that.”
“For better air?”— she remembered. “Oh yes, one certainly wants to get out of London in August.”
“Rather, of course!”— he fully understood. “Though I’m glad you’ve hung on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate,” he continued, “once more.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘us’?” she presently asked.
It pulled him up an instant — representing, as he saw it might have seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue was easy. “I mean all of us together, every one you’ll find ready to surround you with sympathy.”
It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him afresh. “Why do you say sympathy?”
“Well, it’s doubtless a pale word. What we shall feel for you will be much nearer worship.”
“As near then as you like!” With which at last Kate’s name was sounded. “The people I’d most come back for are the people you know. I’d do it for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me.”
“So she has to me,” said Densher. “I feel,” he added as she at first answered nothing, “that, quite contrary to anything I originally expected, I’ve made a good friend of her.”
“I didn’t expect it either — its turning out as it has. But I did,” said Milly, “with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I’d do anything”— she kept it up —“for Kate.”
Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at that moment hung for him by a hair. “Oh I know what one would do for Kate!”— it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was trying the next minute but to make Milly’s allusion easy for herself. “Of course I know what friends you are — and of course I understand,” he permitted himself to add, “any amount of devotion to a person so charming. That’s the good turn then she’ll do us all — I mean her working for your return.”
“Oh you don’t know,” said Milly, “how much I’m really on her hands.”
He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show he knew. “Ah she’s very masterful.”
“She’s great. Yet I don’t say she bullies me.”
“No — that’s not the way. At any rate it isn’t hers,” he smiled. He remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate’s ways was just what he mustn’t show; and he pursued the subject no further than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of representing a truth: “I don’t feel as if I knew her — really to call know.”
“Well, if you come to that, I don’t either!” she laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far — if it was too far — without being false. His observation was one he would perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more still — for feeling how just here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner — and fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy carriage-wheels and of horses trained to “step.” A rumble, a great shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a due display of diminished prancing and stamping. “You’ve a visitor,” Densher laughed, “and it must be at least an ambassador.”
“It’s only my own carriage; it does that — isn’t it wonderful?— every day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our hearts, very amusing.” She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed a brave show. “Is it very awful?”
It was to Densher’s eyes — save for its absurd heaviness — only pleasantly pompous. “It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I know? You’re mistress of these things, in contact with the highest wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your carriage — well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one.” But she was going out, and he mustn’t stand in her way. What had happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was going out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive — that in fact there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her today of several in particular, and that this in short was why the carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these things, that an enquirer
