in his inimitable manner, and throws me back.”
“Back then, after all, thank goodness,” Densher concurred, “on me.”
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had evoked. “It’s a pity, because you’d like him. He’s wonderful — he’s charming.” Her companion gave one of the laughs that showed again how inveterately he felt in her tone something that banished the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. “He would make himself delightful to you.”
“Even while objecting to me?”
“Well, he likes to please,” the girl explained— “personally. I’ve seen it make him wonderful. He would appreciate you and be clever with you. It’s to ME he objects — that is as to my liking you.”
“Heaven be praised then,” cried Densher, “that you like me enough for the objection!”
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. “I don’t. I offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no difference, and that’s what I mean,” she pursued, “by his declining me on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don’t escape.”
Densher wondered. “But if you didn’t wish to escape ME?”
“I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it’s through her and through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it’s through her, and through her only, that I can help HER. That’s what I mean,” she again explained, “by their turning me back.”
The young man thought. “Your sister turns you back too?”
“Oh with a push!”
“But have you offered to live with your sister?”
“I would in a moment if she’d have me. That’s all my virtue — a narrow little family feeling. I’ve a small stupid piety — I don’t know what to call it.” Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. “Sometimes, alone, I’ve to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She went through things — they pulled her down; I know what they were now — I didn’t then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success. That’s what Marian keeps before me; that’s what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position’s a value, a great value, for them both” — she followed and followed. Lucid and ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. “It’s THE value — the only one they have.”
Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure — the quickness and anxiety playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly, as he had never done before. “And the fact you speak of holds you!”
“Of course it holds me. It’s a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I’ve any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made.”
Densher had a pause. “Oh you might by good luck have the personal happiness too.”
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly: “Darling!”
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. “Will you settle it by our being married tomorrow — as we can, with perfect ease, civilly?”
“Let us wait to arrange it,” Kate presently replied, “till after you’ve seen her.”
“Do you call that adoring me?” Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said: “You’re afraid of her yourself.”
He gave rather a glazed smile. “For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit we’re a caution!”
“Yes,” she took it straight up; “we’re hideously intelligent. But there’s fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think,” she added, and for that matter not without courage, “our relation’s quite beautiful. It’s not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in things.”
It made him break into a laugh that had more freedom than his smile. “How you must be afraid you’ll chuck me!”
“No, no, THAT would be vulgar. But of course,” she admitted, “I do see my danger of doing something base.”
“Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?”
“I SHAN’T sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That,” she wound up, “is how I see myself (and how I see you quite as much) acting for them.”
“For ‘them’?” — and the young man extravagantly marked his coldness. “Thank you!”
“Don’t you care for them?”
“Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?”
As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished he repented of his roughness — and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow. “I don’t see why you don’t make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity we may do ALL. We may keep her.”
He stared. “Make her pension us?”
“Well, wait at least till we’ve seen.”
He thought. “Seen what can be got out of her?”
Kate for a moment said nothing. “After all I never asked her; never, when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her. She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.”
“You speak,” Densher observed, “as if she were a vulture.”
“Call it an eagle — with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights. If she’s a thing of the air, in short — say at once a great seamed silk balloon — I never myself got into her car. I was her choice.”
It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master. “What she must see in you!”
“Wonders!” And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. “Everything. There it is.”
Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face it. “So that what you mean is that I’m to do my part in somehow squaring her?”
“See her, see her,” Kate said with impatience.
“And grovel to her?”
“Ah do what you like!” And she walked in her impatience away.
Chapter
