whatever she liked.
It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate that he began on his side to reflect that — with her manner of offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to embrace it — she couldn’t half hate him. That was all, positively, she seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did her intention justice she would have nothing more disagreeable to do. “If I hadn’t been ready to go very much further, you understand, I wouldn’t have gone so far. I don’t care what you repeat to her — the more you repeat to her perhaps the better; and at any rate there’s nothing she doesn’t already know. I don’t say it for her; I say it for you — when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight.” So Aunt Maud delivered herself — as with homely benevolence, in the simplest but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a word to the wise was doubtless, in spite of the adage, NOT always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was good — was really by her measure good enough: good enough that is to give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But WAS he good enough — by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. “She’s the finest possible creature — of course you flatter yourself you know it. But I know it quite as well as you possibly can — by which I mean a good deal better yet; and the tune to which I’m ready to prove my faith compares favourably enough, I think, with anything you can do. I don’t say it because she’s my niece — that’s nothing to me: I might have had fifty nieces, and I wouldn’t have brought one of them to this place if I hadn’t found her to my taste. I don’t say I wouldn’t have done something else, but I wouldn’t have put up with her presence. Kate’s presence, by good fortune, I marked early. Kate’s presence — unluckily for YOU — is everything I could possibly wish. Kate’s presence is, in short, as fine as you know, and I’ve been keeping it for the comfort of my declining years. I’ve watched it long; I’ve been saving it up and letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate; and you may judge whether, now it has begun to pay so, I’m likely to consent to treat for it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I’ve my idea of the best.”
“Oh I quite conceive,” said Densher, “that your idea of the best isn’t me.”
It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder’s that her face in speech was like a lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain. The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take, yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. “I didn’t ask you to come to hear what it isn’t — I asked you to come to hear what it IS.”
“Of course,” Densher laughed, “that’s very great indeed.”
His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely relevant. “I want to see her high, high up — high up and in the light.”
“Ah you naturally want to marry her to a duke and are eager to smooth away any hitch.”
She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it quite forced him at first into the sense, possibly just, of his having shown for flippant, perhaps even for low. He had been looked at so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men, but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion’s subtlety, and thereby of Kate’s possible career. “Don’t be TOO impossible!” — he feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off easily. “I want her to marry a great man.” That was all; but, more and more, it was enough; and if it hadn’t been her next words would have made it so. “And I think of her what I think. There you are.”
They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he only would. To that extent she did appeal — appealed to the intelligence she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. “Of course I’m aware how little I can answer to any fond proud dream. You’ve a view — a grand one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly understand what I’m not, and I’m much obliged to you for not reminding me of it in any rougher way.” She said nothing — she kept that up; it might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man couldn’t show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he WAS — on Mrs. Lowder’s basis, the only one in question — a very small quantity, and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be perfectly simple, yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn’t later on have said how. “You don’t really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and I’m not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they’re meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you myself — since you’re, in your way, my dear young man, delightful — and arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should. Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it’s not really necessary? It won’t — it would be too absurd! — BE necessary. I can bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I’m dealing with you now, see — and successfully judge — without opening it. I do things handsomely all round — I place you in the presence of the plan with which, from the moment it’s a case of taking you seriously, you’re incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round it — don’t be afraid you’ll hurt it! — and live on with it before you.”
He afterwards felt that if she hadn’t absolutely phrased all this it was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He was so pleasantly 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
