Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [141]
They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed, they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham’s typical organism—this lady striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase, keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined, that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness—he had “sampled” all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were—had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham’s nose or with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery. The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in London—for all that was said—much further than in the States: it wouldn’t be the first time, he urged, that they had taught the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native product. He didn’t mean that Miss Theale was funny—though she was weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that New York, in having her to show, hadn’t been aware of its luck. There were plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just as—to make the balance right, thank goodness—they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the Briton cold. The Briton’s temperature in truth wasn’t to be calculated—a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however, without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her young friend had seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine—which she set forth at a certain length—made, obviously, to Densher’s mind, her nearest approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly’s absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him. “You know nothing, sir—but not the least little bit—about my friend.”
He hadn’t pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham’s face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn’t but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean, but while doing so he defended himself. “I certainly don’t know enormously much—beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously appreciated it.” To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success. “Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren’t then present.”
“Ah there you are!” said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make out.
“You weren’t present then, dearest,” Mrs. Lowder richly concurred. “You don’t know,” she continued with mellow gaiety, “how far things may have gone.