Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [149]
“And do you believe in that?”
“In Lord Mark’s genius?” Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very sufficient “Yes!”
“Political?”
“Universal. I don’t know at least,” she said, “what else to call it when a man’s able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause.”
“Ah but if the effect,” said Densher with conscious superficiality, “isn’t agreeable—?”
“Oh but it is!”
“Not surely for every one.”
“If you mean not for you,” Kate returned, “you may have reasons—and men don’t count. Women don’t know if it’s agreeable or not.”
“Then there you are!”
“Yes, precisely—that takes, on his part, genius.”
Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been found, should it have come to an analysis, to “take.” Something suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and overflowed—the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the future she promised, the interest she supplied. “All women but you are stupid. How can I look at another? You’re different and different—and then you’re different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you—except that you’re so much too good for what she builds for. Even ‘society’ won’t know how good for it you are; it’s too stupid, and you’re beyond it. You’d have to pull it uphill—it’s you yourself who are at the top. The women one meets—what are they but books one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.” He almost moaned, he ached, from the depth of his content. “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”
She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their essential wealth of life. “It’s you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.”
It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. “See here, you know: don‘t, don’t—”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t fail me. It would kill me.”
She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. “So you think you’ll kill me in time to prevent it?” She smiled, but he saw her the next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely connected that Densher’s were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a distance to go. “You do then see your way?” She put it to him before they joined—as was high time-the others. And she made him understand she meant his way with Milly.
He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was, undispelled since his return. “There’s something you must definitely tell me. If our friend knows that all the while—?”
She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though quite to smooth it down. “All the while she and I here were growing intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that, yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me.”
“Then how could she suppose you weren’t answering?”
“She doesn’t suppose it.”
“How then can she imagine you never named her?”
“She doesn’t. She knows now I did name her. I’ve told her everything. She’s in possession of reasons that will perfectly do.”
Still he just brooded. “She takes things from you exactly as I take them?”
“Exactly as you take them.”
“She’s just such another victim?”
“Just such another. You