Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [157]
“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