Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [167]
“I shall see him immediately”—Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision. “What is then,” she asked, “your impression?”
Mrs. Stringham’s impression seemed lost in her doubts. “How can he ever care for her?”
Her companion, in her companion’s heavy manner, sat on it. “By being put in the way of it.”
“For God’s sake then,” Mrs. Stringham wailed, “put him in the way! You have him, one feels, in your hand.”
Maud Lowder’s eyes at this rested on her friend’s. “Is that your impression of him?”
“It’s my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one.”
Mrs. Lowder’s eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was a great limitation. “I don’t handle Kate.”
It suggested something that her visitor hadn’t yet had from her—something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. “Do you mean Kate cares for him?”
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend’s quick question had produced a change in her face. She blinked—then looked at the question hard; after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham’s surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined. A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn’t have liked to hear that she hadn’t concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present, in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate’s dissimulation. She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry. “Kate thinks she cares. But she’s mistaken. And no one knows it.” These things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder’s retort. Yet they weren’t all of it. “You don’t know it—that must be your line. Or rather your line must be that you deny it utterly.”
“Deny that she cares for him?”
“Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and absolutely. Deny that you’ve so much as heard of it.”
Susie faced this new duty. “To Milly, you mean—if she asks?”
“To Milly, naturally. No one else will ask.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, “Milly won’t.”
Mrs. Lowder wondered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for me. I lie badly.”
“I lie well, thank God,” Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, “when, as sometimes will happen, there’s nothing else so good. One must always do the best. But without lies then,” she went on, “perhaps we can work it out.” Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some minutes, more enrolled and inflamed—presently felt in her what had made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying. What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth about Kate’s delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the state of her affections, which might be removed-this was apparently the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate’s delusion—by arts, however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher’s?—success in which indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately, her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present