Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [169]
Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained general. “He’s charming.”
She had met Mrs. Lowder’s eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own to which people resort when they are not quite candid—a circumstance that had its effect. “Yes; he’s charming.”
The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. “I thought you didn’t like him!”
“I don’t like him for Kate.”
“But you don’t like him for Milly either.”
Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. “I like him, my dear, for myself.”
“Then that’s the best way of all.”
“Well, it’s one way. He’s not good enough for my niece, and he’s not good enough for you. One’s an aunt, one’s a wretch and one’s a fool.”
“Oh I’m not—not either,” Susie declared.
But her companion kept on. “One lives for others. You do that. If I were living for myself I shouldn’t at all mind him.”
But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. “Ah if I find him charming it’s however I’m living.”
Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving herself away with a laugh. “Of course he’s all right in himself.”
“That’s all I contend,” Susie said with more reserve; and the note in question—what Merton Densher was “in himself”—closed practically, with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
—II—
It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs. Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of his reckoning. If what they had talked of could happen—if Milly, that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself—it wouldn’t do any harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn’t happen—if, anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could do nothing to contribute to it—they would be in no worse a box than before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man, would—besides having more to show him—find him more ready to go on with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd—as well as being ground for a second report to her old friend—that Milly did her part for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for, his having been so easy about her behaviour.
“You see I didn’t know that—for the liberty I took—I shouldn’t afterwards get a stiff note from him.”
So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her a trifle rash. “Oh you’ll never get a stiff note from him in your life.”
She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her young friend’s question. “Why not, as well as any one else who has played him a trick?”
“Well, because he doesn’t regard it as a trick. He could understand your action. It’s all right, you see.”
“Yes—I do see. It is all right. He’s easier with me than with any one else, because that’s the way to let me down. He’s only making believe, and I’m not worth hauling up.”
Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare, poor Susie grasped at her only advantage. “Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett of trifling with you?”
She couldn’t blind herself to the look her companion gave her—a strange half-amused perception of what she made of it. “Well, so far as it’s trifling with me to pity me so much.