Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [200]
His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of Milly’s not being his princess. “Of course she’s not. You must do something first.”
Densher gave it his thought. “Wouldn’t it be rather she who must?”
It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. “I see. No doubt, if one takes it so.” Her cheer was for the time in eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of what Milly could do. “And yet she has wanted to be kind.”
It made him on the spot feel a brute. “Of course she has. No one could be more charming. She has treated me as if I were somebody. Call her my hostess as I’ve never had nor imagined a hostess, and I’m with you altogether. Of course,” he added in the right spirit for her, “I do see that it’s quite court life.”
She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. “That’s all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly.”
“Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you know,” he observed, “isn’t supposed to pay.”
“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That’s just the beauty here; it’s why she’s the great and only princess. With her, at her court,” said Mrs. Stringham, “it does pay.” Then as if she had quite settled it for him: “You’ll see for yourself.”
He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. “I think you were right just now. One must do something first.”
“Well, you’ve done something.”
“No—I don’t see that. I can do more.”
Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! “You can do everything, you know.”
“Everything” was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a different but a related matter. “Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett if, as you tell me, she’s so much better?”
“She hasn’t sent. He has come of himself,” Mrs. Stringham explained. “He has wanted to come.”
“Isn’t that rather worse then—if it means he mayn’t be easy?”
“He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that these several weeks.” After which Mrs. Stringham added: “You can make him easy.”
“I can?” he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats. “What have I to do with it for a man like that?”
“How do you know,” said his friend, “what he’s like? He’s not like any one you’ve ever seen. He’s a great beneficent being.”
“Ah then he can do without me. I’ve no call, as an outsider, to meddle.”
“Tell him, all the same,” Mrs. Stringham urged, “what you think.”
“What I think of Miss Theale?” Densher stared. It was, as they said, a large order. But he found the right note. “It’s none of his business.”
It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be he was not to make out till afterwards. “Say that to him then. Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you.”
“And why should he get at me?”
“Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you’ll see.”
All of which, on Mrs. Stringham’s part, sharpened his sense of immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm—a sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner, half a dozen friends—objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of Lancaster Gate