Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [203]
“Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.”
“They would uncommonly suit you,” he frankly returned.
“Oh yes, I see myself!”
As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her—she would have been splendid; and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly’s royal ornament had—under pressure now not wholly occult-taken on the character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision was actually in Kate’s face. It might have been in her face too that, well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn’t that the great difference that Milly tonight symbolized? She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but come back to his friend’s question of a minute ago. “She’s certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I’m assured she’s better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to me about it. She evidently believes her better.”
“Well, if they choose to call it so—!”
“And what do you call it—as against them?”
“I don’t call it anything to anyone but you. I’m not ‘against’ them!” Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to be taught.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “What do you call it to me?”
It made her wait a little. “She isn’t better. She’s worse. But that has nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing to do?” He wondered.
But she was clear. “Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we’re doing our best for her. We’re making her want to live.” And Kate again watched her. “To-night she does want to live.” She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the hard. “It’s wonderful. It’s beautiful.”
“It’s beautiful indeed.”
He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it no heed. “She’s doing it for him”—and she nodded in the direction of Milly’s medical visitor. “She wants to be for him at her best. But she can’t deceive him.”
Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment : “And do you think you can? I mean, if he’s to be with us here, about your sentiments. If Aunt Maud’s so thick with him—!”
Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a direction of his own eyes—determined, in the way such things happen, precisely by the attention of the others—as Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly marked. “He’s looking at you. He wants to speak to you.”
“So Mrs. Stringham,” the young man laughed, “advised me he would.”
“Then let him. Be right with him. I don’t need,” Kate went on in answer to the previous question, “to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it’s necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can see me only as he sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to do with me.”
“Except to reprobate you,” Densher suggested.
“For not caring for you? Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven by it into your relation with Milly—as all that I leave you to him.”
“Well,” said Densher sincerely enough, “I think I can thank you for leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself.”
She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder