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By Root 16423 0

’s so signal snub, and also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion—that Milly was so interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea with him—an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. “We depend on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we’re coming”—the extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact. Facing their visit itself—to that, no matter what he might have to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the top of Kate’s list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough, deep within, if Kate’s view of that especial propriety had not been modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact. It pleased him to think of “tact” as his present prop in doubt; that glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the sensitive and the kind. He wasn’t inhuman, in fine, so long as it would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten Milly’s hopes. He didn’t want to be rude to them, but he still less wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that, casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. “Will it be safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?”

“‘Safe’—?” She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but he didn’t need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably, she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his life. He couldn’t emphasize that he thought of her as dying, yet he couldn’t pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. “You suppose me so awfully bad?”

He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me.”

“Well then, I’m splendid.”

“Oh I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“I mean I’m capable of life.”

“I’ve never doubted it.”

“I mean,” she went on, “that I want so to live—!”

“Well?” he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.

“Well, that I know I can.”

“Whatever you do?” He shrank from solemnity about it.

“Whatever I do. If I want to.”

“If you want to do it?”

“If I want to live. I can,” Milly repeated.

He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the pity of it. “Ah then that I believe.”

“I will, I will,” she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.

He felt himself smiling through a mist. “You simply must!”

It brought her straight again to the fact. “Well then, if you say it, why mayn’t we pay you our visit?”

“Will it help you to live?”

“Every little helps,” she laughed, “and it’s very little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I shan’t want to miss it—!”

“Yes?”—she had dropped again.

“Well, on the day you give us a chance.”

It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. “You can come,” he said, “when you like.”

What had taken place for him, however—the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality—apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for something else.