Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [44]
“I’ve an idea - in fact I feel sure—that Aunt Maud means to write to you; and I think you had better know it.” So much as this she said to him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: “So as to make up your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she’ll say to you.”
“Then will you kindly tell me?”
She thought a little. “I can’t do that. I should spoil it. She’ll do the best for her own idea.”
“Her idea, you mean, that I’m a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best, not good enough for you?”
They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had another pause. “Not good enough for her.”
“Oh I see. And that’s necessary.”
He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate, however, let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment: “She has behaved extraordinarily.”
“And so have we,” Densher declared. “I think, you know, we’ve been awfully decent.”
“For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for her. For her,” said Kate, “we’ve been monstrous. She has been giving us rope. So if she does send for you,” the girl repeated, “you must know where you are.”
“That I always know. It’s where you are that concerns me.”
“Well,” said Kate after an instant, “her idea of that is what you’ll have from her.” He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who wouldn’t let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them and yet, as regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the face, she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but, distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that it didn’t seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might prove difficult—was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile, for him, each other was what they didn’t have, and it was just the point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point, do what they would, to take her in. And she came in, always, while they sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-and-four; she drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with majesty. It was our young man’s sense that she was magnificently vulgar, but yet quite that this wasn’t all. It wasn’t with her vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity that she was strong original dangerous.
His want of means—of means sufficient for any one but himself—was really the great ugliness, and was moreover at no time more ugly for him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, all shameless, face to face with the elements in Kate