Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [77]
“Well then,” said Milly, “I seem also to feel that I like it better than being made fun of.”
It was one of the things she afterwards saw—Milly was for ever seeing things afterwards—that her companion had here had some way of his own, quite unlike any one’s else, of assuring her of his consideration. She wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor protested. She said to herself at any rate that he had led her on; and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so.
“Does she know much about you?”
“No, she just likes us.”
Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no laugh. “I mean you particularly. Has that lady with the charming face, which is charming, told her?”
Milly cast about. “Told her what?”
“Everything.”
This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her—made her feel for a moment that as a matter of course she was a subject for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. “Oh as for that you must ask her.”
“Your clever companion?”
“Mrs. Lowder.”
He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as, should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell him. “And I shall have at any rate in the meantime the interest of seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you see, how much she knows.”
Milly followed this—it was lucid, but it suggested something apart. “How much does she know about you?”
“Nothing,” said Lord Mark serenely. “But that doesn’t matter-for what she does with me.” And then as to anticipate Milly’s question about the nature of such doing: “This for instance—turning me straight on for you.”
The girl thought. “And you mean she wouldn’t if she did know—?”
He met it as if it were really a point. “No. I believe, to do her justice, she still would. So you can be easy.”
Milly had the next instant then acted on the permission. “Because you’re even at the worst the best thing she has?”
With this he was at last amused. “I was till you came. You’re the best now.”
It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of making her believe them, though still with wonder. That really from this first of their meetings was what was most to abide with her: she accepted almost helplessly—she surrendered so to the inevitable in it—being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen enough of for all practical purposes. Her submission was naturally moreover not to be impaired by her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals, though at a time apparently just previous to her own emergence from the obscurity of extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where his nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His impression, his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still visibly rich. It had helped him to place her, and she was more and more sharply conscious of having—as with the door sharply slammed upon her and the guard’s hand raised in signal to the train—been popped into the compartment in which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her that many a girl would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the kind of mind that thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had practically just learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her rumbling compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their friend’s actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came to, he presently assured her, and this was what it was to be a success; it always happened before one could know it. One’s ignorance was in fact often the greatest part of it. “You haven’t had time yet,” he said; “this is nothing. But you’ll see. You’ll see everything. You can, you know