Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [79]
“Ah if you mean that we shall reward her as hard as ever we can, nothing is more certain. But she’s an idealist,” Milly continued, “and idealists, in the long run, I think, don’t feel that they lose.”
Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this charming. “Ah she strikes you as an idealist?”
“She idealises us, my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a light,” said Milly. “That’s all I’ve got to hold on by. So don’t deprive me of it.”
“I wouldn’t think of such a thing for the world. But do you suppose,” he continued as if it were suddenly important for him—“do you suppose she sees me in a light?”
She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because, placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy at the same time steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact found of a sudden her ease—found it all as she bethought herself that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her quality and, as perhaps might be said her value, from Lord Mark. She wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgement so mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination that in any case now determined Milly’s rejoinder. “No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all here know each other—I see that—so far as you know anything. You know what you’re used to, and it’s your being used to it—that, and that only—that makes you. But there are things you don’t know.”
He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point. “Things that I don’t—with all the pains I take and the way I’ve run about the world to leave nothing unlearned?”
Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim—its not being negligible—that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit. “You’re blasé, but you’re not enlightened. You’re familiar with everything, but conscious really of nothing. What I mean is that you’ve no imagination.”
Lord Mark at this threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more flagrantly diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess’s notice. Mrs. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her screw, her cruise among the islands. “Oh I’ve heard that,” the young man replied, “before!”
“There it is then. You’ve heard everything before. You’ve heard me of course before, in my country, often enough.”
“Oh never too often,” he protested. “I’m sure I hope I shall still hear you again and again.”
“But what good then has it done you?” the girl went on as if now frankly to amuse him.
“Oh you’ll see when you know me.”
“But most assuredly I shall never know you.”
“Then that will be exactly,” he laughed, “the good!”
If it established thus that they couldn’t or wouldn’t mix, why did Milly none the less feel through it a perverse quickening of the relation to which she had been in spite of herself appointed? What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking—for it was what they had arrived at—almost intimately? She wished to get away from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was present to him. She saw already—wonderful creature, after all, herself too—that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out of the question. Everything else might come in