Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [88]
“It doesn’t matter, at a given moment,” Mrs. Stringham returned, “what you know or don’t know as to what I think; for you always find out the very next minute, and when you do find out, dearest, you never really care. Only,” she presently asked, “have you heard of him from Miss Croy?”
“Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven’t mentioned him. Why should we?”
“That you haven’t I understand; but that your friend hasn’t,” Susie opined, “may mean something.”
“May mean what?”
“Well,” Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, “I tell you all when I tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks she won’t.”
Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts—as they so far possessed them—it all sounded a little complicated. “Is it because there’s anything between them?”
“No—I gather not; but Maud’s state of mind is precautionary. She’s afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she’s afraid of everything.”
“She’s afraid, you mean,” Milly asked, “of their—a—liking each other?”
Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. “My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.”
“Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!” said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: “Don’t tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.”
Her friend looked at her—it was not unfrequently the case—a little harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require; and another person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion’s words as symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be quaint with the new quaintness—the great Boston gift; it had been happily her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite cherished her, as a social resource, by reason of it. It shouldn’t therefore fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. “Ah then let us hope we shall sound the depths—I’m prepared for the worst—of sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece—we’re not ignorant of that, are we?—to marry Lord Mark. Hasn’t she told you so?”
“Hasn’t Mrs. Lowder told me?”
“No; hasn’t Kate? It isn’t, you know, that she doesn’t know it.”
Milly had, under her comrade’s eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her as in a clear cold wave that there was a possible account of their relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn’t. She couldn’t say at any rate whether or no Kate had made the point that her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come out—which had been, moreover, eminently guessable—that she was involved in her aunt’s designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she couldn’t in the least have defined—and she was at least, even during these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the difference it did make. Yet all the same the effect for her was, almost violently, of that gentleman’s having been there—having been where she had stood till now in her simplicity—before her. It would have taken but another free moment to make her see abysses—since abysses were what she wanted—in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy and that Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid, it was to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been a labyrinth