Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [93]
“I’d die for you,” said Susan Shepherd after a moment.
“ ‘Thanks awfully’! Then stay here for me.”
“But we can’t be in London for August, nor for many of all these next weeks.”
“Then we’ll go back.”
Susie blenched. “Back to America?”
“No, abroad—to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying ‘here’ for me,” Milly pursued, “your staying with me wherever I may be, even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No,” she insisted, “I don’t know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn’t matter—and I dare say it’s quite true,” she broke off, “that everything will have to come out.” Her friend would have felt of her that she joked about it now, hadn’t her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such unnameable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn’t, that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. “I must face the music. It isn’t at any rate its ‘coming out,’ ” she added; “it’s that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury”.
Her companion wondered. “But how to his?”
“Why if he pretends to love her—!”
“And does he only ‘pretend’?”
“I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far as to make up to other people.”
The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as with gaiety, for a comfortable end. “Did he make up, the false creature, to you?”
“No—but the question isn’t of that. It’s of what Kate might be made to believe.”
“That, given the fact of his having evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been all ready if you had a little bit led him on?”
Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said after a moment and as with a conscious excess of the pensive: “No, I don’t think she’d quite wish to suggest that I made up to him; for that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,” she added—and now at last as with a supreme impatience—“ that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she’s afraid of him, to do him in her sister’s mind a useful ill turn.”
Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment to make out how many her young friend had actually undertaken to see round. Finally, too, weren’t they braving the deeps? They got their amusement where they could. “Isn’t it only,” she asked, “rather probable she’d see that Kate’s knowing him as (what’s the pretty old word?) volage—?”y
“Well?” She hadn’t filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could Milly.
“Well, might but do what that often does—by all our blessed littlelaws and arrangements at least: excite Kate’s own sentiment instead of depressing it.”
The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. “Kate’s own sentiment? Oh she didn’t speak of that. I don’t think,” she added as if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, “I don’t think Mrs. Condrip imagines she’s in love.”
It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. “Then what’s her fear?”
“Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher’s possibly himself keeping it up—the fear of some final result from that.