The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (bill gates books to read TXT) 📕

It couldn’t be less than a climax for a poor shaky maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the matter⁠—for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder’s part, it came to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life⁠—since the brilliant life, as one had faintly figured it, clearly was humanly led⁠—that all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy; still, letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal for one to be able to take in so comfortably one’s companion’s broad blandness. “You must stay among us⁠—you must stay; anything else is impossible and ridiculous; you don’t know yet, no doubt⁠—you can’t; but you will soon enough: you can stay in any position.” It had been as the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous welcome; and even if it were but part of Aunt Maud’s own spiritual ebriety⁠—for the dear woman, one could see, was spiritually “keeping” the day⁠—it served to Milly, then and afterwards, as a high-water mark of the imagination.

It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark’s informing her that she was a “success”⁠—the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as much, and all gratuitous and genial⁠—if, in portions, not exactly hitherto the revelation⁠—as three unprepared weeks could have been expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a “rush” for them, but out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close⁠—reasons completely personal⁠—she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk her, little as, at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful absorption of iced coffee⁠—qualified by a sharp doubt of her wisdom⁠—that she most had in view Lord Mark’s relation to her being there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It wouldn’t have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the property⁠—which was all to the good of making Milly think of a “durbar”; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of “native princes”⁠—familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious term!⁠—and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family. The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy⁠—a young person blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her, and she was the handsomest thing there⁠—this last a declaration made by Milly, in a sort of soft midsummer madness, a straight skylark-flight of charity, to Aunt Maud.

Kate had, for her new friend’s eyes, the extraordinary and attaching property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the imagination for the time make what it would of them⁠—make her merely a person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this sense⁠—which sprang up at its own hours⁠—of being as curious about her as if one hadn’t known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her knowledge of Merton Densher; she had looked then other and, as Milly knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when conventionally “too big,” could almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn’t know her. She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses. Milly was not wholly sure that she herself