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

to be “thrown with” Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that said practically everything. It didn’t perhaps altogether say why she had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought, about as much as she could say to his face.

Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate’s behaviour, the probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love, and Kate couldn’t help it⁠—could only be sorry and kind: wouldn’t that, without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it didn’t, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of him would be different from the impression received in New York. That had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply go to pieces. She couldn’t tell if he were different or not, and she didn’t know nor care if she were: these things had ceased to matter in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater. She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly’s own lively line⁠—the line of spontaneity⁠—made everything else relative; and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards, when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other’s separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought himself, at a given moment, of what his natural lively line would be. It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States, and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there. He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks, to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn’t. He simply drenched her with his sociable story⁠—especially during the time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being American⁠—all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really never cared less for the States than at this moment; but that had nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all these adventures was her doing just what she did then.

It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question as complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently saw⁠—that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like everyone else, simplifyingly “kind” to her. He had caught on already as to manner⁠—fallen into line with everyone else; and if his spirits verily had gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself lighting on the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he didn’t, Milly knew she should still like him⁠—there was no alternative to that; but her heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how much his view of her was destined to have in common with⁠—as she now sighed over it⁠—the view. She could have dreamed of his not having the view, of his having something or other, if need be quite viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least trouble, and the view wouldn’t be, after all, a positive bar to her seeing him. The defect of it in general⁠—if she might so ungraciously criticise⁠—was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded the⁠—likewise sweet⁠—operation of real affinities. It was this that was doubtless marked in her power to keep him now⁠—this and her glassy lustre of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery in the Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring her success in detaining him by Kate’s success in “standing” Susan. It would not be, if she could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down. Such at least was one of the forms of the girl’s inward tension; but beneath even this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had left at home on going out to give it a chance was