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

concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not meanwhile certainly what most made him roam⁠—the missing explanations weren’t. That was what she had so often said before, and always with the effect of suddenly breaking off: “Now please call me a good cab.” Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them, for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?⁠—it was a question he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless⁠—since, when it came to that, they didn’t depend on cabs good or bad for the sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater, even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her appeal⁠—had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He recalled, on his bench in the Regent’s Park, the freedom of fancy, funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of her very “humour,” in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it⁠—a surprise as well as a relief⁠—would do toward really simplifying. It meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.

“Not from me,” Kate had replied. “But I shall speak to her now.” And she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be quite easy. “We’ve behaved for months so properly that I’ve margin surely for my mention of you. You’ll come to see her, and she’ll leave you with me; she’ll show her good nature, and her lack of betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you’ve never broken, quite the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We’re leaving town; it will be the end; just now therefore it’s nothing to ask. I’ll ask tonight,” Kate had wound up, “and if you’ll leave it to me⁠—my cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal⁠—I’ll make it all right.”

He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself that if it wasn’t in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle. This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear Milly, it was sensible, was somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly, popping up in his absence, occupied⁠—he couldn’t have said quite why he felt it⁠—more of the foreground than one would have expected her in advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a foreground in which he himself, in which his connection with Kate, scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she weren’t a bore she’d be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden, after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had meant. The charming girl adored her⁠—Densher had for himself made out that⁠—and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove them still better from the streets. That was an explanation which did hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.

II

It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself, when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn’t come all the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together, and it wasn’t even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the American