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

it was at that comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly’s anxious companion sat and looked⁠—looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out; though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham’s discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl’s prominence as a feature of the season’s end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present and to past. “It’s everything that has happened since that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You don’t know what has happened since, but we do; we’ve seen it and followed it; we’ve a little been of it.” The great thing for him, at this, as Kate gave it, was in fact quite irresistibly that the case was a real one⁠—the kind of thing that, when one’s patience was shorter than one’s curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The little American’s sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured above all by the simple springboard of the scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd had drifted to her blindly⁠—it might as blindly have drifted away. There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention, played over it, the “motive,” as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature of the social boom. The boom as in itself required⁠—that would be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question. Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author of the “rotten” book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.

So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was civilisation⁠—! One could smoke one’s pipe outside when twaddle was within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate’s eyes, but there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across the table, to her: “I say, light of my life, is this the great world?” There came another, it must be added⁠—and doubtless as a result of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them⁠—when she struck him as having quite answered: “Dear no⁠—for what do you take me? Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless, imitation.” What she might have passed for saying, however, was practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn’t leave London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find your friends just where they were. As they had of course been jigging away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn’t know them. She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He had unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen, but she wasn’t the person he had “backed.”

Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making light of poor Susan Shepherd’s property in their young friend⁠—which property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs. Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her passion⁠—the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly, on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the drift of Kate’s contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was