The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

'I mean for you.'

'That's what I mean too,' Kate smiled. 'There he is. Now you can judge.'

'Judge of what?'

'Judge of him.'

'Why should I judge of him?' Densher asked. 'I've nothing to do with him.'

'Then why do you ask about him?'

'To judge of you—which is different.'

Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. 'To take the measure, do you mean, of my danger?'

He hesitated; then he said: 'I'm thinking, I dare say, of Miss Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her—?'

'With his interest in me?'

'With her own interest in you,' Densher said while she reflected. 'If that interest—Mrs. Lowder's—takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he rather to look out for the forms he takes?'

Kate seemed interested in the question, but 'Oh he takes them easily,' she answered. 'The beauty is that she doesn't trust him.'

'That Milly doesn't?'

'Yes—Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really.'

Densher gave it his wonder. 'Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats?'

'Yes,' said Kate—'that's the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with what they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind, however,' she went on, 'is lucky. That's Aunt Maud's security, though she doesn't yet fully recognise it—besides being Milly's own.'

'You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?'

She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. 'You oughtn't to make me say too much. But I'm glad I don't.'

'Don't say too much?'

'Don't care for Lord Mark.'

'Oh!' Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which he added: 'You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?'

'Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!' It had made her again impatient.

Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. 'You scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes.'

'Mercy, no—far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities, 'in' it. Milly, it's true,' she said, to be exact, 'has no natural sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences or know who's who or what's what.'

'I see. That,' Densher laughed, 'is her reason for liking me.'

'Precisely. She doesn't resemble me,' said Kate, 'who at least know what I lose.'

Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. 'And Aunt Maud—why shouldn't she know? I mean that your friend there isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?'

'Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get.'

'Oh, oh!' said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.

'It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur,' she went on without heeding this; 'because perhaps in the line of that alone— as he has no money—more could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. The thing's his genius.'

'And do you believe in that?'

'In Lord Mark's genius?' Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very sufficient 'Yes!'

'Political?'

'Universal. I don't know at least,' she said, 'what else to call it when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause.'

'Ah but if the effect,' said Densher with conscious superficiality, 'isn't agreeable—?'

'Oh but it is!'

'Not surely for every one.'

'If you mean not for you,' Kate returned, 'you may have reasons—and men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not.'

'Then there you are!'