The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean, but while doing so he defended himself. 'I certainly don't know enormously much—beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously appreciated it.' To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success. 'Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then present.'

'Ah there you are!' said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make out.

'You weren't present then, dearest,' Mrs. Lowder richly concurred. 'You don't know,' she continued with mellow gaiety, 'how far things may have gone.'

It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this foolish passage, though it pleased him—and because of the foolishness—not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up—a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. 'Oh it's precisely my point that Mr. Densher can't have had vast opportunities.' And then she smiled at him. 'I wasn't away, you know, long.'

It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. 'And I wasn't there long, either.' He positively saw with it that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. 'She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know.'

'Ah she's a thousand and one things!' replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.

He asked nothing better. 'She was off with you to these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too—away off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see.'

'But you didn't forget her!' Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing archness.

'No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming impressions. But I never,' he lucidly maintained, 'chattered to others about her.'

'She'll thank you for that, sir,' said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness.

'Yet doesn't silence in such a case,' Aunt Maud blandly enquired, 'very often quite prove the depth of the impression?'

He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to fasten on him. 'Well, the impression was as deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know,' he pursued for Mrs. Stringham, 'that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an authority about her.'

Kate came to his assistance—if assistance it was—before their friend had had time to meet this charge. 'You're right about her not being easy to know. One sees her with intensity—sees her more than one sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say, half so much.'

The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the fact of her success; and 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 spring-board 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.'