The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2

in what they represented? Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might well, might almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast. It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness proportionately crowded.

These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs. Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was just a part, likewise, that while plates were changed and dishes presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like plashes of a slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised and more different— different, that is, from every one and everything: it was just a part that while this process went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever it was it had showed in this brief interval as better than the alternative; and it now presented itself altogether in the image and in the place in which she had left it. The image was that of her being, as Lord Mark had declared, a success. This depended more or less of course on his idea of the thing—into which at present, however, she wouldn't go. But, renewing soon, she had asked him what he meant then that Mrs. Lowder would do with her, and he had replied that this might safely be left. 'She'll get back,' he pleasantly said, 'her money.' He could say it too—which was singular—without affecting her either as vulgar or as 'nasty '; and he had soon explained himself by adding: 'Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing.'

'Ah, if you mean that we shall reward her as hard as ever we can, nothing is more certain. But she's an idealist,' Milly continued, 'and idealists, in the long run, I think, don't feel that they lose.'

Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this charming. 'Ah, she strikes you as an idealist?'

'She idealises us, my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a light,' said Milly. 'That's all I've got to hold on by. So don't deprive me of it.'

'I wouldn't for the world. But do you think,' he continued as if it were suddenly important for him—'do you think she sees me in a light?'

She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because, placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy, at the same time, steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact found, of a sudden, her ease—found it all—as she bethought herself that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined Milly's rejoinder. 'No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all, here, know each other—I see that—so far as you know anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to it—that, and that only—that makes you. But there are things you don't know.'

He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point. 'Things that I don't— with all the pains I take and the way I've run about the world to leave nothing unlearned?'

Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim—its not being negligible—that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit. 'You're blase, but you're not enlightened. You're familiar with everything, but conscious, really of nothing. What I mean is that you've no imagination.'

Lord Mark, at this, threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more completely as diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess's notice. Mrs. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her screw, her cruise among the islands. 'Oh, I've heard that,' the young man replied, 'before!'

'There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard me of course before, in my country, often enough.'

'Oh, never too often,' he protested; 'I'm sure I hope I shall still hear you again and again.'

'But what good then has it done you?' the girl went on as if now frankly to amuse him.

'Oh, you'll see when you know me.'

'But, most assuredly, I shall never know you.'

'Then that will be exactly,' he laughed, 'the good!'

If it established thus that they couldn't, or Wouldn't, mix, why, none the less, did Milly feel, through it, a perverse quickening of the relation to which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?

What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking—for it was what they had arrived at—almost intimately? She wished to get away from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was present to him. She saw already—wonderful creature, after all, herself too—that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out of the question. Everything else might come in—only never that; and with such an arrangement they might even go far. This in fact might quite have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of the handsome girl. If she was to keep herself out she could naturally best do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly put in Kate Croy, being ready to that extent—as she was not at all afraid for her—to sacrifice her if necessary. Lord Mark himself, for that matter, had made it easy by saying a little while before that no one among them did anything for nothing. 'What then'—she was aware of being abrupt—'does Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What has she to gain by her lovely welcome? Look at her now!' Milly broke out with characteristic freedom of praise, though pulling herself up also with a compunctious 'Oh!' as the direction thus given to their eyes happened to coincide with a turn of Kate's face to them. All she had meant to do was to insist that this face was fine; but what she had in fact done was to renew again her effect of showing herself to its possessor as conjoined with Lord Mark for some interested view of it. He had, however, promptly met her question.

'To gain? Why, your acquaintance.'

'Well, what's my acquaintance to her? She can care for me—she must feel that—only by being sorry for me; and that's why she's lovely: to be already willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of the disinterested.'