The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

'Oh,' said Densher impatiently, 'you've treated him beautifully.'

'I'm glad,' she smiled, 'that you can still be jealous.' But before he could take it up she had more to say. 'I don't see why it need puzzle you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything else can displease her. What does she see but that Milly herself recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree your own recognition. Out of which she therefore gets it that the more you have for Milly the less you have for me.'

There were moments again—we know that from the first they had been numerous—when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at once to conviction and to reaction. And this effect, however it be named, now broke into his tone. 'Oh if she began to know what I have for you—!'

It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. 'Luckily for us we may really consider she doesn't. So successful have we been.'

'Well,' he presently said, 'I take from you what you give me, and I suppose that, to be consistent—to stand on my feet where I do stand at all—I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me. It never seems to me somehow what I may expect of you. There's so much you don't give me.'

She appeared to wonder. 'And pray what is it I don't—?'

'I give you proof,' said Densher. 'You give me none.'

'What then do you call proof?' she after a moment ventured to ask.

'Your doing something for me.'

She considered with surprise. 'Am I not doing this for you? Do you call this nothing?'

'Nothing at all.'

'Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it.'

They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. 'I thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing!'

It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant moreover that she didn't like it—either the being so or the being seen, for she soon spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence. 'What then do you wish me to risk?'

The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would have said, worse. 'What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this rate that I am?' Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't. Deep, always, was his sense of life with her—deep as it had been from the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two winters ago they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for unguarded, ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some intenser faith between them this was because he believed it could reach her and she could meet it. 'I can go on perhaps,' he said, 'with help. But I can't go on without.'

She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. 'We ought to be there—I mean when they come out.'

'They won't come out—not yet. And I don't care if they do.' To which he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make: 'Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?' It broke from him in perfect sincerity. 'Good God, if you'd only take me!'

It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her an instant. 'We've gone too far,' she none the less pulled herself together to reply. 'Do you want to kill her?'

He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. 'Kill, you mean, Aunt Maud?'

'You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies.'

Oh at this his head went up. 'I, my dear, have told none!'

He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. 'Thank you very much.'

Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already risen to his lips. 'Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance of it I'll go this very night.'

'Then go,' said Kate Croy.

He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had become of a sudden, in all truth, a split—as if the basis of his departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly, recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that produced for them another pause. 'I'll tell any lie you want, any your idea requires, if you'll only come to me.'

'Come to you?'

'Come to me.'

'How? Where?'

She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in her being so equal to him. 'To my rooms, which are perfectly possible, and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt, in view. We can arrange it—with two grains of courage. People in our case always arrange it.' She listened as for the good information, and there was support for him—since it was a question of his going step by step—in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had