The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

it—the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She was, in her accepted effacement—it was actually her acceptance that made the beauty and repaired the damage—under her aunt's eyes now; but whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.

'Don't you think her good enough now?' Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native humours—things quite in the line of old Venetian comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy—a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at all events to answer Kate. 'Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!'

'But she's too nice,' Kate returned with appreciation. 'Everything suits her so— especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll trouble you really to look at them.' Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not 'really' looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the embodied poetry—his mind, for Milly's aspects, kept coming back to that—which owed them part of its style. Kate's face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the wearer's breast—so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably to convenience. 'She's a dove,' Kate went on, 'and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground.'

'Yes—down to the ground is the word.' Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a given case— had, truly, in the case with which he was concerned—spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on.

'Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.'

'They would uncommonly suit you,' he frankly returned.

'Oh yes, I see myself!'

As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her—she would have been splendid; and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal ornament had—under pressure now not wholly occult—taken on the character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that, well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't that the great difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. 'She's certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to me about it. She evidently believes her better.'

'Well, if they choose to call it so—!'

'And what do you call it—as against them?'

'I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!' Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to be taught.

'That's what I'm talking about,' he said. 'What do you call it to me?'

It made her wait a little. 'She isn't better. She's worse. But that has nothing to do with it.'

'Nothing to do?' He wondered.

But she was clear. 'Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're doing our best for her. We're making her want to live.' And Kate again watched her. 'To-night she does want to live.' She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the hard. 'It's wonderful. It's beautiful.'

'It's beautiful indeed.'

He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it no heed. 'She's doing it for him'—and she nodded in the direction of Milly's medical visitor. 'She wants to be for him at her best. But she can't deceive him.'

Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: 'And do you think you can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him—!'

Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a direction of his own eyes—determined, in the way such things happen, precisely by the attention of the others—as Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly marked. 'He's looking at you. He wants to speak to you.'

'So Mrs. Stringham,' the young man laughed, 'advised me he would.'

'Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need,' Kate went on in answer to the previous question, 'to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to do with me.'

'Except to reprobate you,' Densher suggested.

'For not caring for you? Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven by it into your relation with Milly—as all that I leave you to him.'

'Well,' said Densher sincerely enough, 'I think I can thank you for leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself.'