The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

'Don't mind my leading her on?'

She put it differently. 'Don't mind her leading you.'

'Well, she won't—so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that 'help,'' he pursued, 'with what she knows?'

'What she knows? That needn't prevent.'

He wondered. 'Prevent her loving us?'

'Prevent her helping you. She's like that,' Kate Croy explained.

It took indeed some understanding. 'Making nothing of the fact that I love another?'

'Making everything,' said Kate. 'To console you.'

'But for what?'

'For not getting your other.'

He continued to stare. 'But how does she know—?'

'That you won't get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud's stand. That'—Kate was lucid—'gives her the chance to be nice to you.'

'And what does it give me,' the young man none the less rationally asked, 'the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?'

Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his violence. 'You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there are reasons. I mean others.'

'What others?'

'Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you,' the girl added, 'are enough to go on with.'

'To go on to what?'

'Why, to seeing her again—say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on all grounds, is no more than decent of you.'

He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had passed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but it had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindling consequence. 'Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes,' said Densher, 'her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite independently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received.'

It appeared practically all Kate asked. 'Then you see. I shall meet you there.'

'I don't quite see,' he presently returned, 'why she should wish to receive you for it.'

'She receives me for myself—that is for her self. She thinks no end of me. That I should have to drum it into you!'

Yet still he didn't take it. 'Then I confess she's beyond me.'

Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. 'She regards me as already—in these few weeks—her dearest friend. It's quite separate. We're in, she and I, ever so deep.' And it was to confirm this that, as if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out at last her own real light. 'She doesn't of course know I care for you. She thinks I care so little that it's not worth speaking of.' That he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made quickly clear, and Kate hailed the effect with surprise. 'Have you been supposing that she does know—?'

'About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you show me—and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her.' She uttered at this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. 'You have denied it to her?'

She threw up her arms at his being so backward. ''Denied it'? My dear man, we've never spoken of you.'

'Never, never?'

'Strange as it may appear to your glory—never.'

He couldn't piece it together. 'But won't Mrs. Lowder have spoken?'

'Very probably. But of you. Not of me.'

This struck him as obscure. 'How does she know me but as part and parcel of you?'

'How?' Kate triumphantly asked. 'Why exactly to make nothing of it, to have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it. Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation—that is out of my being in danger from you—by not having so much as suspected or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it and sinking it—if she only does so hard enough. Therefore she, in her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say, distinguished you.'

'And you don't suppose,' said Densher, 'that they must have made it out for themselves?'

'No, my dear, I don't; not even,' Kate declared, 'after Milly's so funnily bumping against us on Tuesday.'

'She doesn't see from that—?'

'That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that you regard me with a complacent eye —for you show it, I think, always too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too much; I don't perhaps—to please you completely where others are concerned—show it enough.'

'Can you show it or not as you like?' Densher demanded.