He was taken up promptly with another matter—the truth of the remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking place had obliged him to hang off; they had—after hearing of him from poor Susan as gone—been hoping for an early sight of him; they would have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely—by which she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it—was what marked him for unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft; and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn’t yet begun to be; it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded, he could “work” this association: he had but to use the house freely for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it. Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lowder’s view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him on—brought him on a distance that he couldn’t again retrace. He had private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of candour was Aunt Maud’s wealth of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn’t so himself—everything was too real; but it was none the less not false that he had been through a mill.
It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, “I want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I’m with you to the end!” his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was with him to the end—or she might be—in a way Kate wasn’t; and even if it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just brush away the question of why it shouldn’t. Was he professing to her in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn’t real? How in the world could he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions—two and a scrap—on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met him halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which he was completely free with this lady; and it wouldn’t indeed have come about if—for another monstrosity—he hadn’t ceased to be free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn’t have stayed to the end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all to his help.
“You simply couldn’t stand it?”
“I simply couldn’t stand it. Besides you see—!” But he paused.
“Besides what?” He had been going to say more—then he saw dangers; luckily however she had again assisted him. “Besides—oh I know!—men haven’t, in many relations, the courage of women.”
“They haven’t the courage of women.”
“Kate or I would have stayed,” she declared—“if we hadn’t come away for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated.”
Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn’t his behaviour since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said—he couldn’t help going so far: “I don’t doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy would have stayed.” And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was Susan Shepherd.
