"But he has dropped them?"
"They've dropped _him._ Of that I'm sure. It ought to do for you. I
offered him," the girl immediately continued--"and it was for that I
went to him--to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is
possible. But he won't hear of it."
Densher took this in with visible, but generous, wonder. "You offered
him--'impossible' as you describe him to me--to live with him and share
his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the moment but the high
beauty of it. "You _are_ gallant!"
"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?" She wouldn't in the
least have this. "It wasn't courage--it was the opposite. I did it to
save myself--to escape."
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"
"From everything."
"Do you by any chance mean from me?"
"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."
"But he won't allow it," said Densher.
"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
hold out a finger to me," Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in
his inimitable manner, and throws me back."
"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that marked in him,
again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately, something that banished
the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull
desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. "He would
make himself delightful to you."
"Even while objecting to me?"
"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. He would
appreciate you and be clever with you. It's to _me_ he objects--that is
as to my liking you."
"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed, "that you like me enough
for the objection!"
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."