"Oh, with a push!"
"But have you offered to live with your sister?"
"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
call it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out. "Sometimes,
alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
went through things--they pulled her down; I know what they were now--I
didn't then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is
an insolence of success. That's what Marian keeps before me; that's
what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position's a value,
a great value, for them both"--she followed and followed. Lucid and
ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. "It's _the_ value--the only one
they have."
Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their
pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure--the quickness and anxiety
playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly,
as he had never done before. "And the fact you speak of holds you!"
"Of course, it holds me. It's a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me
ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to
anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I
can be made."
Densher had a pause. "Oh, you might, with good luck, have the personal
happiness too."
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which
she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly:
"Darling!"
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. "Will
you settle it by our being married to-morrow--as we can, with perfect
ease, civilly?"
"Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied, "till after you've
seen her."
"Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of
deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the
tone of it than the way she at last said: "You're afraid of her
yourself."
He gave a smile a trifle glassy. "For young persons of a great
distinction and a very high spirit, we're a caution!"
"Yes," she took it straight up; "we're hideously intelligent. But
there's fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think," she
added, and for that matter, not without courage, "our relation's
beautiful. It's not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in
things."
It made him break into a laugh which had more freedom than his smile.
"How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!"
"No, no, _that_ would be vulgar. But, of course, I do see my danger,"
she admitted, "of doing something base."
"Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"
"I _shan't_ sacrifice you; don't cry out till you're hurt. I shall
sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want
and that I shall try for everything. That," she wound up, "is how I see
myself, and how I see you quite as much, acting for them."
"For 'them'?" and the young man strongly, extravagantly marked his
coldness. "Thank you!"
"Don't you care for them?"
"Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?"
As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the
unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his
roughness--and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was
one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild
glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we
avoid stupidity we may do _all._ We may keep her."