IV

His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he

overtook her, to make out more than ever, in the poise of her head, the

pride of her step--he didn't know what best to call it--a part, at

least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured

his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though, at the

same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before

him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or

profitable compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do

as _she_ liked--his own liking might come off as it would. He would

help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and

the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her

beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the

high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he

wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous,

reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be

clever, with all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he

sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up

again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,

and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the

credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and

surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue. It

was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a

direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged--it which was enough

as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing

Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast

drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the

first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed

in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging

to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really

enlarged to the scale of the place.

He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an

hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while

observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to

be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the

hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but

part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to

and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid

furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as

little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found

himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on,

and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man

could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no

show--literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there

all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect,

were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When

all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once

all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it

back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it.

It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite

felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It

bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow,

strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or

stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there

was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament.

She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and

he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip--the whip, in a

word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved

the girl--which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had

mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking

of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking

it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in

some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage

he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited.

Decidedly there was something he hadn't enough of. He stood as one fast.

His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he

paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at

the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as

little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate

looked rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any

state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly,

more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and

they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction.

He hadn't known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own

rebellions of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent

lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself

that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and

freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities

of the mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so

gregariously ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have

found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played

into the subject for an article--that his impression put straight into

his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still

flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of

its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should

have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove, after all, but a small amount

of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even

while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less

easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He

couldn't describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either

Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure they were rangeable under

one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were

furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and they

abounded in rare material--precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He

had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and

corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled everywhere so thick. He

had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush,

so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was, above all, the

solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general

attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance.

These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his

own world of thought--of which, for that matter, in the presence of

them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed

it to him by their merciless difference. His interview with Aunt Maud,

none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate

though her nature, no doubt Mrs. Lowder, on this occasion, neither

threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of

defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and

unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only

afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something

else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn't have known what

to call it if he hadn't called it her really imprudent good-nature. Her

blandness, in other words, was not mere policy--he wasn't dangerous

enough for policy; it was the result, he could see, of her fairly

liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself became

more interesting; and who knew what might happen should he take to

liking _her?_ Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought

him, at any rate, but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray

powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her

explaining it, that if she had made him wait it had not been to wound

him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her

intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed

to say to him--not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come

home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her

first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he

hadn't taken her hint, and this inquiry assumed so many things that it

made discussion, immediately, frank and large. He knew, with the

question put, that the hint was just what he _had_ taken; knew that she

had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if

he didn't take care he should understand her, and the strength of her

purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the

length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the

thought, too, that he was not going to be afraid of understanding her;

he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the

feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one's mind let one in, at

the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need of action, where

simplicity was all; but when one couldn't prevent it the thing was to

make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original

fun of mistakes. What he must use his fatal intelligence for was to

resist. Mrs. Lowder, meanwhile, might use it for whatever she liked.

It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate

that he began, on his side, to reflect that--with her manner of

offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to

embrace--it she couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively, she

seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did

her intention justice, she would have nothing more disagreeable to do.

"If I hadn't been ready to go very much further, you understand, I

wouldn't have gone so far. I don't care what you repeat to her--the

more you repeat to her, perhaps the better; and, at any rate, there's

nothing she doesn't already know. I don't say it for her; I say it for

you--when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight." So

Aunt Maud delivered herself--as with homely benevolence, in the

simplest, but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a

word to the wise was, doubtless, in spite of the advantage, _not_

always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our

young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was

good--was really, by her measure, good enough: good enough, that is, to

give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But _was_ he good

enough--by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully

expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. "She's the

finest possible creature--of course you flatter yourself that you know

it. But I know it, quite as well as you possibly can--by which I mean a

good deal better yet; and the tune to which I'm ready to prove my faith

compares favourably enough, I think, with anything _you_ can do. I

don't say it because she's my niece--that's nothing to me: I might have

had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have brought one of them to this place

if I hadn't found her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done

something else, but I wouldn't have put up with her presence. Kate's

presence, by good fortune, I marked early; Kate's presence--unluckily

for _you_--is everything I could possibly wish; Kate's presence is, in

short, as fine as you know, and I've been keeping it for the comfort of

my declining years. I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and

letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and you may judge

whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for

it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've my

idea of the best."

"Oh, I quite conceive," said Densher, "that your idea of the best isn't

me."

It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder's that her face in speech was like a

lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain.

The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take;

yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her

surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. "I didn't ask

you to come to hear what it isn't--I asked you to come to hear what it

is."

"Of course," Densher laughed, "it's very great indeed."

His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely

relevant. "I want to see her high, high up--high up and in the light."

"Ah, you naturally want to marry her to a duke, and are eager to smooth

away any hitch."

She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it

quite forced him, at first, into the sense, possibly just, of having

affected her as flippant, perhaps even as low. He had been looked at

so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men,

but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than

anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion's subtlety, and

thereby of Kate's possible career. "Don't be _too_ impossible!"--he

feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and

then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off

easily. "I want her to marry a great man." That was all; but, more and

more, it was enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would have

made it so. "And I think of her what I think. There you are."

They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of

something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he

only would. To that extent she did appeal--appealed to the intelligence

she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at

all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of course I'm

aware how little I can answer to any fond, proud dream. You've a

view--a magnificent one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly

understand what I'm not, and I'm much obliged to you for not reminding

me of it in any rougher way." She said nothing--she kept that up; it

might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in

the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man

couldn't show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he

preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he _was_--on

Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question--a very small quantity,

and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be

perfectly simple; yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension

throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on

have said how. "You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you

think, and I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your

performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they're

meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you

myself--since you're, in your way, my dear young man, delightful--and

arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should.

Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it's not really

necessary? It won't--it would be too absurd!--_be_ necessary. I can

bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I'm

dealing with you now, see--and successfully judge--without opening it.

I do things handsomely all round--I place you in the presence of the

plan with which, from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,

you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round

it--don't be afraid you'll hurt it!--and live on with it before you."

He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it

was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He

was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not

proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to

interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem.

Immediately afterwards, then, he spoke of these things to Kate, and

what then came back to him first of all was the way he had said to

her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers

says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely, of course, that

you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going

far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in

it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own

light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the

close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating

him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was

moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage

with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night

before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a

service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going, for fifteen

or twenty weeks, to America. The idea of a series of letters from the

United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time

been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment

was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had,

in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into

Densher's face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up

in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter

to Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position, as yet,

to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand

confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce

knowing how to measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he

had not quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This

confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed

to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question

surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle

that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened

this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons,

about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little

tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.

It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one

still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as

they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of

June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose

a week; his inquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground,

and there were reasons of State--reasons operating at the seat of

empire in Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head.

Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;

and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to

speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as

that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together; she was

clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her;

but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his

prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him intensely--of

course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke

with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of

this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with

scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily

bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had

really occurred in Fleet Street--all the more that it was his own final

reading. He was to pull the subject up--that was just what they wanted;

and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them

each as he might, to let _him_ down. It was just because he didn't nose

about and wasn't the usual gossipmonger that they had picked him out;

it was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently

wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would

have always to take from his example.

"How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a

journalist's wife!" Densher exclaimed in admiration, even while she

struck him as fairly hurrying him off.

But she was almost impatient of the praise. "What do you expect one

_not_ to understand when one cares for you?"

"Ah then, I'll put it otherwise and say 'How much you care for me!'"

"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity. I _shall,_ with a

chance to show it," she added, "have some imagination for you."

She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent, that he felt

a queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently

arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their

destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from

Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this

element soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the

parts were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before

taking his leave, was to see why Kate had just spoken of the future as

if they now really possessed it, and was to come to the vision by a

devious way that deepened the final cheer. Their faces were turned to

the illumined quarter as soon as he had answered her question in

respect to the appearance of their being able to play a waiting game

with success. It was for the possibility of that appearance that she

had, a few days before, so earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and

if after his hour with that lady it had not struck Densher that he had

seen her to the happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better

meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.

"If she consents to your coming, why isn't that everything?"

"It _is_ everything; everything _she_ thinks it. It's the

probability--I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability--that I may be

prevented from becoming a complication for her by some arrangement,

_any_ arrangement, through which you shall see me often and easily.

She's sure of my want of money, and that gives her time. She believes

in my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my

state before I put the pistol to your head in respect to sharing it.

The time that will take figures for her as the time that will help her

if she doesn't spoil her chance by treating me badly. She doesn't at

all wish moreover," Densher went on, "to treat me badly, for I believe,

upon my honour, funny as it may sound to you, that she personally

rather likes me, and that if you weren't in question I might almost

become her pet young man. She doesn't disparage intellect and

culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be

named in her programme; and I'm sure it has sometimes cost her a real

pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible." He

paused a moment, and his companion then saw that a strange smile was in

his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct, in her own, of this

informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth

were known, she likes me literally better than--deep down--you yourself

do: wherefore she does me the honour to think that I may be safely left

to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I'm not the

sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use,

that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride

and prejudice will take care of the rest! the pride fed full,

meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the

prejudice excited by the comparison she'll enable you to make, from

which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like me so

much as when she succeeded a little better in making me look wretched.

For then _you'll_ like me less."

Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was

a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after

an instant replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair she must

think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."

"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as

deep as it will."

He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to

consider. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as

you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the

other big things that, in one's acquaintance with people, give her a

place so apart."

"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded; "she's on the scale,

altogether, of the car of Juggernaut which was a kind of image that

came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The

things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange

idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of

the car to bristle."

"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that

aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges

that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were

complications, there were questions; but they were so much more

together than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word

of refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy, and they left it there,

as they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her

powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too

the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of

his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last--though

indeed only under artful pressure--fallen foul of his very type, his

want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents.

She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate,

would have been dreadful if he hadn't so let himself in for it.

"I was really curious, you see," he explained, "to find out from her

what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light

of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass

for."

Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why should you care?" she

asked.

"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade,

her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of; they

belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we

must keep setting up 'codes' with. Besides," he added, "I want to

please her personally."

"Ah, yes, we must please her personally!" his companion echoed; and the

words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of

Densher's politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for

New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon

came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told

her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told

herself. That, if it were so, was an accident, and it put him, for half

an hour, on as much of the picture of his early years abroad, his

migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German university, as she had

easy attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their world, would

have spotted him straight as to many of these points; a man of their

world, so far as they had a world, would have been through the English

mill. But it was none the less charming to make his confession to a

woman; women had, in fact, for such differences, so much more

imagination. Kate showed at present all his case could require; when

she had had it from beginning to end she declared that she now made out

more than ever yet of what she loved him for. She had herself, as a

child, lived with some continuity in the world across the Channel,

coming home again still a child; and had participated after that, in

her teens, in her mother's brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to

Florence, to Biarritz, weak and expensive attempts at economy from

which there stuck to her--though in general coldly expressed, through

the instinctive avoidance of cheap raptures--the religion of foreign

things. When it was revealed to her how many more foreign things were

in Merton Densher than he had hitherto taken the trouble to catalogue,

she almost faced him as if he were a map of the continent or a handsome

present of a delightful new "Murray." He hadn't meant to swagger, he

had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs. Lowder he had meant also a

little to explain. His father had been, in strange countries, in twenty

settlements of the English, British chaplain, resident or occasional,

and had had for years the unusual luck of never wanting a billet. His

career abroad had therefore been unbroken, and, as his stipend had

never been great, he had educated his children at the smallest cost, in

the schools nearest; which was also a saving of railway fares.

Densher's mother, it further appeared, had practised on her side a

distinguished industry, to the success of which--so far as success ever

crowned it--this period of exile had much contributed: she copied,

patient lady, famous pictures in great museums, having begun with a

happy natural gift and taking in betimes the scale of her opportunity.

Copyists abroad of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher had had a sense and

a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection that persuaded, that

even deceived, and that made the disposal of her work blissfully usual.

Her son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and the effect of his

telling Kate all about her, as well as about other matters until then

mixed and dim, was to render his history rich, his sources full, his

outline anything but common. He had come round, he had come back, he

insisted abundantly, to being a Briton: his Cambridge years, his happy

connection, as it had proved, with his father's college, amply

certified to that, to say nothing of his subsequent plunge into London,

which filled up the measure. But brave enough though his descent to

English earth, he had passed, by the way, through zones of air that had

left their ruffle on his wings, had been exposed to initiations

ineffaceable. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.

When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,

declaring that this indeed was what was too much the matter with him,

that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.

On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without

mitigation, that if he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for

the world have had him any thing less; so that he was reduced in the

end to accusing her of putting the dreadful truth to him in the hollow

guise of flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was in order that

she might eventually find him impossible; and, as she could fully make

it out but with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight to

help her. If her last word for him, in the connection, was that the way

he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of his having tasted

of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her to eat, this gives

the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of the flight of time

in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate showed, however,

that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke of the relief

Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.

"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so

little."

His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so

much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"

Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she

builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the

view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to

keep it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."

He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.

He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her

own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even

through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm,

transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging

like a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary

beauty: "I engage myself to you for ever."

The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated

nothing--couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole

joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you--I call God to

witness!--every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life."

That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as

quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of

the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and

spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They

moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as

fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent,

they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them.

They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact,

solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted

eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and

to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place

accordingly an affianced couple; but before they left it other things

still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a

premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked

round together to a high level of wisdom and patience. Kate's free

profession was that she wished not to deprive _him_ of Mrs. Lowder's

countenance, which, in the long run, she was convinced he would

continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of

him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to

cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One

difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.

"Of course it will never do--we must remember that--from the moment you

allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long

as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears, I

don't see that we deceive her. At a given moment, you see, she must be

undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the moment and

to face it. Only, after all, in that case," the young man observed,

"one doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her."

"What she'll have got from _us?"_ Kate inquired with a smile. "What

she'll have got from us," the girl went on, "is her own affair--it's

for _her_ to measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I never put

myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands

them. What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of,"

Kate further explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so,

for that matter, will she."

Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the

present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular

situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it."