"Very, very, very many--more than ever; and you know what that is! And
then," Densher added, "there'll be yours."
"Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself."
He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you
elsewhere?" After which, before she could quite answer, he added with
some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know. It's straighter."
She might again have just waited. "Of course it's straighter. Don't be
afraid I shan't be straight. Address me," she continued, "where you
like. I shall be proud enough of its being known you write to me."
He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even at the risk of its
really bringing down the inquisition?"
Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not afraid of the
inquisition. If she asks if there's anything definite between us, I
know perfectly what I shall say."
"That I _am,_ of course, 'gone' for you?"
"That I love you as I shall never in my life love any one else, and
that she can make what she likes of that." She said it out so
splendidly that it was like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a
tide breaking through; and the effect of that, in turn, was to make her
companion meet her with such eyes that she had time again before he
could otherwise speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask _you."_
"Not while I'm away."
"Then when you come back."
"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had our particular joy. But
what I feel is," he candidly added, "that, by an idea of her own, her
superior policy, she _won't_ ask me. She'll let me off. I shan't have
to lie to her."
"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.
"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.
But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he had perhaps been a
shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a
natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the
girl had just given of her own intention. There _was_ a difference in
the air--even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in
truth between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this
provoked her. She seemed to cast about an instant, and then she went
back a little resentfully to something she had suffered to pass a
minute before. She appeared to take up rather more seriously than she
need the joke about her freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a
beautiful way. "Men are too stupid--even you. You didn't understand
just now why, if I post my letters myself, it won't be for any thing so
vulgar as to hide them."
"Oh, you said--for the pleasure."
"Yes; but you didn't, you don't understand what the pleasure may be.
There are refinements----!" she more patiently dropped. "I mean of
consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation," she went on. "No," she
sadly insisted--_"men_ don't know. They know, in such matters, almost
nothing but what women show them."
This was one of the speeches, frequent in her, that, liberally,
joyfully, intensely adopted and, in itself, as might be, embraced, drew
him again as close to her, and held him as long, as their conditions
permitted. "Then that's exactly why we've such an abysmal need of you!"