The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight.
Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room;
he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this
general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks
to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that
intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;
whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs
sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.
Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small
sofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,
of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know each
other--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; and
she arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to put
Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the
profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;
there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he
could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other
hand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see on
the spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. I
mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you
she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
He took this in such patience as he could muster. "What in the world's
the matter with her?"
But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here has
been just a reason for her funking it."
"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher asked again.
"Why just what I've told you--that she likes you so much."
"Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?"
Kate cast about--it would take so long to explain. "And perhaps it's
true that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visibly
preoccupied and worried."
"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be only for that."
"For what then?"
But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. "Why, if it's
anything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, and
she has done all she need to be civil."
"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite beautifully civil."
It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was
already, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on two
different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other
makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell Milly all about you."
"Well then," said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, "I'm glad I
felt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to
her?"
"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's all," Kate declared,
"as it should be."
"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically suggested, "that she
isn't getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on _this?_"
And then as Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On our present
disregard for appearances."
"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make
them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged
that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had
indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instance
another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to
respond just in order to make that impression."
"Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! I
hope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean
judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as
thrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,
Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do you
mean she's as ill as she looks?"
Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech
deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her
own--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could
scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.
She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing her
too--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on
the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled
up. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the night
before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a
day or two later. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
she has had?"
"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"
"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
to lose. And she wants more."
"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"
"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
plain."
Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
then on earth can I do her?"