"And for what?"
"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
it made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
compassion. "She has nothing."
"Not all the young dukes?"
"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
life. Oh she has you arranged!"
"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
"Then why shan't I be?"
"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."
"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
you're therefore what I use most."
He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
he asked.
Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."
"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."
"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."