"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
about her's so good."
"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
emphasis, pulled up.
"You take it from Kate?"
"From Kate herself."
"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
given me her word for it."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
word?"
It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
_you_ call her word?"
"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
things."
Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
interest--"
"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."
At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further;
he fell back on the spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should
she be swearing to you?"
She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to herself; which
disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the
aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you, we're such
tremendous friends."
"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have
stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as
if he had in a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to leave-taking, that
she had given rather more than she intended or than she should be able,
when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
Strange enough in fact that he had had from her, about herself--and,
under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight--what no
one else had had: neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor
Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was
aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take
himself off, so that she might either recover it or bear the loss
better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time
saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed
for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most
decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the
theory that she might whimsically want him--which she never, in her
caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes
over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too noiseless almost for
her nerves, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a
ship--Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card. Lord Mark--and as
if also for admiration of him--delayed his departure to let her receive
it; on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her
presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that
even for dealing with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its
disappearance. The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had
asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
the staircase.
"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
judgement of his identity heard and noted once before