There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
very much out of our meetings?"
"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
Maud."
"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand what Aunt Maud
gets."
"Exactly so--and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so
fascinated with the question. _She_ gives me no light; she's
prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural--!"
"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate I shall be making my
reflexions about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on,
"that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that
what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The
very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for
yourself, is that when she adopts a view she--well, to her own sense,
really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any
other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've
often thought success comes to her"--Kate continued to study the
phenomenon--"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to
prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of
everything, become the right one."
Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response.
"Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn't not
'understand.' I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently
explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he
pursued: "Does she think she terrorises _us?_" To which he added while,
without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He
knew now that he was probing the girl deep--something told him so; but
that was a reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that you
dislike me?"
To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong. "You could yourself
easily put it there!"