"I hope to begin it."
"It's something you haven't begun?"
"Well, only just."
"And since you came?"
She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
ground."
Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper.
"I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."
"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to
repair that ravage."
"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mind
anything."
"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your
days."
He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh
I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."
And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he
visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for
comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
effort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was so
interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he
found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea
with him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--the
extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.
Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,
he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though
it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,
deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not been
modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.
It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; that
glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it would
serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten
Milly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less
wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put
his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it be
safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"
"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
bad?"
He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
believe whatever you tell me."
"Well then, I'm splendid."
"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
"I mean I'm capable of life."
"I've never doubted it."
"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"
"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
"Well, that I know I _can_."
"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
"Whatever I do. If I want to."
"If you want to do it?"
"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
turned for him to mere light and sound.