It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
"Will it help you to live?"
"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"
"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for
something else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about it
and that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's no
matter."
"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at
any rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."
"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
"You mean you won't come to me?"
"No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart from
that," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm
not forced to."
"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at
all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the least
coercible of creatures."
"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
"The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."
"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you
don't complain."
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His
telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas
his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well
have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the
way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she
took him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one sees
one's way."
"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
"I mean to keeping what one has."
"Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,
"it's enough to try for."
"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she added
with a change: "And now about your book."
"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
"The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie
or me to run the risk of spoiling."