"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
"Ah I know nothing about that."
"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
was here, we all liked him."
"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,
"yourself."
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
professional propriety."
"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
"I can't talk to any one about her."
"Except to _me_," his friend continued.
"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
was impossible for us, and--"
"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
together."
Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
believe that he thinks she's gone."