"Oh perfectly."
It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"
"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
very short ones."
"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
enough if you're sure you remember."
"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then she
once copied me something."
"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of
your reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as if
precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:
"And the writing has its usual look?"
Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's
beautiful."
"Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further
remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's
possible."
"Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's
what I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle
vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his
pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the
room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. He
looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid
London street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--as
he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of
the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness
that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of
his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so
driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him
to say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the
inanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly
presented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to
things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try
to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she
again took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"
It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by an
hour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But my
eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I
recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
"One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however was
so singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this while
you _hadn't_ touched it."
"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching
nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took
hold of it."
"Then where is it?"
"Oh I have it here."
"And you've brought it to show me?"
"I've brought it to show you."
So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,
almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.
She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his
own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought.
"But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."
She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable
child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You
haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you
require don't come from your document itself." Then as he answered
nothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"
"I haven't read it."