Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [120]
For Mrs. Lowder also moreover her simple words were the right ones; they were at any rate, that lady’s laugh showed, in the natural note of the racy. “You dear American thing! But people may be very good and yet not good for what one wants.”
“Yes,” the girl assented, “even I suppose when what one wants is something very good.”
“Oh my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all I want! I want everything at once and together—and ever so much for you too, you know. But you’ve seen us,” Aunt Maud continued; “you’ll have made out.”
“Ah,” said Milly, “I don’t make out;” for again—it came that way in rushes—she felt an obscurity in things. “Why, if our friend here doesn’t like him—”
“Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?” Mrs. Lowder did justice to the question. “My dear, how can you ask? Put yourself in her place. She meets me, but on her terms. Proud young women are proud young women. And proud old ones are—well, what I am. Fond of you as we both are, you can help us.”
Milly tried to be inspired. “Does it come back then to my asking her straight?”
At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. “Oh if you’ve so many reasons not—!”
“I’ve not so many,” Milly smiled—“but I’ve one. If I break out so suddenly on my knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken before?”
Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. “Why should you care what she makes? You may have only been decently discreet.”
“Ah I have been,” the girl made haste to say.
“Besides,” her friend went on, “I suggested to you, through Susan, your line.”
“Yes, that reason’s a reason for me.”
“And for me,” Mrs. Lowder insisted. “She’s not therefore so stupid as not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that I had asked you to say nothing.”
“And may I tell her that you’ve asked me now to speak?”
Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up. “You can’t do it without—?”
Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. “I’ll do what I can if you’ll kindly tell me one thing more.” She faltered a little—it was so prying; but she brought it out. “Will he have been writing to her?”
“It’s exactly, my dear, what I should like to know!” Mrs. Lowder was at last impatient. “Push in for yourself and I dare say she’ll tell you.”
Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. “It will be pushing in,” she continued to smile, “for you.” She allowed her companion, however, no time to take this up. “The point will be that if he has been writing she may have answered.”
“But what point, you subtle thing, is that?”
“It isn’t subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple,” Milly said, “that if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me.”
“Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?”
The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural Mrs. Lowder herself should so fail of subtlety. “It will make the difference that he’ll have written her in reply that he knows me. And that, in turn,” our young woman explained, “will give an oddity to my own silence.”
“How so, if she’s perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The only oddity,” Aunt Maud lucidly professed, “is for yourself. It’s in her not having spoken.”
“Ah there we are!” said Milly.
And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend. “Then it has troubled you?”
But the enquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with fine inconsequence to her face. “Not really the least little bit!” And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was in the first place already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her face of her uppermost motive—it was so little, in its hard smooth sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke fair; the only thing was that