Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [188]
“And you don’t do anything?”
“I do everything. Everything’s this,” she smiled. “I’m doing it now. One can’t do more than live.”
“Oh live!” Lord Mark ejaculated.
“Well, it’s immense for me.” She finally spoke as if for amusement ; now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. “I shan’t,” she added, “have missed everything.”
“Why should you have missed anything?” She felt, as he sounded this, to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. “You’re the person in the world for whom that’s least necessary; for whom one would call it in fact most impossible; for whom ‘missing’ at all will surely require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you believe in advice, for God’s sake take mine. I know what you want.”
Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself—or almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. “I think I want not to be too much worried.”
“You want to be adored.” It came at last straight. “Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do it. It is so”—he firmly kept it up. “You’re not loved enough.”
“Enough for what, Lord Mark?”
“Why to get the full good of it.”
Well, she didn’t after all mock at him. “I see what you mean. That full good of it which consists in finding one’s self forced to love in return.” She had grasped it, but she hesitated. “Your idea is that I might find myself forced to love you?”
“Oh ‘forced’—!” He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion somehow so ill consorted—he was so much all these things that he had absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. “Is it inconceivable to you that you might try?”
“To be so favorably affected by you—?”
“To believe in me. To believe in me,” Lord Mark repeated.
Again she hesitated. “To ‘try’ in return for your trying?”
“Oh I shouldn’t have to!” he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent, however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly, almost comically saw—a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a healing and uplifting passion it was in truth deficient; it wouldn’t do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away. And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion, of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination against him never yet made—made at least to any consciousness of his own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The gathering dusk of her personal world presented itself to him, in her eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that practically he was afraid -whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides, wonderful girl,