Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [97]
The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as with gaiety, for a comfortable end. “Did he make up, the false creature, to you?”
“No—but the question isn’t of that. It’s of what Kate might be made to believe.”
“That, given the fact of his having evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been all ready if you had a little bit led him on?”
Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said after a moment and as with a conscious excess of the pensive: “No, I don’t think she’d quite wish to suggest that I made up to him; for that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,” she added—and now at last as with a supreme impatience—“ that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she’s afraid of him, to do him in her sister’s mind a useful ill turn.”
Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment to make out how many her young friend had actually undertaken to see round. Finally, too, weren’t they braving the deeps? They got their amusement where they could. “Isn’t it only,” she asked, “rather probable she’d see that Kate’s knowing him as (what’s the pretty old word?) volage—?”y
“Well?” She hadn’t filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could Milly.
“Well, might but do what that often does—by all our blessed littlelaws and arrangements at least: excite Kate’s own sentiment instead of depressing it.”
The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. “Kate’s own sentiment? Oh she didn’t speak of that. I don’t think,” she added as if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, “I don’t think Mrs. Condrip imagines she’s in love.”
It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. “Then what’s her fear?”
“Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher’s possibly himself keeping it up—the fear of some final result from that.”
“Oh,” said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted—“she looks far ahead!”
At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague “sports.” “No—it’s only we who do.”
“Well, don’t let us be more interested for them than they are for themselves!”
“Certainly not”—the girl promptly assented. A certain interest nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. “It wasn’t of anything on Kate’s own part she spoke.”
“You mean she thinks her sister distinctly doesn’t care for him?”
It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she meant; but there it presently was. “If she did care Mrs. Condrip would have told me.”
What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then they had been talking so. “But did you ask her?”
“Ah no!”
“Oh!” said Susan Shepherd.
Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn’t have asked her for the world.
BOOK FIFTH
—I—
Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she were confessing—all the while it was quite the case that neither justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan Shepherd at home, had been “civil” to Susan—it was just that shade, and Susan’s fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides letting them easily see that if it hadn’t by this time been the end of everything—which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the season at its last gasp—the places they might have