"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 favourably 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, that he had never quite expected to have to protest about anything beyond his natural convenience—more, in fine, than his disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal moyens, in short, permitted.
His predicament was therefore one he couldn't like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he brought it on himself.
No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called her reality.
It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting—had his innermost feeling spoken—at the propriety rather, in his interest, of some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would meet that halfway, but the real must also meet him.
Milly's sense of it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported, couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow.
It had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to her.
By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had quite ceased to be so.
By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back in kind, would close one in from harm.
He quite grasped for the quarter of an hour the perch she held out to him—grasped it with one hand, that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened.
It was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general assumption that nothing—nothing to make a deadly difference for him—ever could happen.
It was, socially, a working view like another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the rest of their adventure.
Downstairs again, however, with the limit of his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said, reappeared for her—breaking out moreover, with an effect of strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of health.
He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused.
"It's true, you know, all the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up." He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared. "Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference doesn't notice.
And that's why I know that I notice."
"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather that affection was supposed to be blind."
"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of—are they beauties?"
"Yes, for those who care for you—as every one does.
Everything about you is a beauty.
Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the seriousness of what you tell me.
It's too absurd you should have any trouble about which something can't be done.
If you can't get the right thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know?
You're the first young woman of your time.
I mean what I say." He looked, to do him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear—simply so competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all in love with you.