Mrs. Stringham waited.
"She has been marvellous—that's what she has been.
She is marvellous.
But she's really better."
"Oh then if she's really better—!" But he checked himself, wanting only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him.
"She's keeping herself.
You'll see.
You'll not really need to miss anything.
There's to be a little party."
"Ah I do see—by this aggravated grandeur."
"Well, it is lovely, isn't it?
I want the whole thing.
She's lodged for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it—I mean bringing out all the glory of the place—makes her really happy.
It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be—with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect.
If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour.
The old housekeeper, the woman in charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the evening."
These explanations and sundry others Mrs. Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that the picture closed him in.
What part was there for him, with his attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which everything else would have it?
"They won't, however, be at dinner, the few people she expects—they come round afterwards from their respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago.
It's for him she has wanted to do something—to let it begin at once.
We shall see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad—she'll be glad too—that you're to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it, was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope—!" But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than she uttered.
"What is it you hope?"
"Well, that you'll stay on."
"Do you mean after dinner?"
She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
"Oh that, of course.
Why we're to have music—beautiful instruments and songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either.
She has arranged it—or at least I have.
That is Eugenio has.
Besides, you're in the picture."
"Oh—I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup.
What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is that you'll be faithful to us—that you've not come for a mere foolish few days."
Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce.
The way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest acquisition!
The things they took for granted and the general misery of explaining!
He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it.
It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle on his heart.
He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold breath of it was in the air.
So there he was.
And at best he floundered.
"I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very tiresome things to consider.
Botherations, necessities at home.
The pinch, the pressure in London."
But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been her own very element.
"Oh the daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward?
No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days.
Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've given up all to follow her.