I wish you could feel as I do.
And can't you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly.
"Do you write about Venice?"
"No; but I would—oh wouldn't I?—if I hadn't so completely given up.
She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess—"
"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
"Precisely.
There you are!"
It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places at once.
"I quite understand that she's yours.
Only you see she's not mine."
He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a disturbing implication.
This was part of what he liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it.
That was in itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could see.
Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all was.
She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep.
Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the midst.
Such perceptions made occasions—well, occasions for fairly wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing involved.
Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine.
He was glad there was no male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a man to see him.
He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for.
He had a vision of great London surgeons—if this one was a surgeon—as incisive all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the ironic attention of his own sex.
The most he might be able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in.
It was a train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well.
Lord Mark had caught him twice in the fact—the fact of his absurd posture; and that made a second male.
But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark.
His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess.
"Of course she's not.
You must do something first."
Densher gave it his thought.
"Wouldn't it be rather she who must?"
It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand.
"I see.
No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
It made him on the spot feel a brute.
"Of course she has.
No one could be more charming.
She has treated me as if I were somebody.
Call her my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you altogether.
Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see that it's quite court life."
She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him.
"That's all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel.
That will do perfectly."
"Oh well then I grant it.
Only court life as a general thing, you know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
That's just the beauty here; it's why she's the great and only princess.
With her, at her court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her.