With him thus in presence, and near him—and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner—there was no getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express herself by following up the advantage she did possess.
It was part of that advantage for the hour—a brief fallacious makeweight to his pressure—that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel her will.
They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave him back the sense of his action.
It had never yet in life been granted him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest.
He had lived long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter.
It was a liking greater than Milly's—or it would be: he felt it in him to answer for that.
So at all events he read the case while he noted that Kate was somehow—for Kate—wanting in lustre.
As a striking young presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside.
This represented, he perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes—he had never forgotten it—the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate.
She was, in her accepted effacement—it was actually her acceptance that made the beauty and repaired the damage—under her aunt's eyes now; but whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied?
It struck him none the less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
"Don't you think her good enough now?"
Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native humours—things quite in the line of old Venetian comedy.
The girl's idea of music had been happy—a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank.
It was easy at all events to answer Kate.
"Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
"But she's too nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything suits her so—especially her pearls.
They go so with her old lace.
I'll trouble you really to look at them."
Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the embodied poetry—his mind, for Milly's aspects, kept coming back to that—which owed them part of its style.
Kate's face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the wearer's breast—so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably to convenience.
"She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled.
Yet they suit her down to the ground."
"Yes—down to the ground is the word."
Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion's feeling about them.
Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit.
Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds.
It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a given case—had, truly, in the case with which he was concerned—spread themselves for protection.
Hadn't they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease?
All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on.
"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
"Oh yes, I see myself!"
As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her—she would have been splendid; and with it he felt more what she was thinking of.
Milly's royal ornament had—under pressure now not wholly occult—taken on the character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision was actually in Kate's face.
It might have been in her face too that, well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what Merton Densher would never be able to give her.
Wasn't that the great difference that Milly to-night symbolised?
She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least little present.
Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards that Densher thought.
He could think now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner.
He could but come back to his friend's question of a minute ago.
"She's certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's better.
Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to me about it.
She evidently believes her better."
"Well, if they choose to call it so—!"
"And what do you call it—as against them?"
"I don't call it anything to any one but you.
I'm not 'against' them!" Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to be taught.
"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
It made her wait a little.