"She isn't better.
She's worse.
But that has nothing to do with it."
"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
But she was clear.
"Nothing to do with us.
Except of course that we're doing our best for her.
We're making her want to live." And Kate again watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful.
It's beautiful."
"It's beautiful indeed."
He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it no heed.
"She's doing it for him"—and she nodded in the direction of Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best.
But she can't deceive him."
Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment:
"And do you think you can?
I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your sentiments.
If Aunt Maud's so thick with him—!"
Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a direction of his own eyes—determined, in the way such things happen, precisely by the attention of the others—as Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly marked.
"He's looking at you.
He wants to speak to you."
"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
"Then let him.
Be right with him.
I don't need," Kate went on in answer to the previous question, "to deceive him.
Aunt Maud, if it's necessary, will do that.
I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can see me only as she sees me.
She sees me now so well.
He has nothing to do with me."
"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
"For not caring for you?
Perfectly.
As a brilliant young man driven by it into your relation with Milly—as all that I leave you to him."
"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of introducing him.
"All the more reason why I should commit you then to Lady Wells."
"Oh but wait."
It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when they were married.
It was furthermore that the consciousness of something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments—to say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard.
If Aunt Maud, over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind.
Besides, just now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was immediately to show.
"How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying?
If you're right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs. Lowder's being squared.
If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued, "can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't deceive other people—not those, that is, who are closely concerned.
He won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud, who's her own."
Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth his having kept her for.
"Why will it be odd?
I marvel at your seeing your way so little."
Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick, its slightly quaking intensities.
He had compared her once, we know, to a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of turning the page.
"Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way you see it!"