He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it.
This, however, was not what he brought out.
Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening.
"Only, what harm have you done her?"
Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness.
"I don't know.
I come and talk of her here with you."
It made him again hesitate.
"Does she utterly hate me?"
"I don't know.
How can I?
No one ever will."
"She'll never tell?"
"She'll never tell."
Once more he thought.
"She must be magnificent."
"She is magnificent."
His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he could, all over.
"Would she see me again?"
It made his companion stare.
"Should you like to see her?"
"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. "No."
"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed.
"I don't see what you can do."
"I don't either.
But she might."
Mrs. Stringham continued to think.
"It's too late."
"Too late for her to see—?"
"Too late."
The very decision of her despair—it was after all so lucid—kindled in him a heat.
"But the doctor, all the while—?"
"Tacchini?
Oh he's kind. He comes.
He's proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man.
He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients.
He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on events.
But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile.
We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of her."
"By her request?"
"Absolutely.
I don't do what she doesn't wish.
We talk of the price of provisions."
"By her request too?"
"Absolutely.
She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we liked."
Densher took it all in.
"But he isn't any comfort to you!"