I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in October—that night when she was in white, when she had people there and those musicians—she committed him to my care.
It was beautiful for both of us—she put us in relation.
She asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off.
That proved," Densher said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
"He liked you," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
"Ah I know nothing about that."
"You ought to then.
He went with you to galleries and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon he might really have been a great judge.
I mean of the beautiful."
"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is—in having judged her.
He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing.
His interest in her—which we must make the most of—can only be supremely beneficent."
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confessed to.
"I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
There was something for him in the sound of it.
"Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him.
Surely, when he was here, we all liked him."
"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks.
And I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said, "yourself."
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word.
"We never spoke of her.
Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture.
But she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it.
"That was his professional propriety."
"Precisely.
But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I couldn't talk to him about her!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
"I can't talk to any one about her."
"Except to me," his friend continued.
"Except to you."
The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her.
For honesty too—that is for his own words—he had quickly coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate.
His visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching him hold it down.
And he had to hold it down—the effort of which, precisely, made him red.
He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
She might make what she would of it.
He attempted to repeat his statement, but he really modified it.
"Sir Luke, at all events, had nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him.
Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and—"
"And real"—she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis—"was more impossible still." No doubt—he didn't deny it; and she had straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say—that there were immensities between you.
Otherwise you'd have chattered."
"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
"You were neither of you thinking of any one else.
That's why you kept together."
Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight back to what he had originally said.
"I haven't a notion, all the same, of what he thinks."
She faced him, visibly, with the question into which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was perpetually flowering, right and left—"Are you very sure?"—and he could only note her apparent difference from himself.
"You, I judge, believe that he thinks she's gone."
She took it, but she bore up.