To some 'game,' as they say.
To some deviltry.
To some duplicity."
"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous supposition."
Her companion, after a stiff minute—sensibly long for each—fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute, which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible.
She left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights.
These would have been an advantage mainly to herself.
Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence of them.
It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him—so differently, for confidence—in words she had already used.
"If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for him, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so dreadfully to believe?"
Oh how he knew he hung back!
But at last he said:
"You're absolutely certain then that she does believe it?"
"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"
He took his time again to judge.
"Do you believe it?"
He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion.
She answered none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed.
"What I believe will inevitably depend more or less on your action.
You can perfectly settle it—if you care.
I promise to believe you down to the ground if, to save her life, you consent to a denial."
"But a denial, when it comes to that—confound the whole thing, don't you see!—of exactly what?"
It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged.
"Of everything."
Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much.
"Oh!" he simply moaned into the gloom.
IV
The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of other rigours.
The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright colour, took large possession.
Venice glowed and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets.
Densher rejoiced in this on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything.
That was where the event had landed him—where no event in his life had landed him before.
He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts—a few of them—which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.
But anything like his actual state he had not, as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range—the prohibition in other words of freedom—hitherto known.
The great oddity was that if he had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure, nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying.
It would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all, to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his going on as he was.
That was the effect in particular of Mrs. Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth of what he couldn't do.
It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge, he possibly could.
It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the station for Sir Luke.
Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet turned over so long.
What then was his odious position but that again and again he was afraid?
He stiffened himself under this consciousness as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant.
He hadn't at any time proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his life.
Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him.
He was afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal.
He was afraid of it as a current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear.
What finally prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's brief sacrifice to society—and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had brought it well to the surface—shown him marked benevolence.
Mrs. Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them made him—it was unmistakeable—feel things he perhaps hadn't felt.