"Of course, it holds me.
It's a perpetual sound in my ears.
It makes me ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made."
Densher had a pause.
"Oh, you might, with good luck, have the personal happiness too."
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly:
"Darling!"
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple.
"Will you settle it by our being married to-morrow—as we can, with perfect ease, civilly?"
"Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied, "till after you've seen her."
"Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said:
"You're afraid of her yourself."
He gave a smile a trifle glassy.
"For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit, we're a caution!"
"Yes," she took it straight up; "we're hideously intelligent.
But there's fun in it too.
We must get our fun where we can.
I think," she added, and for that matter, not without courage, "our relation's beautiful.
It's not a bit vulgar.
I cling to some saving romance in things."
It made him break into a laugh which had more freedom than his smile.
"How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!"
"No, no, that would be vulgar.
But, of course, I do see my danger," she admitted, "of doing something base."
"Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"
"I shan't sacrifice you; don't cry out till you're hurt.
I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything.
That," she wound up, "is how I see myself, and how I see you quite as much, acting for them."
"For 'them'?" and the young man strongly, extravagantly marked his coldness. "Thank you!"
"Don't you care for them?"
"Why should I?
What are they to me but a serious nuisance?"
As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his roughness—and partly because he expected a flash from her.
But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow.
"I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity we may do all.
We may keep her."
He stared.
"Make her pension us?"
"Well, wait at least till we have seen."
He thought.
"Seen what can be got out of her?"
Kate for a moment said nothing.
"After all I never asked her; never, when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws."
"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were a vulture."
"Call it an eagle—with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights.
If she's a thing of the air, in short—say at once a balloon—I never myself got into her car.
I was her choice."
It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master.