She at any rate does love life.
To have met a person like you," Kate further explained, "is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of life.
Oh she has you arranged!"
"You have, it strikes me, my dear"—and he looked both detached and rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
"Then why shan't I be?"
"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you will be.
You'll have expected enough for that."
"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have.
You're what I have of most precious, and you're therefore what I use most."
He looked at her long.
"I wish I could use you a little more." After which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?" he asked.
Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be.
"Not lungs, I think.
Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's really as if her appearance put her outside of such things—being, in spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's conceivable she should be exposed to.
She affects one, I should say, as a creature saved from a shipwreck.
Such a creature may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence.
She has had her wreck—she has met her adventure."
"Oh I grant you her wreck!"—Kate was all response so far. "But do let her have still her adventure.
There are wrecks that are not adventures."
"Well—if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that she has none of the effect—on one's nerves or whatever—of an invalid."
Kate on her side did this justice.
"No—that's the beauty of her."
"The beauty—?"
"Yes, she's so wonderful.
She won't show for that, any more than your watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual.
She won't die, she won't live, by inches.
She won't smell, as it were, of drugs.
She won't taste, as it were, of medicine.
No one will know."
"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?
In what extraordinary state is she?"
Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself.
"I believe that if she's ill at all she's very ill.
I believe that if she's bad she's not a little bad.
I can't tell you why, but that's how I see her.
She'll really live or she'll really not.
She'll have it all or she'll miss it all.
Now I don't think she'll have it all."
Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid.
"You 'think' and you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while without an inkling of her complaint?"
"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't want knowledge.
She moreover herself doesn't want one to want it: she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of—I don't know what to call it—intensity of pride.
And then and then—" But with this she faltered.
"And then what?"
"I'm a brute about illness.
I hate it.
It's well for you, my dear," Kate continued, "that you're as sound as a bell."