"And pray what's that?"
"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life.
I'm treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you.
I can—I can smooth your path.
She's charming, she's clever and she's good.
And her fortune's a real fortune."
Ah there she was, Aunt Maud!
The pieces fell together for him as he felt her thus buying him off, and buying him—it would have been funny if it hadn't been so grave—with Miss Theale's money.
He ventured, derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant.
"I'm much obliged to you for the handsome offer—"
"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it does—but there's no reason it shouldn't to you.
Mind you, moreover"—she kept it up—"I'm not one who talks in the air.
And you owe me something—if you want to know why."
Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive an odd confirmation, her truth.
Her truth, for that matter, was that she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well, while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud.
"Of course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment.
Your inviting me for instance to-night—!"
"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it.
But you don't know," she added, "how far I've gone for you."
He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he laughed again as he could.
"I see how far you're going."
"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him stare: "To start you it was necessary.
From me it has the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand me?
I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which, speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to make me right!" The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had left the house.
He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short, under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the square that, going eastward, opened out on his left.
He had had his brief stupidity, but now he understood.
She had guaranteed to Milly Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him.
She had affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his.
He made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its starting him.
She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that Milly might be compassionate too.
"Proper" indeed it was, her lie—the very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic.
So Milly was successfully deceived.
V
To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition, with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless American relation—the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express in names enough—should seem so unperturbed by other matters.
They had both since then had great adventures—such an adventure for him was his mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons other than those that had already served.
Densher had asked for her, at her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her interesting.
She had been interesting enough without them—that appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly open to him.
What had happily averted the need of his breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice in the possession of.
Many men—he practically made the reflexion—wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and, thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible.
He had talked with Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her.
Such, however, had not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the night before, cleared itself up.
It wasn't so much that he failed of being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor evil and the least cruelty.
It was that he liked too much every one concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable.
He liked Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd?
He had never known himself so generally merciful.
It was a footing, at all events, whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging.
Should he find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough.
The idea of working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise much interest—fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light.