United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She was not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five spectators with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out into public clamour, as soon as touched.
"But there'll be my letters." The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?" "Very, very, very many more than ever; and you know what that is! And then," Densher added, "there'll be yours." "Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself." He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you elsewhere?"
What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of," Kate further explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so, for that matter, will she." Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it." She hesitated. "Of our secret?"
She and Densher are penniless, Milly is rich, but they can afford to bide their time and Milly cannot; let them do so, therefore, let Densher accept his opportunity, and let him presently return to Kate, well endowed by the generosity of an exquisite young wife, dead in her prime.
He had his own view of the ability of such a personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the worst.
"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive. "It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this; "because perhaps in the line of that alone as he has no money more could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. The thing's his genius."
If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust upon you, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," she continued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest." "Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the next moment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."
I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause." "Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality, "isn't agreeable ?" "Oh but it is!" "Not surely for every one."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark in a manner that, making it resound through the great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a judgement of his identity heard and noted once before Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel and all the more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same discrimination.
She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose, only of what Mrs.
Word Of The Day