The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (bill gates books to read TXT) 📕

There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect. His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs. Lowder’s view of her profit⁠—a view so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. “ ‘Meet,’ my dear man,” she expressively echoed; “does it strike you that we get, after all, so very much out of our meetings?”

“On the contrary⁠—they’re starvation diet. All I mean is⁠—and it’s all I’ve meant from the day I came⁠—that we at least get more than Aunt Maud.”

“Ah but you see,” Kate replied, “you don’t understand what Aunt Maud gets.”

“Exactly so⁠—and it’s what I don’t understand that keeps me so fascinated with the question. She gives me no light; she’s prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural⁠—!”

“She takes it as ‘of a natural’ that at this rate I shall be making my reflections about you. There’s every appearance for her,” Kate went on, “that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for yourself, is that when she adopts a view she⁠—well, to her own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I’ve often thought success comes to her”⁠—Kate continued to study the phenomenon⁠—“by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything, become the right one.”

Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response. “Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn’t not ‘understand.’ I’m condemned to that,” he on his side presently explained, “only when understanding fails.” He took a moment; then he pursued: “Does she think she terrorises us?” To which he added while, without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: “Does she believe anything so stiff as that you’ve really changed about me?” He knew now that he was probing the girl deep⁠—something told him so; but that was a reason the more. “Has she got it into her head that you dislike me?”

To this, of a sudden, Kate’s answer was strong. “You could yourself easily put it there!”

He wondered. “By telling her so?”

“No,” said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; “I don’t ask that of you.”

“Oh my dear,” Densher laughed, “when you ask, you know, so little⁠—!”

There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. “I’m perfectly justified in what I’ve asked,” she quietly returned. “It’s doing beautifully for you.” Their eyes again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. “You’re not a bit unhappy.”

“Oh ain’t I?” he brought out very roundly.

“It doesn’t practically show⁠—which is enough for Aunt Maud. You’re wonderful, you’re beautiful,” Kate said; “and if you really want to know whether I believe you’re doing it you may take from me perfectly that I see it coming.” With which, by a quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she asked him the hour.

“Oh only twelve-ten”⁠—he had looked at his watch. “We’ve taken but thirteen minutes; we’ve time yet.”

“Then we must walk. We must go toward them.”

Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of the Square. “They’re still in their shop. They’re safe for half an hour.”

“That shows then, that shows!” said Kate.

This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity, favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions hadn’t yet been, and weren’t for a while longer likely to be, disgorged by the lace-shop, in one of the loggie, where, shortly before, they had left them for a look-in⁠—the expression was artfully Densher’s⁠—at Saint Mark’s. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn’t been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially in presence⁠—in presence of everyone; everyone consisting at this juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly. But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had assented to their not waiting in the shop; it