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

“It isn’t subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple,” Milly said, “that if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me.”

“Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?”

The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural that her interlocutress herself should so fail of subtlety. “It will make the difference that he will have written to her in answer that he knows me. And that, in turn,” our young woman explained, “will give an oddity to my own silence.”

“How so, if she’s perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The only oddity,” Aunt Maud lucidly professed, “is for yourself. It’s in her not having spoken.”

“Ah, there we are!” said Milly.

And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend. “Then it has troubled you?”

But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with fine inconsequence, to her face. “Not, really, the least little bit!” And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first place, already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her face of her uppermost motive⁠—it was so little, in its hard, smooth sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she likewise didn’t look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now⁠—a full appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She spoke with a belated light, Milly could apprehend⁠—she could always apprehend⁠—from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl, was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been thinking, round the case, much more than she had supposed; and this remark could, at once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if she didn’t look out, would soon be saying⁠—“There’s something the matter with you!” What one was therefore one’s self concerned immediately to establish was that there was nothing at all. “I shall like to help you; I shall like, so far as that goes, to help Kate herself,” she made such haste as she could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity this friend was giving them⁠—referring it, however, so far as words went, to the other friend, breaking off with an amused: “How tremendously Susie must be beautifying!”

It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure that must signify some enriched benevolence. “Let it go, my dear. We shall, after all, soon enough see.”

“If he has come back we shall certainly see,” Milly after a moment replied; “for he’ll probably feel that he can’t quite civilly not come to see me. Then there,” she remarked, “we shall be. It wouldn’t then, you see, come through Kate at all⁠—it would come through him. Except,” she wound up with a smile, “that he won’t find me.”

She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her interlocutress, in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so floated her on that she couldn’t stop⁠—by very much the same trick it had played her with her doctor. “Shall you run away from him?”

She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. “Then,” she went on, “you’ll deal with Kate directly.”

“Shall you run away from her?” Mrs. Lowder profoundly inquired, while they became aware of Susie’s return through the room, opening out behind them, in which they had dined.

This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with it, everything she felt in the connection rose to her lips in a question that, even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep colourless. “Is it your own belief that he is with her?”

Aunt Maud took it in⁠—took in, that is, everything of the tone that she just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds, was but to make their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and was asking if Kate had gone⁠—an inquiry at once answered by this young lady’s reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where, looking at them, she had paused⁠—producing thus, on Aunt Maud’s part, almost too impressive a “Hush!” Mrs. Lowder indeed, without loss of time, smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but Milly’s words to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece directly, struck our young woman as already recoiling on herself. Directness, however evaded, would be, fully, for her; nothing in fact would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion. Kate had remained in the window, very handsome and