The Wings of the Dove, Henry James [thriller books to read .TXT] 📗

It didn’t take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly would want to fill out his notion of her⁠—even a little, as it were, to warm the air for her. That, however⁠—and better early than late⁠—he must accept as of no use; and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on the subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that it would importantly simplify. “Yes, it makes another; but they all together wouldn’t make⁠—well, I don’t know what to call it but the difference. I mean when one is⁠—really alone. I’ve never seen anything like the kindness.” She pulled up a minute while he waited⁠—waited again as if with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her, talk. What she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as it were, in public. She had never seen anything like the kindness, and she wished to do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and justice was not wronged by her being able presently to stick to her point. “Only one’s situation is what it is. It’s me it concerns. The rest is delightful and useless. Nobody can really help. That’s why I’m by myself today. I want to be⁠—in spite of Miss Croy, who came with me last. If you can help, so much the better and also of course if one can, a little, one’s self. Except for that⁠—you and me doing our best⁠—I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like it⁠—and I don’t exaggerate. Shouldn’t one, at the start, show the worst⁠—so that anything after that may be better? It wouldn’t make any real difference⁠—it won’t make any, anything that may happen won’t⁠—to anyone. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you, just as I am; and⁠—if you do in the least care to know⁠—it quite positively bears me up.” She put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give her all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did, accordingly, take it straight home. It showed him⁠—showed him in spite of himself⁠—as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside, delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested, on her behalf, in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her. She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind⁠—his being the even highest, magnificently because otherwise, obviously, it wouldn’t be there; but she could at the same time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn’t be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly, pity; and when pity held up its telltale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now⁠—she would always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the greater ease to himself as there wasn’t one of her divinations that⁠—as her own⁠—he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was making her talk she was talking; and what it could, at any rate, come to for him was that she wasn’t afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn’t; which undertaking of hers⁠—not to have misled him⁠—was what she counted at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really be misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign, a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but brightness⁠—that even of sharp steel⁠—was of course for the other side of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or another. “Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no relations at all?⁠—not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?”

She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or a freak of nature at a show. “Nobody whatever.” But the last thing she had come for was to be dreary about it. “I’m a survivor⁠—a survivor of a general wreck. You see,” she added, “how that’s to be taken into account⁠—that everyone else has gone. When I was ten years old there were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I’m all that’s left. But they died,” she went on, to be fair all round, “of different things. Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I’m American. Not that I mean that makes me worse. However, you’ll probably know what it