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

though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness⁠—he had “sampled” all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were⁠—had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham’s nose or with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery. The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in London⁠—for all that was said⁠—much further than in the States: it wouldn’t be the first time, he urged, that they had taught the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native product. He didn’t mean that Miss Theale was funny⁠—though she was weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that New York, in having her to show, hadn’t been aware of its luck. There were plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just as⁠—to make the balance right, thank goodness⁠—they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the Briton cold. The Briton’s temperature in truth wasn’t to be calculated⁠—a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however, without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her young friend had seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine⁠—which she set forth at a certain length⁠—made, obviously, to Densher’s mind, her nearest approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly’s absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him. “You know nothing, sir⁠—but not the least little bit⁠—about my friend.”

He hadn’t pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham’s face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn’t but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean, but while doing so he defended himself. “I certainly don’t know enormously much⁠—beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously appreciated it.” To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success. “Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren’t then present.”

“Ah there you are!” said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make out.

“You weren’t present then, dearest,” Mrs. Lowder richly concurred. “You don’t know,” she continued with mellow gaiety, “how far things may have gone.”

It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this foolish passage, though it pleased him⁠—and because of the foolishness⁠—not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham’s, which affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up⁠—a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder’s joke. “Oh it’s precisely my point that Mr. Densher can’t have had vast opportunities.” And then she smiled at him. “I wasn’t away, you know, long.”

It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. “And I wasn’t there long, either.” He positively saw with it that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. “She’s beautiful, but I don’t say she’s easy to know.”

“Ah she’s a thousand and one things!” replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.

He asked nothing better. “She was off with you to these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too⁠—away off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see.”

“But you didn’t forget her!” Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing archness.

“No, of course I didn’t forget her. One doesn’t forget such charming impressions. But I never,” he lucidly maintained, “chattered to others about her.”

“She’ll thank you for that, sir,” said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness.

“Yet doesn’t silence in such a case,” Aunt Maud blandly enquired, “very often quite prove the depth of the impression?”

He would have been amused, hadn’t he been slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to fasten on him. “Well, the impression was as deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know,” he pursued for Mrs. Stringham, “that I don’t figure by any consent of my own as an authority about her.”

Kate came to his assistance⁠—if assistance it was⁠—before their friend had had time to meet this charge. “You’re right about her not being easy to know. One sees her with intensity⁠—sees her more than one sees almost anyone; but then one discovers that that isn’t knowing her and that one may know better a person whom one doesn’t ‘see,’ as I say, half so much.”

The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the fact of her success; and