The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) đ
- Author: Henry James
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âReally?â âI would in his place!â She might have been disappointed, but she had her good humour. âHe tells me to liveââ âand she oddly limited the word.
It left Susie a little at sea. âThen what do you want more?â
âMy dear,â the girl presently said, âI donât âwant,â as I assure you, anything. Still,â she added, âI am living. Oh yes, Iâm living.â
It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. âSo am I then, youâll see!ââ âshe spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet it was her wisdom nowâ âmeaning by it as much as she didâ ânot to say more than that. She had risen by Millyâs aid to a certain command of what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly descendedâ âa sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively cleared; and Susan Shepherdâs star from this time on continued to twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly, the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strettâs visit and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than fix it. Millyâs reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heelsâ âor, so oddly perhaps, at Miss Croyâs heels, Miss Croy being at Millyâsâ âhad contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned during the hour of their friendsâ visit, faintly clearing indeed while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croyâs remarkable advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If it hadnât acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom, the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
The intensity the circumstance in question might wear to the informed imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubtâ âand with other things to our purposeâ âin two or three of those confidential passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadnât yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadnât had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud Manninghamâs own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to giveâ âthe regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her cry. She couldnât cry, with Milly in observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity. She cried and cried at firstâ âshe confined herself to that; it was for the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more, as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitorâs most vivid plea for it. âI shall never be able, you know, to cry againâ âat least not ever with her; so I must take it out when I can. Even if she does herself it wonât be for me to give away; for what would that be but a confession of despair? Iâm not with her for thatâ âIâm with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly wonât cry herself.â
âIâm sure I hope,â said Mrs. Lowder, âthat she wonât have occasion to.â
âShe wonât even if she does have occasion. She wonât shed a tear. Thereâs something that will prevent her.â
âOh!â said Mrs. Lowder.
âYes, her pride,â Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friendâs doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept her from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that these same things, at such times, made still more for business, arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of servants, the taking of decisions. âI might be crying now,â she said, âif I werenât writing lettersââ âand this quite without harshness for her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman summoned by the pressure of a knob, the
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