The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) 📖
- Author: Henry James
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The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance so closely related to all one’s possibilities that one missed the pleasure of really improving it. “Oh no, you’re extremely difficult to treat. I’ve need with you, I assure you, of all my wit.”
“Well, I mean I do come up.” She hadn’t meanwhile a bit believed in his answer, convinced as she was that if she had been difficult it would be the last thing he would have told her. “I’m doing,” she said, “as I like.”
“Then it’s as I like. But you must really, though we’re having such a decent month, get straight away.” In pursuance of which, when she had replied with promptitude that her departure—for the Tyrol and then for Venice—was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with alacrity. “For Venice? That’s perfect, for we shall meet there. I’ve a dream of it for October, when I’m hoping for three weeks off; three weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice.”
“That’s lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in advance or in any way, I can do for you—!”
“Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be capital to find you there.”
“I think it ought to make you feel,” she said after a moment, “that I am easy to treat.”
But he shook his head again; he wouldn’t have it. “You’ve not come to that yet.”
“One has to be so bad for it?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever come to it—to ‘ease’ of treatment. I doubt if it’s possible. I’ve not, if it is, found anyone bad enough. The ease, you see, is for you.”
“I see—I see.”
They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke asked: “And that clever lady—she goes with you?”
“Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She’ll stay with me, I hope, to the end.”
He had a cheerful blankness. “To the end of what?”
“Well—of everything.”
“Ah then,” he laughed, “you’re in luck. The end of everything is far off. This, you know, I’m hoping,” said Sir Luke, “is only the beginning.” And the next question he risked might have been a part of his hope. “Just you and she together?”
“No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we’ve seen more here than of anyone and who are just the right people for us.”
He thought a moment. “You’ll be four women together then?”
“Ah,” said Milly, “we’re widows and orphans. But I think,” she added as if to say what she saw would reassure him, “that we shall not be unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of ‘life’ I suppose you mean mainly gentlemen.”
“When I talk of ‘life,’ ” he made answer after a moment during which he might have been appreciating her raciness—“when I talk of life I think I mean more than anything else the beautiful show of it, in its freshness, made by young persons of your age. So go on as you are. I see more and more how you are. You can’t,” he went so far as to say for pleasantness, “better it.”
She took it from him with a great show of peace. “One of our companions will be Miss Croy, who came with me here first. It’s in her that life is splendid; and a part of that is even that she’s devoted to me. But she’s above all magnificent in herself. So that if you’d like,” she freely threw out, “to see her—”
“Oh I shall like to see anyone who’s devoted to you, for clearly it will be jolly to be ‘in’ it. So that if she’s to be at Venice I shall see her?”
“We must arrange it—I shan’t fail. She moreover has a friend who may also be there”—Milly found herself going on to this. “He’s likely to come, I believe, for he always follows her.”
Sir Luke wondered. “You mean they’re lovers?”
“He is,” Milly smiled; “but not she. She doesn’t care for him.”
Sir Luke took an interest. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Nothing but that she doesn’t like him.”
Sir Luke kept it up. “Is he all right?”
“Oh he’s very nice. Indeed he’s remarkably so.”
“And he’s
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