gton Gardens, which, they could easily and
tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dread