only his. He
made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
Milly was successfully deceived.

V

To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
acquaintance