ll was what
came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
presence of any des