at complacently "jawing," he
accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
interrupted encounter in New York.

At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
acquaintance between a clever young man and a respons