"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"

"Why to get the full good of it."

Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full
good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in
return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I
might find myself forced to love _you?_"

"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the
least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion
somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had
absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single
intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such
shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,
and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of
existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is
it inconceivable to you that you might try?"

"To be so favourably affected by you--?"

"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.

Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"

"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in su