le, at the best, they
could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of
the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the
first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of
them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in
truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,
on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just
what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"

It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at
her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he
knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one
of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but
visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of
blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and
Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,
that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular
time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.
But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him
now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They
_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and
the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They
connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in
him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it
amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he
could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her
inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine
as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where
their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse
independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will
you take me just as I am?"

She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified
to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he
found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant
into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with
him.