re thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
through space.

Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
general necessity of which he was cons