in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
in on the morrow.

He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
announced; for she w