as after all capable of that, capable of guessing
and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple wer