e for
_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.

That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he