behave. This question, I hasten
to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
conditions, than any ever known to him.

This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
his friend on each occasion to the blest miracl