ked the highest style, in a composition in which
everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.

He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"

"Well, that you'll stay on."

"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
he could scarce tell where it ended or began.

"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
in the picture."

"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.

"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
few days."

Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
on his heart. He had incurred i