mething."

"No--I don't see that. I can do more."

Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
everything, you know."

"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"

"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
"He has wanted to come."

"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"

"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
him easy."

"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"

"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."

"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."

"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."

"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."

It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."

"And why should he get at me?"

"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."

All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
some than for others; what he i