aware he had seen
them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
the ground."

"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
presently going on.

"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."

"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.

"Oh yes, I see myself!"

As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that