or the
relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,
at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't
diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as
possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping
her, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for want
of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many words
speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to
intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was
an impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he was
careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all
was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not
stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within
bounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much
disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the
queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,
even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of
facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have
to be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, without
prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as
doing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judge
where it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other at
the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,
and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and
yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the
line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for
us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what
figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above
and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
been felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not the
national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,
in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he could
unlimitedly take for granted.

He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without