deepened fear of the
undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his
nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to
mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. All
women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but
the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,
practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character
that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual
non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days
had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the
information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." The
announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the
gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the
knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,
could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli
among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among
the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he
recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of
the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not
prepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared to
say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher
mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in
whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but a
place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always
ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour
the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, any
cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health
was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
taken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio,
whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led
from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in
meditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would
have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which
required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for
each--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everyt