hing
but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from
occult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely
formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't
himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;
it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
court.

The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first
sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought him
down the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of the
court, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the one
chance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,
_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by the
obvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him for
the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young
lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a
connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious
to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of
the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,
had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic
sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of
politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's
servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third
was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him after
all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that
might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to
fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that
came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"
because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him
see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever
so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as
insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the
pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in the
augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established
between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to Miss
Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he could
also bethink himself th