l, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn't
feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had
touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability
so to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a
kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark's
return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there
were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even to
his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing
it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about it
than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop
on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a
visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely
one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to
spare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
reflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
straight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating a
person in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.
With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of the
contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,
and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and he
drew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.
Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it
straight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled into
just the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the very
person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative
innocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wished
to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To
keep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, to
keep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.

The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,
extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed
but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the
better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the
particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by