might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
_cliche_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's