talking about it against time and, in
particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed
the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he
couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the
family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl
must have wanted to live.

"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with
everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if
it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"

Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly
giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have
been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had
her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,
and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about
them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to
herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,
the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep
it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so
naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its
vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she
was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully
silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,
in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object
clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the
case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make
him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had
been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud
by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had
let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received
on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so
perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of
princely state.

Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,
all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth
of autumn sun, the state in que