on, "that my decision to do this took for me last
night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And
he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her
as mechanical.

She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went
with her. "You didn't want to come?"

"It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if it
had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,
I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and
portentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for my
happiness."

This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it.
"You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."

"Oh--well enough!"

But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."

"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
so simple even as that."

She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
_haven't_ decided what to do."

She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
part of the room to another.

"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.

It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
you've had to come?"

"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."

"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
oughtn't to be.