at head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
long."

It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."

"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
to keep well with him.

He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
endlessly more to see."

"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
archness.

"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
about her."

"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
firmness.

"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
often quite prove the depth of the impression?"

He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
authority about her."

Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
half so much."

The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
fact of her success; and i