h not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
compassion. "She has nothing."

"Not all the young dukes?"

"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
life. Oh she has you arranged!"

"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"

"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"

"Then why shan't I be?"

"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."

"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"

"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
you're therefore what I use most."

He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
he asked.

Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"

"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."

"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."

"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."

Kate on her side did this justice. "No--that's the beauty of her."

"The beauty--?"

"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your
watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you
convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
won't live, by inches