. _The_ thing's his genius."

"And do you believe in that?"

"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had
yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so
that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in
time with a very sufficient "Yes!"

"Political?"

"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it
when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,
without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an
effect without his being in any traceable way a cause."

"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality,
"isn't agreeable--?"

"Oh but it is!"

"Not surely for every one."

"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you may have reasons--and
men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not."

"Then there you are!"

"Yes, precisely--that takes, on his part, genius."

Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus
promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been
found, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and
overflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the
future she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you are
stupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--and
then you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--except
that you're so much too good for what she builds _for_. Even 'society'
won't know how good for it you are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond
it. You'd have to pull it uphill--it's you yourself who are at the top.
The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read?
You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've a
subscription!"

She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in
answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their
essential wealth of life. "It's you who draw me out. I exist in you.
Not in others."

It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself
pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "See
here, you know: don't, _don't_--!"

"Don't what?"

"Don't fail me. It would kill me."

She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. "So you think
you'll kill _me_ in t