rage--it was the opposite. I did it to
save myself--to escape."

He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"

"From everything."

"Do you by any chance mean from me?"

"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."

"But he won't allow it," said Densher.

"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
hold out a finger to me," Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in
his inimitable manner, and throws me back."

"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."

But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that marked in him,
again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately, something that banished
the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull
desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. "He would
make himself delightful to you."

"Even while objecting to me?"

"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. He would
appreciate you and be clever with you. It's to _me_ he objects--that is
as to my liking you."

"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed, "that you like me enough
for the objection!"

But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."

Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to escape _me?"_

"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it's through her and
through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
through her, and through her only, that I can help _her._ That's what I
mean," she again explained, "by their turning me back."

The young man thought. "Your sister turns you back too?"

"Oh, with a push!"

"But have you offered to live with your sister?"

"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
call it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out. "Sometimes,
alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
went through things--they pulled her do