struck him as equivocal; he
had not quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This
confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed
to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question
surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle
that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened
this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons,
about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little
tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.

It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one
still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as
they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of
June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose
a week; his inquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground,
and there were reasons of State--reasons operating at the seat of
empire in Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head.
Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;
and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to
speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as
that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together; she was
clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her;
but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his
prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him intensely--of
course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke
with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of
this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with
scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily
bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had
really occurred in Fleet Street--all the more that it was his own final
reading. He was to pull the subject up--that was just what they wanted;
and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them
each as he might, to let _him_ down. It was just because he didn't nose
about and wasn't the usual gossipmonger that they had picked him out;
it was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently
wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would
have always to take from his example.

"How you ought indeed, when you understand so w