I might almost
become her pet young man. She doesn't disparage intellect and
culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be
named in her programme; and I'm sure it has sometimes cost her a real
pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible." He
paused a moment, and his companion then saw that a strange smile was in
his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct, in her own, of this
informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth
were known, she likes me literally better than--deep down--you yourself
do: wherefore she does me the honour to think that I may be safely left
to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I'm not the
sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use,
that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride
and prejudice will take care of the rest! the pride fed full,
meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the
prejudice excited by the comparison she'll enable you to make, from
which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like me so
much as when she succeeded a little better in making me look wretched.
For then _you'll_ like me less."

Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was
a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after
an instant replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair she must
think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."

"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as
deep as it will."

He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to
consider. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as
you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the
other big things that, in one's acquaintance with people, give her a
place so apart."

"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded; "she's on the scale,
altogether, of the car of Juggernaut which was a kind of image that
came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The
things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange
idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of
the car to bristle."

"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that
aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges
that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were
complica