e; and that, if her aunt chose to glare at her
from the drawing-room or to cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she
could at least make it convenient that this should be easily done. The
fact was that the relation between these young persons abounded in such
oddities as were not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a good
deal more appearance than motive. Of the strength of the tie that held
them we shall sufficiently take the measure; but it was meanwhile
almost obvious that if the great possibility had come up for them it
had done so, to an exceptional degree, under the protection of the
famous law of contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually govern
them would not be the result of their having much in common--having
anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its
explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the
other was rich. It is nothing new indeed that generous young persons
often admire most what nature hasn't given them--from which it would
appear, after all, that our friends were both generous.

Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong;
and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making
that element real. She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
trust; no creature she had ever encountered having been able in any
degree to testify for it directly. Vague rumours of its existence had
made their precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck
her as more likely than that she should live and die without the chance
to verify them. The chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on
the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour
that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. That
occasion indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in it, would
be worthy of high commemoration; Densher's perception went out to meet
the young woman's and quite kept pace with her own recognition. Having
so of