Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/17

 She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early convenience one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art that his fully seeing where she had placed him had not been till after he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He had not in other words at any point, doubted he was on his way to say to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have believed that they could hold out—hold out, that is, not against Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged, made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could be with it; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already suffered Kate to begin finely to manipulate it. It had a vulgar sound—as throughout, in love, the names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with love itself, vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his money. It was not in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in the least come back 7