Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/18

 flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to show. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the lapse of time. The lapse of time—not so many weeks, after all, she might always of course say—couldn't at any rate have failed to do something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at Euston—almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly, safely sure. It was all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden master, in a great dim church, might play on the grandest organ. His final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one the impossible.

She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they had been able to float in the mere joy of contact—such contact as their situation, in pictured public halls, permitted. This poor makeshift for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of unrest even on Kate's part inadequate; so little could a decent interest in the interesting 8