Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/216

 that keeps me so fascinated with the question. She gives me no light; she's prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural!"

"She takes it as 'of a natural' that, at this rate, I shall be making my reflections about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on, "that what she had made up her mind to as possible is possible; that what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for yourself, is that, when she adopts a view, she—well, to her own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorises, with her view, any other, any opposite view, and those with it who represent it. I've often thought success comes to her"—Kate continued to study the phenomenon—"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything, become the right one."

Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response. "Ah, my dear child, if you can explain, I of course needn't not 'understand'. I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he pursued: "Does she think she terrorises us?" To which he added while, without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He knew now that he was probing the girl deep—something told him so; 206