Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/23

 him too in this position, be it added—and he might positively have occupied the same bench—various troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather than fewer between them. The explanations about the two ladies would be part of the lot; these could wait with all the rest. They were not meanwhile, certainly, what most made him roam—the missing explanations were not. That was what she had so often said before, and always with the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now, please, call me a good cab." Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with his special irrelevance. It was, effectively, what most divided them, for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?—it was a question he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless—since when it came to that they didn't depend on cabs, good or bad, for the sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, 13