Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/245

 character that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly appeared able by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display. She was the American girl as he had originally found her—found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then, he had seen her on the day of her meeting him, in London, in Kate's company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in her—such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it was the right thing, this evening, all round: that came out for him in a word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second introduction. He had, under cover of the music, melted away from the lady toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her that he made out as telling, evasively, a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To what did she want to coerce him as a form of payment for what he had done to her there? It was thus, in contact, uppermost for him that he had done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort, from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near him—and it had been so 235